Classic and Contemporary Poetry: Explained

Mina Loy’s "Poe" is a brief but potent meditation on Edgar Allan Poe’s aesthetic and thematic preoccupations, distilling his poetic legacy into a concentrated, imagistic reverie. Loy’s language evokes the spectral, melancholic world of Poe’s verse, emphasizing its preoccupation with death, beauty, and the otherworldly. The poem functions as both homage and reinterpretation, capturing the atmosphere of Poe’s work while reshaping it through Loy’s own modernist lens.

The opening phrase, "a lyric elixir of death," immediately establishes the poem’s central paradox: a fusion of melody and mortality, of poetry as a kind of intoxicating, embalming force. "Elixir" suggests both an alchemical transformation and a potion—something simultaneously magical and medicinal, but here, its effect is preservation in death rather than renewal in life. This aligns with Poe’s own vision of poetry, particularly his famous assertion in "The Philosophy of Composition" that "the death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." Loy condenses this idea into a single phrase, suggesting that Poe’s verse acts as a kind of deathly preservation, a distillation of beauty that paradoxically embalms rather than enlivens.

The "spindle spirits of your hour glass loves" expands this theme, drawing on the imagery of time and fragility. "Spindle" evokes both the thread of fate—an allusion to the Moirai of Greek mythology, who spin and cut the thread of life—and the delicate, tapering shape of something thin and ephemeral. "Hour glass loves" suggests doomed romance, loves measured by the passage of time, destined to trickle away like sand in an hourglass. This reflects Poe’s own poetic obsession with lost love, particularly the spectral presence of women like Lenore and Annabel Lee, figures who exist in the liminal space between life and death. Loy’s phrasing suggests that these loves are not merely lost but suspended, preserved in the elixir of poetry, fixed in an eternal, untouchable state.

The setting of the poem is established in the following lines: "on moon spun nights / sets icicled canopy for corpses of poesy / with roses and northern lights." Here, Loy constructs a distinctly Poe-esque nocturnal landscape, where beauty and death intertwine. The phrase "moon spun nights" suggests a world woven out of moonlight, an ethereal, dreamlike realm characteristic of Poe’s work. The "icicled canopy" continues this interplay of delicacy and death; it evokes both a funereal covering—perhaps an allusion to the tombs and vaults that populate Poe’s stories—and something fragile and frozen, a crystalline stillness that mirrors the suspended time of the "hour glass loves." This canopy is for the "corpses of poesy," a striking phrase that encapsulates the tension in Poe’s aesthetic: poetry as something both vital and inherently mournful, as though each poem were an elegy, a beautiful ruin. The juxtaposition of "roses and northern lights" further enhances this effect—roses symbolizing both love and mortality, northern lights evoking an otherworldly, ghostly radiance.

The final lines deepen this spectral atmosphere: "Where frozen nightingales in ilix aisles / sing burial rites." The nightingale, traditionally a symbol of poetic inspiration (as in Keats' "Ode to a Nightingale"), is here "frozen," transformed from a symbol of lyrical vitality into something stilled and lifeless. The image suggests that poetry, in Poe’s world, is not a song of life but a dirge, an elegy frozen in time. The reference to "ilix aisles" likely invokes the holly tree (Ilex), which is associated with winter and endurance, reinforcing the poem’s themes of stasis and preservation. The birds, once symbols of song and movement, are now reduced to spectral echoes, their voices confined to "burial rites." This final image suggests that in Poe’s world, poetry does not merely memorialize the dead—it becomes a part of death itself, its beauty inseparable from mourning.

Loy’s poem captures the essence of Poe’s aesthetic—his blending of beauty, death, and the supernatural—while also reframing it through her own modernist sensibilities. The poem is tightly structured, each phrase densely packed with meaning, creating an effect similar to Poe’s own verse, which often relied on condensed, hypnotic imagery to evoke atmosphere. Yet Loy’s tone is not merely imitative; it carries a note of detachment, an awareness of the artifice at play. The highly wrought language, the deliberate lyricism, suggests a critical distance, as if Loy is both enchanted by Poe’s world and aware of its constructed nature.

This balance between homage and critique aligns with Loy’s broader poetic concerns. Throughout her work, she frequently interrogated traditional aesthetic ideals, particularly those surrounding beauty and the female form. In "Poe," she engages with Poe’s vision of poetic beauty—his glorification of the dead woman, his fascination with the frozen, perfect corpse—without fully submitting to it. By presenting his aesthetic as a kind of embalming process, she highlights its paradoxical nature: a poetry that preserves beauty, but only in death. In this way, "Poe" is both a tribute and a dissection, a recognition of the haunting power of Poe’s verse and an implicit questioning of its morbidity.

Loy’s use of musicality and dense imagery mirrors Poe’s own technique, yet her phrasing is more elliptical, more fragmentary than his often more rhythmically sustained verse. This reflects the influence of modernist experimentation, where meaning is suggested rather than fully explicated. The compression of the poem, its reliance on layered, allusive images, makes it feel like a distilled essence of Poe’s world—a snapshot of his aesthetic, frozen in a crystalline form much like the nightingales in its final lines.

Ultimately, "Poe" serves as both an evocation and a critique of its subject. It acknowledges the intoxicating quality of Poe’s lyricism while also subtly revealing the limitations of his vision. By likening his poetry to an "elixir of death," Loy suggests that his aesthetic is both bewitching and ultimately fatal, a preservation that is also a form of entombment. In doing so, she engages in a dialogue with Poe’s legacy, acknowledging its enduring allure while also exposing its spectral, ossified beauty.

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