Poe and the Idea of Music

Charity McAdams is professor in the Barrett Honors College at Arizona State University.

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.

• AcknowledgementsIntroduction1Is This Divine? No, This is the Voice of a Woman.Madame Malibran: The Very Genius of Music“The Spectacles”: In Imitation of MalibranThe Alchemy of Unreason: Well and Strenuously Sung!2Another Kind of Musician Altogether“The Fall of the House of Usher”: The Guitar and the BalladThe Case of the Ballad“Ulalume”: Faëry BalletIndefinitiveness: The True Musical Expression“Annabel Lee”: The Sounding Sea“The Haunted Palace”: Spirits Moving Musically3An Almost Magical Melody“Ligeia”: Siren Who Never Sings4The Wantonest Singing BirdsPoems as Songs in Language, Aim, and PurposeVentum Textilem: The Veil of the SoulMere 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 Naming5The Starry Choir (And Other Listening Things)Music of the Spheres: Music, in Our Own More Limited Sense of the Word“Al Aaraaf”: Music o