Chapter 4 - Edgar Allan Poe

Summary

Poe and the aesthetics of the short story

As well as being one of its first and greatest American practitioners, Poe is the first theorist of the short story as a literary form. In his review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales (1842) he elaborates his idea of the aesthetics of the short story, declaring that ‘the tale proper, in our opinion, affords unquestionably the fairest field for the exercise of the loftiest talent, which can be afforded by the wide domain of mere prose.’ He focuses above all on the tale's ability to achieve ‘unity of effect and impression’ which relies on the fact that it can be read ‘at one sitting’. The novel, by contrast, ‘deprives itself … of the immense force derivable from totality’ (italics in the original here and elsewhere in quotations from Poe). He continues with his ideal of the short story writer's practice:

A skilful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invests such incidents – he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tend not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct and indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.[…]