Few would hazard a challenge to long-standing opinions that Poe was a master of the Gothic horror tale, although many might not as readily be aware that he did not invent Gothic fiction. When he began to attract widespread attention by publishing several macabre tales in the Southern Literary Messenger in early 1835, critics sounded negative notes concerning his "Germanism," a synonym for Gothicism, just as they deplored his wasting talents on what they deemed had become an outmoded type of fiction. Such caveats, as well as many offered over the course of the century succeeding his death, notwithstanding Poe's Gothic tales, are what have typically attracted greatest numbers of readers, and that allurement is wholly understandable. A descent from such British milestones in literary Gothicism as Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto (1764), William Beckford's Vathek (1786), W. H. Ireland's The Abbess (1798), or Sir Walter Scott's The Bride of Lammermoor (1819) is evident in Poe's writings. In his own day the brief tale of terror, familiarly known to the Anglo-American readership as the signature for fiction in the popular Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, served as Poe's, and other Americans', model, time and again, although his accomplishments in the short story far surpassed what now often reads like so much dross in the pages of the celebrated Scottish and other contemporaneous literary magazines from the first half of the nineteenth century. Well into his literary career, in his second review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, Poe alluded to the fine "tales of effect [to be found] in the earlier numbers of Blackwood [which were] relished by every man of genius". In his mind such effect, or unity of impression, was inevitably coupled with "terror, or passion, or horror." In a later review of Hawthorne, Poe cited as praiseworthy specimens of American tale writing William Gilmore Simms's "Grayling; or, Murder Will Out," Washington Irving's Tales of a Traveller, and Charles Wilkins Webber's "Jack Long; or, The Shot in the Eye," along with many of those by Hawthorne - all in the Gothic mode - albeit he took Hawthorne to task for a too heavy-handed allegorical vein in many of his stories. Poe also spoke of Hawthorne's tales, in general, as analogous to those of the German author, Ludwig Tieck, whose tales number among the highlights of German Gothicism.

One might well ask at this juncture: "Just what is Gothic tradition?" Such a query has been answered rather glibly, by some, and it may well require some elaboration of less witty propensities. A remark by Donald E. Westlake, present-day detective fiction aficionado, exemplifies the former attitude; to him, a Gothic "is a story about a girl who gets a house." Although many Gothic works do involve just such a story - witness Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, or a host of twentieth century paperback Gothic novels with covers showing a young girl against the backdrop of a great house looming nearby, one good example being Sandra Brown's romance novel, Slow Heat in Heaven (1988) - other elements often carry as great, or greater, significance. Not every Gothic story takes place in a house (or haunted castle), a house is not necessarily a primary consideration in many first rate exemplars of the tradition, nor does a girl figure as the character throughout Gothic fiction.

The term "Gothic," admittedly, originated in a confluence of history and architecture. The Goths were a northern Germanic European people whose ways and beliefs differed largely from those of Greco-Roman Classical civilization farther south. To the southern outlook, the Goths were wholly uncivilized and barbarous. When the initiation of architecture that departed radically from the low, heavily-arched forms in "Romanesque" pervasive darkness consequent upon the inability to construct large windows because they would have weakened the stonework, such newer buildings, chiefly the great cathedrals that arose all over northwestern Europe and the British Isles from the eleventh century onward, provided structures which permitted far more light to illuminate the interiors. Employment of vaulted (pointed) arches within and of huge "flying buttresses" for support outside, gave to these vast, tall cathedrals an appearance of a winged bird or a growing plant. What was essential to architectural soundness was often deemed "grotesque" by those who beheld the tangible forms. Gothic cathedrals speedily make one aware of an innate desire to look upward, and they convey senses of great space. Even with far more lighting than Romanesque buildings afforded, a sense of considerable shadowiness or obscurity is inescapable when one enters Gothic buildings or their cloisters. To those who objected that such tall structures were often adorned with what the extremely practical mind saw as inessential decorations, the response was that these buildings were, after all, symbols of human attempts to glorify God, and that His eye could see what mere human vision could not.

Great cathedrals that have changed little since the middle ages still dot Continental Europe. In Great Britain, however, once Henry VIII decided that allegiance to the Pope in Rome was no longer necessary and, as a concomitant, that much in the way of cathedrals, abbeys, monasteries, convents, and, often, churches of far lesser status, would contribute substantially to the wealth of the Crown, many Gothic buildings fell into ruins because they were no longer maintained. In addition to the symbolism in the ruined architecture, the British mind came to associate a downright immorality with some of the thinking and practices in Roman Catholicism. For example, once Henry's decrees for creating the Anglican Church became operable, ties between Roman Catholicism and Continental European political class structures seemed dangerous. Moreover, celibate clergy, especially monks and nuns, eventually came to be anathema in British eyes. The clergy contributed in another way to Gothic tradition. The hooded, flowing robes worn by many members of ecclesiastical orders dovetailed precisely with stereotypical conceptions of ghosts in bedsheets, and, amidst the strange visionary responses otherwise created by Gothic architecture's combination of vastness and obscurities, they offered plausible models for supernatural beings. Another off-center assumption about Catholic practices concerned live burial as punishment for clerical recalcitrance. Since paranoias about actual premature burials persisted well into the early years of the twentieth century, here was a motif with compelling outreach to many readers.

Little wonder, then, that ruined architecture from "medieval" times merged with tyrannical and profligate conduct by members of the ruling classes throughout much of Europe, to produce Horace Walpole's intriguing Gothic novel, The Castle of Otranto (1764). In this brief novel appear, if in crude, pioneering fashion, hallmarks of what in many ways has continued to inform Gothic literature up to our own times. To epitomize, the basic Gothic plot entails vicious pursuit of innocence/innocents for purposes of power, lust, money, at times singly, at others collectively. Issues of identity and power, often relating to family situations of lineage or marriages (which in their turn might affect history, and which in later Gothic works often were centered in smaller numbers of characters, ultimately to operate within the consciousness of just one character), along with sexuality and gender considerations, came to hold greater importance than the eerie settings that provided mysterious backdrops for equally mysterious speeches and actions in previous Gothic works. Military situations or others involving social unrest likewise contributed recurrent themes, devolving, no doubt, from like features in Renaissance drama, principally that of the revenge tragedy stamp.

Such substance enhanced emotional uncertainties and disturbances among the characters, and created scenes in which life and death draw close, whether in actual battle or in some non-military combat and trauma in which opposing characters lead readers to think of wins and losses. Supernaturalism was also significant in Walpole's novel. A gigantic supernatural helmet crushed Manfred's son, Conrad, before he could marry. A figure in an ancestral portrait became animated. In the hands of his literary descendants, supernatural trappings were often taken to incredible lengths. Once the Germans adapted British Gothicism into their own imaginative literature during the later eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, they were reputed by Anglo-American readers and critics to have carried natural and supernatural horrors to even greater extremes. Thus, the notion of all things German as barbarous reared its head once again, and one frequently encounters the epithet "German" as a term of disapprobation from the 1790s on through Poe's time. Furthermore, supernatural powers were often ascribed to medical doctors and scientists or pseudo-scientists.

What finally emerged as a mainstay in Gothic works, architectural setting or not, was an atmosphere conducive to anxieties in the protagonist and, depending on the situation in the story, among other characters in general. The literal haunted castle, cathedral, monastery was often transformed into some natural setting conducive to unrest and fears, or, in yet another kind of development, to a haunted mind which required no castle or frowning mansion to stimulate terrors, the corridors of the psyche sufficing to engender such a frisson. Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, for example, drew repeatedly on landscapes to throw into high relief the emotional explosions that occur throughout the novel. American authors, understandably, had no castles, abbeys, or cloisters in the near proximity that European authors had, and thus American Gothics tended to foreground other varieties of tangibles. Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter (1850) focused first on the forbidding jail so important to life in seventeenth-century Boston, shifted to the scaffold, and then made landscapes reflect the lights and shadows in human life and character. In his tales he effected similar shifts. In "Young Goodman Brown," for example, action moved from colonial Salem to the frightening forest that so bedeviled the journeying Goodman Brown; or the weird lime kiln that formed the scene in "Ethan Brand," or the kaleidoscopic scenes wherein natural setting mirrored human emotions in "Alice Doane's Appeal." Melville took Gothicism onto the seas in many of his books, and Moby-Dick (1851) owed much to Gothic tradition in matters of characterization of Ahab, Ishmael, and Moby-Dick himself, as well as in its handling of superstitions and of settings like the Pequod, an aqua-Gothic haunted castle, if ever there was one, or the mysterious oceans, whose depths hinted of mystery and the unknown.

To address other important topics, we see that sexual themes in The Castle of Otranto had been linked with violence, brutality and death, often leading to parricide and, in the case of Prince Manfred, the protagonist, near incest. Such themes were intensified in many later Gothic works, so readers hostile to Gothicism have charged that they are little better than pornography. Many Gothic villains are possessed of a startlingly piercing eye, which functions symbolically in phallic terms in its ability to penetrate its victims' innermost secrets. That feature links with the Evil Eye in folklore, which has powerfully magic, hypnotic effects. If pornographic texture is to be found easily in Gothic tradition, so is another popular-culture element, namely, humor. Many readers of Walpole's novel find that the hyperbolic language and high-pitched emotions verge so strongly toward the ridiculous as to suggest a strong comic impulse indicative of his satirizing the melodramatic qualities potential in horrifics.

Since Walpole himself claimed that the impulse for this book came to him in a dream, and since dreams take us into territories of non-rationality, the argument for comedy (which is premised on the non-rational) in The Castle of Otranto cannot be overlooked. An even greater infusion of satire, many believe, characterizes William Beckford's Oriental Gothic novel, Vathek (1786). Whatever the status of humor in these works, a strong tendency to lampoon what readers could interpret as intentional or unintentional comedy in Gothic writings, entered and has continued to be vital in Gothic tradition. The satiric sections in Jane Austen's Northanger Abbey, published in 1818, but written a decade earlier, when the British Gothic fad had reached a high point, have often been revisited by literary scholars, although that novel is but one among many hits at the rage for a non-critical devouring of Gothics. Such eagerness for thrills caused many writers, just as eager to turn a profit, to serve out horrors that became ever more sleazy. The numerous "penny dreadfuls" and "bloods" that were aimed at a public who would not question any plausibility in what they read, as long as it contained their desired stimuli of melodramatics.

Well before Poe's debut on the literary scene in the 1820s and 1830s, then, and continuing long after his death in 1849, blendings of horror and humor enlivened Gothic productions. Such "sportive Gothic," as one critic has called many of Washington Irving's handlings of supernaturalism, appealed to many American writers and readers, Poe included. Spoofs or "quizzes" of Gothicism abounded in the Anglo-American literary world of this era. A related consideration and this one in existence almost before a steady stream of creative writings came from the pens of Americans who undertook authorship, was a desire to create a literature that would manifest the nationalistic trends infusing American life. Such thinking led many Americans to deplore what they deemed the inferiorities of Old World literature in the face of the cultural milieu on the new continent. Literary Gothicism thus drew recurrent fire in critical sections of American literary magazines, such barbs darted in hopes of encouraging aspirant American writers to shy away from a seemingly decadent mode. William Dunlap, for one, who had spearheaded American theater and dramatic movements in northeastern cities, turned his hand, late in life to fashion several Gothic tales, albeit in "It Might Have Been Better, It Might Have Been Worse," a magazine tale of the early 1830s, he used up Gothic superstition emanating from misunderstandings among the characters, who all too quickly assumed that strange occurrences originated in supernatural rather than ordinary circumstances. An even more interesting case of this nature occurs in the works of James Kirke Paulding. In his stances as critic, notably in "National Literature" (1820, expanded in 1835), he praised the realism he perceived in then current American life; in his fiction, he often employed Gothic trappings, only to reveal that a healthy realism could eventuate triumphant at their expense. A number of Paulding's comic Gothic tales are set in the Near East, as if to suggest that weird fantasies are, overall, unAmerican. One tale, however, "Cobus Yerks," originally published in the Atlantic Souvenir for 1828, which has an American cast much in the manner of Irving's "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow," recounts the torments arising from Cobus's (Jacob's) being pursued by a presumed spectral dog, concluding, however, with the revelation that any "otherworldliness" stemmed from Cobus's drunkenness.

American Gothic works tend to transform European architecture into American landscape as material for intriguing hauntings. Dunlap and his friend, Charles Brockden Brown, exemplify such early transformations, and they may be considered the founders of American literary Gothicism. Several Dunlap plays are the first preeminent Gothic works by an American author. Commencing with Leicester (1794) and Fontainville Abbey (1795), an adaptation of Mrs. Radcliffe's novel, The Romance of the Forest, Dunlap promoted the American scene in his far more renowned play, Andre (1798), which features the American Revolution and its inherent anxieties as background against which André's tragedy and its accompanying emotional traumas are enacted. Brown's novels, Wieland, Ormond, Arthur Mervyn, and Edgar Huntly, all published as the eighteenth century concluded, embody Gothic horrors, but those horrors prove to have bases in human psychology rather than in the presumed supernatural horrors that create the Wieland family's upheavals. In Arthur Mervyn, a yellow fever epidemic furnishes grim situations that harrow character's psyches with as much intensity as any ghostly presence might. Dunlap's and Brown's Gothic works contain none of the humorous undercurrents that infiltrate those by some of the other Americans mentioned above, but, in all, a prevalent tendency to depend less on the supernaturalism of European Gothic tradition and to employ more psychological substance is evident. Granted, some Americans continued to draw upon what we might define as "straight" supernaturalism to enhance their Gothic productions, as is the case with John Greenleaf Whittier's Supernaturalism of New England (1831), expanded into Legends of New England (1847), William Austin's famous short story, which domesticated into American literature the legend of the Flying Dutchman, "Peter Rugg, the Missing Man," published first in 1824, and often reprinted, or some of the other dramatists, as well as many now forgotten writers, whose wares grew tedious because of cardboard characters in improbable situations, fashioned merely as thrills for thrills' sake.

Poe's greatest literary achievement was his renovation of the terror tale from what had been its principal intent, to entertain by means of "curdling the blood," to use a widely current phrase of the times, into what have been recognized as some of the most sophisticated creations in psychological fiction in the English language. He realized at the outset of his career that Gothicism was eminently compatible with psychological plausibility in literature, and he worked out such designs in combination repeatedly throughout his literary career. His first strong yearning, however, was to be a poet, and he returned to the writing of poetry during his career, albeit, after he had brought out three slim volumes of poems between 1827 and 1831 yet secured no profit, he foresaw that he could not gain sufficient financial recompense from that genre to maintain himself. Understandably, from one who looked to the poems of Byron, Shelley, and Coleridge as his own poetic models, Poe's verse reveals unmistakable Gothic characteristics. Tamerlane, for example, centers on the dying confession of the titular protagonist to a Roman Catholic priest - a literal impossibility, but one of those anachronisms that course through many earlier Gothic works, in which the "medieval" or - to cite another strain readily assimilated into the emerging tradition - "Oriental" Gothic, characters speak the English language of a much later period, not to mention that they also embody the moral outlooks of a later historical era rather than what might more plausibly be their different national or ethnic outlook. Tamerlane's memories reveal his imperious, volatile nature: "And, I believe, the winged strife/And tumult of the headlong air/Have nestled in my very hair". He adds that heaven and hell war in his emotions, and thus this passage, later supplemented by allusions to Eblis, betrays Poe's debts to Beckford's Vathek, wherein Eblis and hearts set afire are given prominence.

Typical of many Gothic characters, Tamerlane suffers effects of a blighted love affair with a maiden who was far superior to him in her abilities to love (he subsumed his own capacities for love in his will to political and military power), and well before his dying hour he has wearied of what the world has brought to him: might tinged with deep loneliness. Thus he stands as forerunner not only to other characters in Poe's poems, notably the speaker in the early "Dreams," another angst-ridden, disconsolate protagonist, and those in poems like "The Lake - To - ," "Lenore," "To One in Paradise," "Dream-Land," "The Raven," "Ulalume," "Annabel Lee," or "For Annie" (this last being atypical in that the protagonist–speaker's torments have vanished, though what they seemed to be is vividly depicted). Tamerlane also adumbrates the protagonists in Poe's fiction. The weird settings in some of the poems - "The Haunted Palace," "The City in the Sea," "The Sleeper," "The Coliseum," "Dream-Land," "The Raven," and "Ulalume" - likewise evince Poe's familiarity with the foreboding remoteness and mystery which had well before his time become commonplaces in Gothic tradition.

Most of Poe's tales devolve from Gothic tradition. When he turned from the creation of poetry as his literary mainstay to the writing of fiction, he naturally wanted to produce what would sell. What had been selling well, despite any grumblings from reviewers, was Gothic fiction, so to that mode Poe turned with an eagerness that eventually led him into some amazing pathways. Poe's preparation for creating fiction that would appeal to the marketplace made him aware of the highs and lows in Gothicism, so much so that, like other American writers, he quickly fledged his wings as a fiction writer by attempting a book that, had it appeared, would doubtless have inspired a far different image of Poe than that which for so long stood: a drunken, drug-ridden, debauching necrophiliac creature whose own morality, or lack thereof, filtered into his writings.

"Tales of the Folio Club" featured monthly meetings of a group of pretentious litterateurs, who followed a supper replete with ample alcohol by readings and critiques of their own endeavors in fiction. The club members were modeled upon then well-known authors of popular fiction, each to read a story composed in his recognized manner, and debates over its merits and demerits would ensue. Also each renowned writer would feature as the first-person narrator in his own tale. No publisher would risk the uncertain returns from so subtle a project, so Poe ultimately dismantled the book and published the tales individually in newspapers and magazines. Thenceforth, although his contemporaries recognized satire and parody in these early tales, nobody has ever wholly concurred as to their implications. Poe's ceaseless revisions compounded this confusion because what may have read as comedy within the Folio Club arrangement might be read, with equal validity, as intense seriousness in another context. Debates over what is serious, what comic, in Poe's fiction continue to the present day.

One striking example of this multiplicity is offered by Poe's first published tale, "Metzengerstein," filled with terror-fraught escapades in remote Hungary: family feuds and resultant revenges; a family curse; a supernaturally animated tapestry rather than a haunted portrait; a supernatural, fierycolored gigantic horse (the reincarnation or metempsychosis of old Count Berlifitzing into his favorite kind of animal to wreak his revenge), which destroys young Metzengerstein in a sensational conclusion when horse bears rider up the many spiraling staircases of the latter's burning palace, to leave behind the smoke image of a great horse. Frederick had apparently torched old Berlifitzing's stables, causing the old man's death. Frederick's own increasing isolation, terror, and demise bear out the curse – that the Berlifitzings would triumph over the Metzengersteins.

This tale reads almost as if it were an encyclopedia of "German" supernatural horrors. Nevertheless, for an apprentice work, which might readily betray its models, it demonstrates its author's sophistication. The stacatto effects in the prose attain onomatopoeic heights. The "stupendous and magnificent battlements of the Palace Metzengerstein," for instance, "were discovered crackling and rocking their very foundation under the influence of a dense and livid mass of ungovernable fire". We can almost hear the hissing and see the flames rising. Poe's attentiveness to unity of impression or effect as the mainspring of artistry in short stories is in evidence, too. The Latin motto, which translates as "Living I was your plague - dying I will be your death," leads convincingly into the opening of the tale: "Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages". Horror and fatality, along with the beliefs in metempsychosis, or transmigration of souls, which are quickly solidified as primary themes, heightened by the curse on the Metzengersteins, are rounded off deftly in the close of the tale. The rapid succession of scenes, along with the increasing mysteriousness that each displays, adds to the elements of angst and fatality that hover closely around Frederick.

In Poe's Folio Club scheme, so he wrote at one point, the critical commentaries were to function as much as or more so than the tales themselves as vehicles for mirth. Thus "Metzengerstein" may not have required any submerged comedy to stand among the Folio Club tales in sixth place, read by "Mr. Horrible Dictu, with white eyelashes, who had graduated at Gottingen", conveying lurid German supernatural horror. By the time of this reading, the club members were probably affected by gluttony and drunkenness, and therefore their evaluations rather than the texture of the piece itself may have created pretentious “criticism,” which would come naturally from the "Junto of Dunderheadism" that the Folio Club was.

What they might have understood and, more likely, what they would have misunderstood about "Metzengerstein" might well have been laughable.

Whatever the quantity of the "Germanic" within "Metzengerstein," it remains an important barometer to Poe's subsequent achievements in Gothic fiction. The supernatural horse adumbrates the near otherworldly qualities of the cats in "The Black Cat," published ten years later. The emotionally overwrought protagonist characterized in Frederick also heads a line of similar characters in Poe's fiction. Frederick's unrestrained evil, which extends to death-dealing acts, recurs in many more Poe protagonists, as does his weltering in guilt, remorse, and confusion, which prompt him to bombastic speeches and violent actions. Frederick's overwrought state of mind threads its way among Poe's later first-person narrators as they take center stage in the tales, in his assuredly Gothic novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), and in many of his poems, most notably "The Raven" and "Ulalume," which might be called Gothic stories in verse. Moreover, Frederick's fate - resulting from his efforts to subdue the great horse, an animal symbolic of revenge and its evil consequences - harks back to Coleridge's ancient mariner, to C. B. Brown's Wieland, to Mary Shelley's Dr. Frankenstein and other overreaching Faust-like characters from Renaissance revenge tragedy and classical mythology, and it anticipates such works as Moby-Dick and, looking into twentieth-century manifestations, the King Kong, Godzilla, Dracula, and Jurassic Park films.

"MS. Found in a Bottle," as told by Mr. Solomon Seadrift, a name that undercuts the wisdom of biblical Solomon as it makes the narrator suited to tell a "drifty" story, may be read as one, among several, drunkards' tales told in the Folio Club. The narrator asks us to give credence, as he seems to, to mounting horrors that stretch probability to its limit. Should we take at face value his ostensibly calm outlook, such that, as he is assaulted by natural and then supernatural phenomena, he cooly writes in his diary until he realizes that death is near? Finally, in just as orderly a procedure, he inserts his manuscript into an empty bottle, corks it and tosses it to the tempestuous waves as he is about to go down with the ship. Or should we query the nature of the bottle whence comes this manuscript? Poe's original motto for this tale was "A wet sheet and a flowing sea," a line of verse from Alan Cunningham. In nineteenth century slang, one did not have to be three sheets to the wind to be intoxicated; one would do. Along with the narrator's "imbibing" of "shadows," until his soul became a "ruin" (another old colloquialism for poor-quality gin), should we wonder that we may be near some very subtle wordplay on Poe's part, especially since language of intoxication characterizes the state of most Folio Club members? The dream elements permeating this domestication of the Flying Dutchman legend more than tepidly suggest good causes for some of the incredibility, although we may sense that the storyteller's "imbibing" emptied the bottle into which his manuscript went. Once again, though, Poe has wrought an artful tale, in which perimeters of the natural and supernatural, or the sober and the mirthful, to hold forth the truth-versus-fiction theme in deft fashion.

The initial popularity of "MS. Found" as the prize tale in a Baltimore newspaper contest, may have come about because the judges' indecisiveness concerning just which of the several tales submitted by Poe could have led them to favor a sea story during the time when Baltimore was far better known as a port city than it is today. Furthermore, nautical tales of stirring adventure on the high seas were much in favor in the 1830s, chiefly because Sir Walter Scott's, James Fenimore Cooper's, and Frederick Marryat's sea fiction had won vast audiences and found many imitators. This tale has been frequently reprinted, and its reprintings have by no means been confined to selections of Poe's works, but have been anthologized in collections of adventure, mystery, fantasy, and sea stories.

Another ambiguous tale, "The Assignation," features non-supernatural Gothicism. Here the effects of the narrator's adventures literally and figuratively assault his vision, making it Gothic. As he beholds the sensational rescue of a drowning baby by a mysterious stranger, who has dived from a dark window directly facing that of the beautiful young Marchesa Aphrodite (he is her lover, perhaps the father of her child), and the puzzling remark of the lady that follows, he perceives and suggests a mere physical assignation of this captivating pair. Mirrorings of several types, visual and emotional, tangible and intangible, coalesce with the narrator's befuddlement, so he misunderstands the essence of love that bonds the Marchesa and the stranger. These motifs are reinforced when, early next morning, the narrator visits the stranger's apartments, there to be overwhelmed, first, by his dizzying journey up great staircases to reach the inner chambers, and, once within, by the incongruous assemblage of art objects collected by his host. He is dizzied in more ways than one. All the while a sense of something's being amiss, of emotions teetering on the edge of life and death, of potential violence counterpointed by the seeming relaxation of his host, contributes an aura of mystery that is enhanced by a viewing of the lifesize and lifelike portrait of the Marchesa, whose likeness, with the addition of wings, suggestive of her Psyche role in her relationship with the more physical-seeming stranger, is illuminated by the same kind of dazzling light that had visually and emotionally affected the narrator on the previous night. Both the stranger and his beloved are made analogous to what were in Poe's time admired as ultimates in statuary art, Canova's Venus and the Belvidere Apollo - a pair doubtless driven by passions beyond mundane imagination. The stranger-lover, modeled upon Lord Byron, has attempted to mitigate his frustrations in love by collecting artwork, which, however, is incongruous, as if to symbolize the imperfections caused when only the physical side of human nature is emphasized. Thus he and his beloved look to another world, on the far side of the grave, to consummate their genuine, spiritual love. That is, having sated themselves sexually, they commit suicide (death of an individual self to establish a new unified self) in hopes of uniting their souls. This vein of thought the earthy, sensual narrator cannot fathom, thus the events leading up to, and including, the lovers' deaths, are beyond his comprehension, save as he can recount them in sensational story terms. Delightful irony sounds in his closing remark: "a consciousness of the entire and terrible truth flashed suddenly over my soul". Has the whole truth of what he has observed suddenly come to him, or is his notion of entirety bounded by the usual meaning of "assignation"?

The bulk of the tale is set in the stranger's dwelling, Poe's adroit modification of the haunted castle from earlier Gothicism. The stranger's "castle" is indeed "haunted," but the haunting is grounded in human psychology instead of vengeful specters, scary noises, and dilapidated architecture. The art collection is startling, as art objects tend to be in Gothic works, and the emphasis on interiority urges us to consider the psychological depths in the tale. The narrator's mind may incline toward interpreting situations in sexual terms, but that same mind is capable of evoking interesting symbolic fiction. Yet another psychological twist devolves from the statue motifs; timehonored folklore posits that any human who falls in love with a statue, or with a supernatural being, is doomed to unhappiness, often leading to death for one or both lovers. Specifically, the theme of a young man betrothed to a statue underlies this tale, and readers alert to this folk superstition might find satisfaction in Poe's treatment of this theme.

"The Assignation," originally entitled "The Visionary," figured in the Folio Club context of humor and horror being misconstrued by an intoxicated audience. Not surprisingly, Poe's handling of a portion of the late Lord Byron's romantic life (he and his Italian lover did not commit suicide; he died in the war for Greek independence, and she long outlived him), is cast in storybook, fantasy form, as we learn in the opening paragraphs of the tale. The cream of this jest is that the well-known Romantic poet and biographer of Byron, Thomas Moore, would obviously have been detected in the guise of Mr. Convolvulus Gondola, the Folio Club reader-narrator of this tale. Moore's reputation encompassed eroticism and a predilection for alcohol. To have a drunken Tom Moore face the passionate in Byron's life would indeed have amused many readers in Poe's day because Moore's biography was attacked by those who found his presentation inaccurate. The amazed, and amazing "visions" of both stranger-lover and narrator may, in part, emanate from alcohol, as is borne out by the erratic thinking of the latter and that in the former as he contemplates death before and after drinking from the poisoned goblet. The attention to the type of wine consumed, the wordplay on Thomas Moore - Thomas More, who, legend had it, laughed on his way to execution, and the additional bit of comedy in the stranger's chafing his guest for drunkenness, heightened by wordplay on alcohol as the host's "tone of voice dropped to the very spirit of cordiality" in apologizing for his own laughter at his visitor's expense: all are calculated to test a reader's acumen, although the accompanying aura of uneasiness and mystery from unknown causes upholds the surface Gothic frisson.

From these beginnings, in which the incoherence of alcoholics' fumblings to express themselves, in tandem with their perceptions, which may plausibly be irrational and tend to envisioning of violence, brutality, sex, confusion in the face of the unknown or, at least, the not immediately apprehendable, Poe went on to craft what are far more subtle renderings of Gothic art. Tales like "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Pit and the Pendulum," the detective, or, as Poe preferred, "ratiocinative" tales, "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether": all of these are founded solidly on Gothic tradition. Poe's modifications of the Gothic, however, imbue these fictions with great art. Poe divined how he could manipulate conventions of Gothicism to create fine psychological fiction. Responding to the disapproving charges of "Germanism" targeting some of his early tales - "Berenice," "Morella," "Usher" - Poe stated in the "Preface" to his first collection of fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839): "If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis, I maintain that terror is not of Germany, but of the soul, - that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and urged it only to its legitimate results". Such terror finds excellent symbols in the spiraling staircases and the downward spirals into ocean depths or mouldering subcellars of ruinous mansions and abbeys, or their equivalents. Many of his characters' movements from place to place lead to actual or figurative vertigo or bewilderment. Many of the buildings or even individual rooms may symbolize the interiors of human heads, i.e., minds. Poe found in Gothic tradition the very kinds of settings and characters that, transformed in his imagination, would contribute wonderful symbolism to psychologically plausible narratives of multiple outreach.

"The Pit and the Pendulum," for example, harbors many of these legitimate terrors, none supernatural in origin, although at times the narrator-protagonist's tormented consciousness may make him and readers temporarily think that supernaturalism is at work. The narrator-victim's confinement in the pit may signal his like descent into his own inner self. This tale has many sources in popular horror tales from Blackwood's and other like periodical publications, to C. B. Brown's Edgar Huntly, to historical materials on the Inquisition. These foundations have perhaps accounted for the tale's continuing popularity. The symbolism may also continue to touch readers' own innermost emotional chords (fear of the dark, fear of torture and pain, fear of starvation, fear of the unknown, fear of death), and this factor may promote a recurrent fascination for such reading. Richard Wilbur stated that, for him, Poe's probings of psychic states, "transitions between those states, and the possible meanings and implications that such states might have[,]" plus his employment of dream structures are, along with his obviously well considered diction, what constitute Poe's greatness. This greatness is exemplified in his tales, no matter how odd their language may initially seem. Doubtless, Wilbur's response matches those of many other readers as to what is so compelling about Poe's tales.

Once the Inquisition judges have pronounced the narrator's death sentence, his swoons and fantasies regarding their moving lips transform from the thinnest lines to "writh[ing] with a deadly locution," predicate, for him, no mercy. Just so the candles shift from conveying angelic charity to "meaningless spectres with heads of flame". The descent, as he is borne to his prison, seems as endless as it is confounding, and the madness that befalls him is akin to that of countless other victims in Gothic tradition, but with this difference, that he is journeying into the heart of his own dark inner depths. His later gropings to determine size and shape of his cell symbolize a tormented soul's explorations of its every dimension, during which sight and sound verge on the meaningless. The depth of despair into which he has been plunged is minuscule in comparison with the depth of the pit – a fine renovation of the live-burial motif.

"The Pit and the Pendulum" and other tales in the Poe canon have striking resemblances to present-day psychological experiments that restrict normal sensory activities; the result: hallucination. The narrator in Poe's tale regales us with hallucinatory sensations as he proceeds through his nightmare. No matter what the physical stimulus, the experience is predominantly emotional. In that satire upon popular terror fiction, "How to Write a Blackwood Article," Poe insinuated a bit of utter truth, so far as his own aims and methods are concerned, when Mr. Blackwood, seasoned publisher of terror tales, advises: "Sensations are the great things after all". In Poe's fiction sensations and things become well nigh interchangeable, and in "The Pit and the Pendulum" they very artistically intermingle.

Two much admired tales, "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," both appeal in terms of their Gothicism. In the former, as in "Metzengerstein," animal and human characteristics are reversed as the narrator who, whatever his disclaimers, reveals, bit by bit (to create a buildup of suspense), that he is indeed quite sadistic and maniacal - or animalistic - while the cats seem to become quite human. Alcohol complicates his nature, although there is none of the comedy in this alcoholic's story as there had been in the Folio Club narratives. His torturing and hanging of his first cat prove his cruelty, and the conflagration that destroys his home, leaving him to mull the significance of the cat relief on one undestroyed wall, recalls a similar weird display in "Metzengerstein." His rationalizing of this circumstance only plunges him into deeper irrationality (who would throw a dead cat at a sleeper to rouse him!). When a new cat appears on the scene, one reminiscent of the dead Pluto, the distinct white spot on its breast, to the narrator, comes more and more to look like a gallows. The narrator now reveals that evil impulses have mastered him, and within a short time he comes to abhor this second cat as strongly as he had its predecessor, intends to kill it with an axe, but, by mere chance – so he says – he murders his wife when she deflects the blow. He walls up the corpse in the cellar, and, as the cat has vanished, he assumes that he is freed from this tormentor. When the police come to investigate and, having discovered nothing amiss, are about to depart, what the narrator has described as the spirit of perverseness motivates him to tap the wall, whence a terrifying howl sounds. The wall is opened, the corpse revealed, with the cat atop its head, and so the narrator has conducted a near live burial. The cat represents the man's non-rational nature, a fitting bit of symbolism for this animal because of long cherished folk beliefs about the cat as familiar to those who are evil. The narrator's inadvertent temporary burial of the cat along with his intentional burial of his wife's corpse may imply that the narrator has walled up, or, in psychological terms, repressed the feminine, nurturing elements in his psyche. He moves from a kindly, mild frame of mind and actions to increasing personal isolation and violent hostility toward others. "The Black Cat" may, in its inclusion of masculine and feminine traits as parts of an integrated self (what Poe's Dupin in "The Purloined Letter" distinguishes in his distinguishing the mathematician from poet, or the intellectual from the imaginative being) show an advance over the man - only in "The Pit and the Pendulum," and an alignment with "Berenice," "Morella," "The Assignation," "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Oval Portrait," and "Eleonora' - the group generally designated Poe's tales about women. One might say that in "The Black Cat," as in several of the others, the narrator is bested by an avenging woman whom he has wronged. But this wife remains dead; there is no actual supernaturalism to thicken the plot; and it is the very alive cat that brings about the denouement. Here, then is another Poesque modification of Gothicism.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" probably measures as one of Poe's greatest achievements in the short story, and it has admitted many approaches. The tale offers an anxiety-ridden narrator–protagonist, a haunted mansion tenanted by haunted siblings – who eventually come to "haunt" the storyteller - a mysterious doctor, whose intents seem to be nefarious, plus a veritable gallery of Gothic properties: bewildering corridors, eerie chambers, a terrifying poem that descends from the interspersed "songs" in many Gothic novels (with this difference; Usher's poem dovetails with the additional discordant sounds heard in the tale instead of providing a bit of relief), a picture that is animated in its inanimation, a large serving out of supernaturalism or seeming supernaturalism, mystifying illness of a perishing frail one, distorted thought and sense perceptions that disturb Usher and the narrator, live burial and the horrifying return of the interred, the deaths of both Usher siblings, collapse of the mansion, and the lasting effects of these horrors upon the narrator. All these, and much more, are dramatized with model concision.

Not accidentally does Poe give us a tale of disintegrating bodies, but, more important, disintegrating psyches as well, which he frames with a mansion that looks like a human head. Granted, that "head" is grotesque in its corporeal appearance, but once again Poe directs our closer attention to what lies inside. The opening of the story seems to take place outdoors, but what is the precise geographical location of "a singularly dreary tract of country" traversed by the narrator on horseback? I submit that even at this initial stage Poe is establishing geography of the imagination. At the House of Usher the narrator "found myself," a loaded phrase which in context with the variations on "house," helps to establish a psychological emphasis within the tale, no matter what outward Gothic trappings lie at the surface. In what does this self consist? Very quickly, attention is drawn toward the building proper, which is "melancholy," a "mansion of gloom," so thinks the onlooker. Ironically, although he presents himself as a rational, orderly friend capable of coping with Roderick Usher's negative fantasies, this narrator's vocabulary is strikingly Gothic in its implications, as is evident in the quotations above. In thinking about how a "mere different arrangement of the particulars of the scene, of the details of the picture" would alter his responses, he looks down into the tarn beside the house, only to sustain an even greater "shudder" at the image seen there - which, of course, includes that of his own face. The bleakness of the house, its "vacant eye-like windows," the rank weeds and pale trunks of decayed trees nearby, mirror his own countenance and thus his own mindset. Were this head of his - which resembles the mansion in appearance, and thus occasions his emotional unrest, because what he sees appalls him - to look different, were it not so melancholy (a word which, in Poe's day, implied both physical and mental illness), he might be of a more pleasant frame of mind.

His horse being stabled by a servant, the narrator's proceeding ever farther within is fraught with rising anxieties because of the valet's "stealthy step" and the "low cunning and perplexity" of the family doctor, who "accosted me with trepidation" as he exited. Two questions immediately emerge: (1) Are these other persons so sinister as they appear to the narrator, or is this additional Gothic vocabulary expressive of his own fragile psyche? (2) Does his ultimately leaving behind horse, servants, and doctor symbolize his departure from everyday normalcy and scientific rationality? He never again sees either horse or other persons, once he enters the presence of the Usher twins, and so a "yes" reply to the second question seems to be logical.

Roderick Usher may, on one hand, descend from the terrifying Gothic villain in his treatment of Madeline; he may have committed incest with her, and then - in a fit of guilt and remorse as she sickens, with an admixture, nonetheless, of power mania - he buries her alive. Roderick as artist figure may suggest that he feels no bounds of ordinary human love or decency. He is, however, a "sick" artist in that his poem is horrifying, his music weird, his own situation mirrored in the blankness of his painting (which is nevertheless frightening), and his choice of readings bizarre. None of his accomplishments or interests soothe him; in fact their appearances seem to punctuate increases in the debilitation of his psycho-physical state. Madeline remains a shadowy figure when she first appears, rightly so, no doubt. The Usher twins represent the states of the narrator's own physical-emotional constitution. That they are ill indicates that all is not well with the visitor's soul and, perhaps, given his repulsion when he beholds his own image in the tarn, his body either.

The narrator is more closely tied to the Usher "house," in all its manifestations, than he consciously admits. Roderick is an artist figure gone mad in this drama inside a house that symbolizes a head (ergo, its emphasis on the mind). His burying or repressing the other part of his self, exemplified by Madeline, to whom he is inextricably bound, is an attempt by the deranged imaginative portion of a self to put down the physical, earthy, sexual elements without which no self can be integrated or functional in positive ways. Madeline's name, which may mean "Magdalen," "lady of the house," and "tower of strength," has sexual implications, the last meaning creating a deft irony in its phallicness. In depicting the Madeline-Roderick relationship, Poe may have drawn on vampire lore, as is suggested by the last volume cited among Usher's favorite readings. The ritual in this one was used to ward off vampires. This segment of the plot acts as a mirror to the narrator in relation to his own well being, and since what he witnesses leads into decay and death, no wonder he is terrified. Madeline's avenging return results in the deaths of the Usher twins, Roderick indeed dying from very fear of fear itself, which, he remarked earlier, would bring about his death. The narrator flees as the house cracks and sinks into the tarn, but the events in which he has participated influence him so much that he cannot choose but tell the story. Naturally he would be driven to emotional states bordering on madness in experiencing a welter of horrors within his own being. The fissure in the mansion's stonework mirrors the split between the Usher twins, and, since they share characteristics, physical and emotional, with the narrator,

he, too, is severally fissured. Like many of Poe's other narrators, he has a confessional reaction, and that motivates his matchless telling of a story of a "fall," but this fall is one of psychic disintegration that anticipates correlations between emotional stress and organic illness which have occupied much scientific thinking generations later.

Gothicism figures significantly in many more of Poe's fictions and poems. The readings offered above are representative of the modifications to which he subjected Gothic tradition. From Poe's tales and poems, often through some pathways as serpentine or spiraling as those to be found in "Usher," "Masque," "Metzengerstein," "The Assignation," and "Tarr and Fether" (which in part may parody, under the guise of reality-madness paradigms. the Gothic effects in "Usher," "Masque," and "Murders"), Poe's Gothicism casts shadows over many later works in fantasy, science, and detective fiction – not to mention the numerous "modern Gothics" that continue to pour forth - just as it enters the work of Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Eudora Welty, Flannery O'Connor, Hart Crane, Stephen King, and much else.

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