Artibus et Historiae no. 4 (II)
1981, ISSN 0391-9064Up
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CATERINA LIMENTANI VIRDIS - Landscape and Narrative in Edgar Allan Poe
It is interesting to realize that Imagination, as Edgar Allan Poe points out, is faced by the choice between "either Beauty or Deformity, only the most combinable things hitherto uncombined". Poe's passionate and intriguing taste as regards Nature, i.e. landscapes, seems, at first, to be dominated by this theoretical law and to be produced only by the talent of an eccentric and visionary genius.
But the most original feature of Poe's landscapes is the continual sequence of descriptions demonstrating an exceptionally good familiarity with specifically technical terms of representation. Analyzing this sort of passage from both the linguistic and rhetorical point of view, it becomes clear that the author was well informed about the aesthetics of gardening as well as the contemporary literature an landscape. Thus, the intertwining of subtle connections between certain aspects of American painting and their correlatives in literature in the earlier Nineteenth Century is seen in a new and stimulating light.
