University Press Copublishing Division / Lehigh University Press
Pages: 170
•
Trim: 6¼ x 9⅜
978-1-61146-204-3 • Hardback • October 2017 • $104.00 • (£80.00)
978-1-61146-206-7 • Paperback • March 2020 • $43.99 • (£35.00)
978-1-61146-205-0 • eBook • October 2017 • $41.50 • (£35.00)
Charity McAdams is professor in the Honors department at Arizona State University.
Acknowledgements
Introduction
1Is This Divine? No, This is the Voice of a Woman.
Madame Malibran: The Very Genius of Music
“The Spectacles”: In Imitation of Malibran
The Alchemy of Unreason: Well and Strenuously Sung!
2Another Kind of Musician Altogether
“The Fall of the House of Usher”: The Guitar and the Ballad
The Case of the Ballad
“Ulalume”: Faëry Ballet
Indefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression
“Annabel Lee”: The Sounding Sea
“The Haunted Palace”: Spirits Moving Musically
3An Almost Magical Melody
“Ligeia”: Siren Who Never Sings
4The Wantonest Singing Birds
Poems as Songs in Language, Aim, and Purpose
Ventum Textilem: The Veil of the Soul
Mere Words: Birdsong
“Fanny”: Wild Death Song, Sweet and Clear
“Romance”: Unless It Trembled with the Strings
“Nameless Here For Evermore”: To Sing Well is to Avoid Naming
5The Starry Choir (And Other Listening Things)
Music of the Spheres: Music, in Our Own More Limited Sense of the Word
“Al Aaraaf”: Music of the Passion-Hearted
“Israfel”: Sweetest Voice of All God’s Creatures
Power of Words: The Naiad Voice that Addresses Them From Below
6But Gradually my Songs They Ceased
“The Cask of Amontillado”: The Conical Cap and Bells
“The Bells”: What a World of Solemn Thought Their Monody Compels
“A Pæan”: The Requiem for the Loveliest Dead
“The Masque of the Red Death”: The Music Swells, and the Dreams Live, and Writhe
Conclusion
Appendix
An Inherited Musical Talent
The Idea without Music: Decontextualizing Poe
‘The Rational Agent of Enchantment Itself’: Absolute Music and the Music of the Spheres
Bibliography
Charity McAdams' fascinating, thorough, and luminous book is the key to understanding Poe's poetic idealism. That idealism conceives of itself as fundamentally musical. So we need to understand what music meant to Poe. This book gives us that understanding, by carefully mapping, for the first time, the relationship between Poe's words, the music he might have heard, and the music he imagined beyond the reach of our ears. It is a unique contribution both to Poe scholarship, and to the study of the relationship between poetry and music in the 19th century.
— Peter Dayan, Universities of Edinburgh and Aalborg