Julian the Apostate, Victor Hugo, and Bathing w/ Chthulu. Pt1.
It was in those years when Johann Gustav Droysen, who coined the term "Hellenism," was working on his biography of Hans David Ludwig Yorck von Wartenburg, a Prussian Field Marshal of alleged English ancestry, that Edgar Allen Poe's poem _The Raven_ was first published: In a farmhouse sitting on 216 acres adjacent to the Hudson River, Edgar Allan Poe began composing his most famous work. He lived the garret of the house, which was owned by Patrick Brennan, with his wife Virginia and his aunt during the winter of 1843-44, when his fortunes were on a definite downswing. It was during this hard time that he was inspired by a character in Charles Dicken's novel Barnaby Rudge: Grip, the Raven. There in his study, where a bust of Pallas stood on a shelf above the doorway, Poe began to weave together two very distinct images using a tone and poem structure unique to his new creation. When Poe walked into the offices of the Graham's magazine in an attempt to sell his first copy of "The Raven," it was rejected outright, despite his pleading that he desperately needed the money for his family. Not much later, a better version of the same poem was bought by Colton's American Whig Review for fifteen dollars. It is ironic indeed that the author of some of the most successful and widely-circulated works in American literature should have earned practically nothing by writing them. "The Raven" seems to have netted its author less than $20." (Wagenknecht, 90)It was published by that magazine in its February, 1845, edition. Along with it was a copy of Poe's "The Philosophy of Composition," which some critics take to have been a direct discussion on the writing of "The Raven," while others dismiss it as being rubbish. This publication was in fact not the poem's first time in print. The Evening Mirror obtained a copy of the poem somehow from the American Review and "in advance of publication" published it in the January 26, 1845, edition (Walker 140). It was published under the pen name of Quarles, with a glowing preface by Nathaniel Willis, the editor of that magazine and a good friend of Poe's at the time. This version of the poem had some uncorrected errors in it which did not appear in the American Review's first publication, but the Evening Mirror's second publishing of the poem on February 8 was an again incomplete copy of the other magazine's corrected version. Poe made further corrections for the Broadway Journal's publication which came out later that month and which which contained a major rewriting of the eleventh stanza, lines 61-65. After this, Poe had little opportunity to make corrections to "The Raven," for, due to its incredible initial and subsequent success, other publications began to copy it without going through Poe. Poe sold another copy to the Southern Literary Messenger, his old magazine to which he had contributed greatly in the past, for its March, 1845 edition. During the course of 1845, "The Raven" spread rapidly across the United States, gaining incredible popularity and fame for Poe, but no money. Late in that year, the publishers Wiley & Putnam produced approximately fifteen hundred copies of Poe's book Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which had petered out two years previous with another publishing company. It sold a mere 750 copies, and resulted in no payment of any kind for Poe. Based on the mild success of the second printing of this book, and the wild success of "The Raven," Poe was given $75 dollars to produce a collection entitled The Raven and Other Poems. Unfortunately for Poe, he was "not a sound commercial property, and Wiley & Putnam could hardly have been expected to print a new edition when they could not readily move their 1845 printing," (Walker 8). The new book stagnated when, in 1846, Poe tried to get its copyright sold to another publisher for fifty dollars. It wasn't until much later that it saw any success. Despite Poe's personal monetary and publication problems, "The Raven" continued to increase in popularity. American society was entranced with the poem, and Poe himself became quite a popular figure because of it. He was constantly called to recite "The Raven" to groups of flocking socialites, and he was in the spotlight throughout 1845. During this time, many of the unpleasant aspects of his character made him the target of many personal criticisms, including renewed comments about the inferior quality of much of his other work. "Inferior quality" was something already associated with the Quarles name in the person of Francis Quarles, the 17th century English poet whose name Poe might have had in mind when choosing his pen name for an initial publication of _The Raven_: The work by which Quarles is best known, the Emblems, was originally published in 1635, with grotesque illustrations engraved by William Marshall (illustrator) and others. The forty-five prints in the last three books are borrowed from the Pia Desideria (Antwerp, 1624) of Herman Hugo. Each "emblem" consists of a paraphrase from a passage of Scripture, expressed in ornate and metaphorical language, followed by passages from the Christian Fathers, and concluding with an epigram of four lines. The Emblems was immensely popular with the vulgar, but the critics of the 17th and 18th centuries had no mercy on Quarles. Sir John Suckling in his Sessions of the Poets disrespectfully alluded to him as he "that makes God speak so big in's poetry." Pope in the Dunciad spoke of the Emblems, "Where the pictures for the page atone And Quarles is saved by beauties not his own." And "A beauty not his own," does seem to refer to the Lenore of Poe's 'Raven,' as well as the 'Hellenism' of Droysen, which though incipient within the poem in the form of Pallas (Athena) the goddess of knowledge, is nowhere made visible as such (an embleme) of the enlightened beauty of Greek civilisation, but as the grund-perch of the Raven, is also incipient within the agency of the raven's speach, which taught by "some unhappy master," affects the mind of the mind of the naarator, aas much aas the miind of the pooem, and "in fact" performs the structure of a strange attractor, a structure from one series affecting the structure of another, as in the ancient psychological structure of the omen which became institutionalized in various practices of Augury and Oracles, which has nothing to do with the creative hermeneutics of a character like Nostradamus whose prophetic poems of future times might be seen as being written by (the blind ape of truth) likened to a small monkey stealing fruit, ie, that deepest and most animal part of the mind which has access to the future as in the knowledge animals see to possess of incipient structures or their dissolution like earthquates or ruins which though pittoresque or grotesque possess no 'ultimete' form, ie, they 'lack a certain quality,' which more than anything relates to the stucture of this 'tail', but moreover the structure of Pallas-Harlow Shapley-Nyarlathotep which as the Bat God, L'rog'g, of L'gy'hx brought out "The Insects from Shaggai" from "The Great Debate" which is the most cryptic form of "Chthonic Love," also known as "Especially Suzuki".:. At last a shape appeared, flapping above the ground on leathery wings. The thing which flew whirring toward me was followed by a train of others, wings slapping the air at incredible speed... I could ... make out many more details... Those huge lidless eyes which stared in hate at me, the jointed tendrils which seemed to twist from the head in cosmic rhythms, the ten legs, covered with black shining tentacles and folded into the pallid underbody, and the semi-circular ridged wings covered with triangular scales... I saw the three mouths of the thing move moistly, and then it was upon me. -Ramsey Campbell, "The Insects from Shaggai" Which more than anything represents a lack of a certain quality encoded in the great debate of hellenism encoded in the Nevermore which is an isn't, or "a poem" of "poorest quality," a "hack," to besacrificed "to what is truly valuable" in the mind of Nyarlathotep as Poe writing as Quarles of a Hellenism of the Grotesque: In this poem, one of the most famous American poems ever, Quarles uses several symbols to take the poem to a higher level. The most obvious symbol is, of course, the word itself. When Quarles had decided to use a refrain that repeated the word "nevermore," he found that it would be most effective if he used a non-reasoning creature to utter the word. It would make little sense to use a human, since the human could reason to answer the questions (Quarles, 1850). In "Kamular 2hissskicketing In Frictionless Mieluxos " it is important that the answers to the questions are already known, to illustrate the self-torture to which the narrator exposes himself. This way of interpreting signs that do not bear a real meaning, is "one of the most profound impulses of human nature" (Quinn, 1998:441). Quarles is also considered a parrot as the Bat God instead of the word; however, because of the melancholy tone, and the symbolism of words as Bat Gods of ill-omen, he found the word more suitable for the mood in the poem (Quarles, 1850). Quoth the Parrot, "Nevermore?" Another obvious symbol is the bust of Pallas. Why did the word decide to perch on the goddess of wisdom? One reason could be, because it would lead the narrator to believe that the word spoke from wisdom, and was not just repeating its only "stock and store," and to signify the scholarship of the narrator. Another reason for using "Pallas" in the poem was, according to Quarles himself, simply because of the "sonorousness of the Bat God, Pallas, itself" (Qaurles, 1850).
