The Death of Edgar Allan Poe

On October 3 1849, the famed American horror and mystery author Edgar Allan Poe was found in a complete state of delirium – incoherent, dishevelled and wearing a stranger’s clothes. Four days later, he died in a hospital. His final words were “Lord, help my poor soul”.

The nature of Poe’s untimely demise at the age of 40 remains a mystery today, having baffled scholars for over 170 years. Dozens of possible causes of death have been suggested — from rabies to syphilis. Some suggest Poe was victimised in a form of voter fraud known as a cooping scheme, in which gangs working for corrupt politicians would sometimes beat unwilling bystanders to make them vote repeatedly for a certain candidate.

Others have suggested suicide. Poe’s contemporary, Charles Baudelaire — a French poet who also translated Poe’s works — suggested that the incident was “almost a suicide, a suicide prepared for a long time”.

At first, the suicide hypothesis may seem a touch dramatic. The idea of an author whose works were famously dark and gruesome being so disturbed as to take his own life almost sounds like a bad cliché. However, there may be something to this theory.

Poe’s personal life was a complex blend of factors that are reliably associated with an above-average risk for depression and death by suicide. He was male, often felt overwhelming hopelessness, had a history of alcohol and substance abuse, and repeatedly lost loved ones. Critically, Poe had made previous suicide attempts — having tried to overdose on laudanum a year before his death.

All possible causes of Poe’s death have, to date, been purely speculative. He received no autopsy, and no medical records of the event have survived (if they ever existed). Yet even in the absence of medical data, we are now able to examine Poe’s life and death through an objective lens.

Today, we have tools that can measure a person’s psychology from the words they use in everyday life. My colleagues and I have used text-analytic methods to better understand everything from the emotional underpinnings of political ideology to entrepreneurial personality profiles to the psychological effects of childhood sexual abuse.

Language and depression

The links between language, depression and suicidal behaviour are well established. Researchers consistently find that depressed people use language differently than their non-depressed peers.

People who are depressed tend to use more negative language. They also use language consistent with social withdrawal, including more self-referential words (“me” words) and fewer collective pronouns (“we” words). Depressed people also typically use more “working through” language – also called “cognitive processing” words – which includes “think”, “suppose” and “understand”.

Research has found that people who died by suicide can be identified by such language patterns. For example, they consistently use more “me” words and fewer “we” words. Importantly, these patterns tend to increase drastically as they get closer to suicide. Analyses of the language patterns in Marilyn Monroe’s Fragments and the diaries of explorer Henry Hellyer have been used to support the case for each of their suicides.

Building on this past research, our research team created an index of depression language. We then used it to assess whether Poe’s language showed signs of recurrent depression or feelings of suicide. We analysed over 400 stories, poems and personal letters written by Poe throughout his life. Accounting for his own unique linguistic patterns, we identified any prolonged spikes that signalled likely periods of major depression:

Throughout Poe’s life, nearly 20 texts scored abnormally high on our depression index, half of which were written in 1843, 1845 and 1849 — the year of his death. Poe’s depression scores were most pronounced in his personal letters, which are often the best reflection of one’s “authentic self”. They are largely absent from his professional writings. Notable exceptions include The Light-House, which scored extremely high on our depression index and was still a work in progress at the time of his death.

Looking deeper, we explored the events of Poe’s life during his most depressed periods. Surprisingly, 1843 and 1845 were two of his most successful years. Poe earned overnight fame for The Gold-Bug (1843) and The Raven (1845). Both were reprinted dozens of times to keep up with popular demand. Yet Poe’s relationship with his newfound fame was complicated. He earned practically nothing from his accomplishments. He deeply resented his own poverty, and fame likely betrayed his expectations.

Was it suicide?

From our analyses, we can conclude that Poe’s final months were indeed quite dark. This was primarily evident within his personal life. For example, Poe’s personal letter that scored highest on our depression index was one written to his mother-in-law in July 1849, where he wrote about the poor state of his health, finances and clothes.

Although our analyses reveal that Poe was spiralling into a depression at the end of his life, we can’t say for sure whether his death was a suicide. Considering his rather high suicide risk from a clinical perspective, paired with our objective analysis of his mental states, it remains a real possibility that he did kill himself. Following our analyses, the suicide hypothesis currently stands as the only cause of death that has objective evidence behind it.

We cannot definitively rule out other theories of Poe’s death. Given the less consistent results from his professional writings, and that suicide is often influenced by numerous factors simultaneously, a more complex picture emerges. At the very least, his mounting depression could have played some role in his judgement and decision-making leading up to his death. Ultimately, the nature of Poe’s death remains a mystery quite befitting the master of the macabre.

Depression and language: analysing Edgar Allan Poe’s writings to solve the mystery of his death. By Ryan Boyd. The Conversation ,  February  24, 2020.

It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby second-hand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious, and unable to move, but as Walker approached the him, he discovered something unexpected: the man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore that might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker penned Snodgrass a letter asking for help.

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849

Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,

JOS. W. WALKER

To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27—almost a week earlier—Poe had left Richmond, Virginia bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Mrs. St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th- century, again—and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician Dr. John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death—shrouded in mystery—seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas—a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it’s fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article "Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman, " Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed. . . ." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. As Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article, "The Grave of Poe," that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid 1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on election day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on Oct. 4th), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn’t handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in her biography "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists that prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his finals days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J. P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1849: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. . . . He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium, and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! . . . A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking lead to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance, or his second-hand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon Monoxide Poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy Metal Poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July of 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, Dr. R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond" were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, Dr. J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days—the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms—E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October of 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain Tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue was erected, honoring Poe, near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains exhumed, in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin—or the corpse within it—and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know, today, that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: a New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol.

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu—which might have turned into deadly pneumonia—on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there—which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his second-hand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians—or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." "Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

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For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms."

The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. By Natasha Geiling.  Smithsonian Magazine , October 7, 2014. 

Edgar Allan Poe once wrote an essay called “The Philosophy of Composition,” to explain why he wrote “The Raven” backwards. The poem tells the story of a man who, “once upon a midnight dreary,” while mourning his dead love, Lenore, answers a tapping at his chamber door, to find “Darkness there and nothing more.” He peers into the darkness, “dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before,” and meets a silence broken only by his own whispered word, “Lenore?” He closes the door. The tapping starts again. He flings open his shutter and in, “with many a flirt and flutter,” flies a raven, “grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore.”The bird speaks just one word: Nevermore. That word is the poem’s last, but it’s where Poe began. He started, he said, “at the end, where all works of art should begin,” and “first put pen to paper” at what became the third to last stanza:

“Prophet,” said I, “thing of evil! Prophet still if bird or devil!

By that heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore,

Tell this soul with sorrow laden, if within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”

                 Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

“The Philosophy of Composition” is a lovely little essay, but, as Poe himself admitted, it’s a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didn’t actually write “The Raven” backwards. The essay is as much an exercise as the poem itself, a contrivance, a flourish. Here is a beautiful poem; it does everything a poem should do, is everything a poem should be. And here is a clever essay about the writing of a beautiful poem. Top that. Nearly everything Poe wrote, including the spooky stories for which he’s most remembered, has this virtuosic, showy, lilting, and slightly wilting quality, like a peony just past bloom. Poe didn’t write “The Raven” to answer the exacting demands of a philosophic Art, or not entirely, anyway. He wrote it for the same reason he wrote tales like “The Gold-bug”: to stave off starvation. For a long while, Poe lived on bread and molasses; weeks before “The Gold-bug” was published, he was begging strangers on the street for fifty cents to buy something to eat. “‘The Raven’ has had a great ‘run,’” Poe wrote a friend,“but I wrote it for the express purpose of running—just as I did the ‘Gold-Bug,’ you know. The bird beat the bug, though, all hollow.” The public that swallowed that bird and bug, Poe quite strenuously resented.You either love Poe or you don’t but, either way, unless you happen to be, say, Coleridge, Poe doesn’t love you. A writer more condescending to more adoring readers is hard to think of. “The nose of a mob is its imagination,” Poe wrote, “By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.”

Poe died, under very mysterious circumstances, in October 1849. Drunk and delirious, he seems to have been dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, precinct after precinct, in one of that city’s infamously corrupt congressional elections, until he finally collapsed. From Ryan’s tavern, a polling place in the Fourth Ward, Poe was carried, like a corpse, to a hospital. He died three days later. He was forty years old.

“My whole existence has been the merest Romance,” Poe wrote, the year before his death,“in the sense of the most utter unworldliness.” This is Byronic bunk. Poe’s life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe’s world was Andrew Jackson’s America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought his perch. Poe’s biography really is a series of unfortunate events. But two of those events were global financial crises: the Panic of 1819 and the Panic of 1837, the pit and pendulum of the antebellum economy. Poe died at the end of a decade known as “the Hungry Forties,” and he wasn’t the only American to fall face down in the gutter during a seven-yearlong depression brought on by a credit collapse.9 He did not live out of time. He lived in hard times, dark times, up and down times. Indigence cast a shadow over everything Poe attempted. Poverty was his raven, tapping at the door, and it was Poe, not the bird, who uttered, helplessly, another rhyme for “Nevermore.” “I send you an original tale,” Poe once began a letter, and, at its end, added one line more: “P.S. I am poor.”

 Edgar Poe was born in Boston, on January 19, 1809, to a talented actress named Eliza Poe and her hapless husband, David, who deserted her. When Edgar was two, his mother died of consumption. The Poe orphans had little more to depend upon than the charity of strangers. The children were separated and Edgar landed in the home of a wealthy Richmond merchant named John Allan and his sickly, childless wife, Fanny. Allan, who ran a firm called the House of Ellis and Allan, never adopted the boy, and never loved him, either. Poe, for his part, took Allan’s name but never wanted it. (He signed letters, and published, as “Edgar A. Poe.”) In 1815, Allan moved his family to London, to take advantage of the booming British market for Virginia tobacco.11 Poe attended posh boarding schools. Then, during the Panic of 1819, the first bust in the industrializing nineteenth century, banks failed, factories closed, and Allan’s business imploded. The House of Ellis and Allan fell. Allan, plagued with two hundred thousand dollars of debt, sailed back to Virginia. Poe turned poet. The earliest verses in his hand that survive were written when he was fifteen. “Last night with many cares and toils oppress’d / Weary . . . I laid me on a couch to rest.” Adolescent melancholy, and nothing more. But those lines are scribbled on a sheet of paper on which Allan had calculated, just above Poe’s scrawl, the compound interest on a debt.

In 1823, Poe fell in love with Jane Stannard, the unhinged mother of a school friend. A year later, Stannard died, insane. Poe spent much time at her graveside. “No more” became his favorite phrase. (Poe would later insist that mourning the death of a beautiful woman is, of all sorrows, the most poetical; he loved to play with names.)14 In 1825, Allan inherited a fortune from an uncle. Allan rose; Poe kept falling. At sixteen, Poe went to the University of Virginia where he drank and gambled and, in a matter of months, racked up debts totaling more than two thousand dollars. Allan refused to honor them, even though Poe was at some risk of finding himself in debtor’s prison. Poe ran off. There followed a series of huffy pronouncements and stormy departures; most ended in Poe begging Allan for money. “I am in the greatest necessity, not having tasted food since Yesterday morning,” Poe wrote. “I have nowhere to sleep at night, but roam about the Streets.” Allan was unmoved. Poe enlisted in the army and served for two years as Edgar A. Perry. In 1829, Fanny Allan died. Andrew Jackson was inaugurated. Poe, while awaiting a commission to West Point—having sent an application, and Allan’s fifty dollars, to Jackson’s secretary of war, John Eaton—submitted the manuscript for a book of poems to a publisher, who told him that he would publish it only if Poe would guarantee him against the loss. Allan refused to front the money. Poe moved to Baltimore, where he lived with his invalid grandmother; his aunt, Maria Clemm; his nine-yearold cousin, Virginia; and his brother, Henry, an alcoholic who was dying of consumption.

Jackson, meanwhile, refused to renew the charter of the Bank of the United States, run by Nicholas Biddle. Biddle insisted on the need for federal regulation of paper currency. Jackson and his supporters, known as “gold-bugs,” wanted no paper money at all.15 (“Gold-bug” was also slang for millionaire.) Between 1830 and 1837, while Biddle and Jackson battled, 347 state-chartered banks opened across the country. They printed their own money. In 1832, the year Jackson vetoed the extension of the national bank’s charter, $59 million of paper bills were in circulation; four years later, that number had reached $140 million. All this paper was backed up by very little coin.16 At the end of Jackson’s two terms, American banks held $57 million in paper money and only $10.5 million in gold.

Poe, who was broke, didn’t need a bank. He could treasure up funds, he came to believe, in his own brain. He read as much as he could, charging books out of the Baltimore Library. “There are minds which not only retain all receipts, but keep them at compound interest for ever,” he once wrote. “Knowledge breeds knowledge, as gold gold.”18 Poe may have thought his mind was a mint, but when his book of poems was finally published, it earned him nothing (exactly what all his collections of poetry earned). He sold one of Maria Clemm’s slaves. “I have tried to get the money for you from Mr. A a dozen times,” Poe wrote to one of his many creditors, “but he always shuffles me off.” And then he added, lying, “Mr. A is not very often sober.”

“I have an inveterate habit of speaking the truth,” Poe once wrote. That, too, was a lie. (That Poe lied so compulsively about his own life has proved the undoing of many a biographer.) 21 In 1830, Poe finally made it to West Point, where he pulled pranks.“I cannot believe a word he writes,” Allan wrote on the back of yet another letter from his wayward charge. After Poe was court-martialed, Allan, who had since married a woman twenty years his junior, cut Poe off entirely. Poe went to New York but, unable to support himself by writing, he left the city within three months, returning to Baltimore, to live with Mrs. Clemm and little Virginia. He published his first story, “Metzengerstein.” He won a prize of fifty dollars from the Baltimore Weekly Visitor for “MS in a Bottle.” The editor, who met him, later wrote,“I found him a state of starvation.” In these straits, Poe wrote “Berenice,” a story about a man who disinters his dead lover and yanks out all her teeth—“the white and glistening, and ghastly teeth of Berenice”—although this gets even grosser when, after he’s done it, he realizes she was still alive. It has been plausibly claimed that Poe wrote this story to make a very bad and cruel and long-winded joke about “bad taste.” Also: he was hungry.

John Allan died in 1834, a rich man. He left his vast estate, three plantations and two hundred slaves, to his second wife and their two children. He left Edgar A. Poe not a penny. The next year, Poe was hired as the editor of a new monthly magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, in Richmond. He was paid sixty dollars a month, a modest salary but for him, a fortune. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm. She was thirteen; he was twenty-seven; he said she was twenty-one. He called her his “darling little wifey.” (“I was a child and she was a child, / In a kingdom by the sea; / But we loved with a love that was more than love— / I and my Annabel Lee.”) Poe held the job at the Messenger for only fifteen months. He boasted that, under his editorship, the magazine’s circulation grew from 700 to 5,500, but, as the Poe scholar Thomas Whalen has discovered, this, too, was a lie. The magazine had thirteen hundred subscribers when Poe started, and eighteen hundred when he left.

Poe lied about the Messenger’s circulation because he was attempting to forge a career in the world of magazine publishing during very troubled economic times. And, plainly, he was a very troubled man. Quarreling with the publisher of the Messenger, Poe left the magazine and, in February 1837, moved to New York. The New-Yorker, a weekly magazine edited by Rufus Griswold, welcomed him, praising Poe’s work at the Messenger. Harper & Brothers was just about to publish Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.

Unfortunately, Poe arrived in New York just in time for Panic of 1837. With all that paper money, speculators had gone wild; in the West, there had been a land grab and, in the East, a housing bubble; in New York, real estate values had risen 150 percent. When the crash came, in the last weeks of Jackson’s presidency, bankruptcies swept the nation. In New York, riots broke out as the swelling ranks of the city’s poor broke into food shops. “Down with the panic makers,” one newspaper warned, promising, “A bright sun will soon dispel the remaining darkness.” But the skies didn’t clear. In April, one New Yorker wrote in his diary, “Wall Street. The blackness of darkness still hangeth over it. Failure on failure.” By the fall of 1837, nine out of ten eastern factories had closed. Five hundred desperate New Yorkers turned up to answer an ad for twenty day laborers, to be paid at the truly measly wage of four dollars a month.

Then Pym failed. Poe’s publisher had tried to pass the novel off as an authentic travel journal even as its author left a trail of clues to his oh-so clever hoax—“pym” being, for instance, an anagram for “imp.” This didn’t go over especially well. One reviewer called the book “an impudent attempt at humbugging the public.” Poe did not write another novel. He moved to Philadelphia and wrote more stories. During the seven-year depression that followed the Panic, as Whalen has shown, Poe wrote 90 percent fewer poems and twice as many tales. He insisted that this was an aesthetic choice. The tale, he insisted, affords “the best prose opportunity for display of the highest talent.” Any piece of truly worthy writing must be able to be read at a sitting in order to achieve a single dramatic effect, the Nevermore-ish end with which, Poe said,every work of Art must begin. Maybe. But writing a book was exactly the kind of long term investment Poe could not afford to make, especially with so little prospect of return. In the 1820s, books cost, on average, two dollars; during the depression, that price fell to fifty cents.

Poe had already started writing gothic stories before the economy collapsed. But, as a man of no independent means whatsoever, he was especially vulnerable to market forces, and he knew it. (That’s probably why he worked so hard at appearing so otherworldly, so Romantic.) Poe tried to deduce, from careful study, what sold best. “The history of all Magazines,” he concluded, “shows plainly that those which have attained celebrity were indebted for it to articles similar in nature—to Berenice.” Gothic stories—supernatural tales set, often, in medieval ruins—had been popular for decades.They were also rather interesting to write on a rainy day, as Mary Shelley discovered, and great fun to parody, as Jane Austen found out(both Frankenstein and Northanger Abbey were published in 1818, when Poe was in England). The genre had since gone to seed; most of it, in Poe’s lifetime, was fairly rotten. It did sell well, though. A philosophy of composition? No, what Poe developed was a philosophy of the literary marketplace. He had little choice. “The general market for literary wares,” he reported, during one of the worst years of the depression, “is in a state of stagnation.”

The problem with Poe comes to this. He needed to turn his pen to profit—his mind was a mint!—but he also wanted to signal, as with Pym, that he was lowering himself. Look! See! I’m brilliant! Even at writing dreck! This kind of thing isn’t usually terribly charming. Once in a while, someone attempted to point this out. Early on, a fellow writer explained to Poe why the brothers Harper had declined to publish Poe’s Tales of the Folio Club:

They object that there is a degree of obscurity in their application, which will prevent ordinary readers from comprehending their drift, and consequently from enjoying the fine satire they convey. It requires a degree of familiarity with various kinds of knowledge which they do not possess, to enable them to relish the joke; the dish is too refined for them to banquet on.

Poe found this advice difficult to take. In “How to Write an Article for Blackwood Magazine,” a story he wrote in 1838, he tried telling the joke more broadly. An aspiring writer of gothics visits Blackwood’s editor, seeking instruction. “Your writer of intensities must have very black ink, and a very big pen, with a very blunt nib,” the editor advises, then offers some examples of recent successes:

Let me see. There was “The Dead Alive,” a capital thing!—the record of a gentleman’s sensations when entombed before the breath was out of his body—full of tact, taste, terror, sentiment, metaphysics, and erudition. You would have sworn that the writer had been born and brought up in a coffin. Then we had the “Confessions of an Opium eater”—fine, very fine!—glorious imagination—deep philosophy—acute speculation—plenty of fire and fury, and a good spicing of the decidedly unintelligible. That was a nice bit of flummery, and went down the throats of the people delightfully. They would have it that Coleridge wrote thepaper—but not so. It was composed by my pet baboon, Juniper.

Still not so endearing.

Poe calibrated and recalibrated. Just how many ways can a writer insult his readers and get away with it? If you take Poe’s best horror stories at face value, they are terrifying, wonderfully, flawlessly, terrifying; they are masterpieces. They’re also dripping with contempt. “Half banter, half-satire,” is how Poe once described them.40 “The Tell-Tale Heart” reads more like three-quarters burlesque, especially when you think about the literary output of Juniper the baboon. A madman with super-acuity murders an old man and entombs the corpse beneath the floor. When the police arrive, the madman begins to hear the beating of his victim’s heart.

I felt that I must scream or die!—and now—again—hark!

louder! louder! louder! louder!—

      “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the

deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of

his hideous heart!”

Most of Poe’s stories have this campy, floozy Boo! business at the end Poe knew these were cheap tricks. No one plays them better than he does. It wasn’t to everyone’s taste.The first editor to read “The Tell-Tale Heart” rejected it, writing back,“If Mr. Poe would condescend to furnish more quiet articles, he would be a most desirable correspondent.”

“The Humbug,” first published in The New Yorker, April 20, 2009, and collected in The Story of America: Essays on Origins by Jill Lepore. Copyright © 2012 by Princeton University Press. 

The Humbug. By Jill Lepore. Pen America,  October 23, 2013

A Forest of Symbols : Symbolism and Philosophy

“I always had a soft spot for artists and writers labeled symbolists,” Andrei Pop tells us, “if only because they were often picked on.” Indeed, he explains, they were unjustly labeled incomprehensible neurotics or egoists, anarchists or decadents — the latter even becoming a popular name for the movement. For Pop, an associate professor of art history at the University of Chicago and a member of its Committee on Social Thought, symbolist practices are crucial to understanding the genesis of modern art. Now an intellectual assumption across many disciplines, symbolism, Pop affirms in his new book “A Forest of Symbols,” was a consequence of the radical rethinking of the nature of the symbol in the late 19th century. His book provides a rich and unprecedented examination of this historical period, and a unique framework for rethinking the emergence of non-referential models of perception and for understanding the modernization of how various forms of knowledge can be represented.

Like many of the titles we at Zone Books are proud to have published in recent years — Christopher Heuer’s “Into the White,” Mitchell Merback’s “Perfection’s Therapy,” and Amy Powell’s “Depositions,” among them — Pop’s vibrant book is driven by crucial questions internal to art history but which, in their realization, are fundamentally transdisciplinary in extraordinarily creative ways. This creativity is well-reflected in the far-reaching interview featured below, in which Pop discusses, among other topics, what drew him to symbolism, the potential symbols have to communicate a common visual language, and the outsized influence of Edgar Allan Poe.

Zone Books: “A forest” seems a fittingly symbolic choice for the title. How did you decide upon it?

Andrei Pop: Credit goes to the great French poet Baudelaire, who wrote that “Man passes through forests of symbols which watch him with familiar gazes.” This reminds me of a jungle with stone idols glaring through the foliage, mysterious but also a bit silly — like a Tintin comic. But a forest is so much more: not just a thing or place but a world for plants and animals and people, who use it for food, shelter, resources — in other words, they coexist uneasily within it. And everything the humans do, practical or theoretical, they represent in pictures or words or other symbols: so symbols are our forest, and we even overlay nonhuman nature, whether forest or outer space, with symbols to bring it closer to us (the Moon, the Sun, the Milky Way). A Forest of Symbols then is a symbol full of symbols: the very theme of the book. But the title didn’t come easy! I only picked it after being struck by all the forest symbolism I used in the book, like the common phrase of ‘not seeing the forest for the trees’. Finally, there is a small but significant difference between Baudelaire’s phrase and mine: his forests are many, mine just one, “a forest” linking art and science as symbol-making activities.

ZB: What drew you to questions of symbolism?

AP: I always had a soft spot for artists and writers labeled symbolists, if only because they were often picked on. They were supposedly overblown or overwrought or incomprehensible, they ignored nature, dabbled in the dark arts or art for art’s sake, were neurotics or egoists or anarchists or decadents — the last was even a popular name for the whole movement. Yet what these criticisms missed is the humor and the intelligence of this art, which often turned its razor wit against itself and its makers: the artist’s futile attempts to represent the world for other human beings. Then I was struck by what seemed a pure linguistic coincidence: the fact that mathematicians of the era spoke of “symbolism” too, e.g., the mathematician-philosopher Whitehead even wrote a book with this title. They did not mean art, but just the technical notations they used to express logical proofs. It turned out, on closer investigations, that these two apparently opposite practices both involved getting unreliable, subjective, self-centered human minds to pay attention to subtle nuances of drawn or printed or otherwise inscribed figures, for the purposes of coming to understand each other and recognize objective truths they could share. I was hooked.

ZB: Several artists, writers, philosophers, and mathematicians appear throughout your discussion: including Edgar Allan Poe, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Ludwig Wittgenstein. How did you choose which figures to discuss?

AP: I wish I could say it took great originality to collect these people, but the artists, whether poets or painters, just couldn’t shut up about Poe. And they were right! Just like Bart Simpson and a lot of general readers, I’ve always loved Poe, but did not realize what a systematic thinker he is. He explained with great philosophical clarity just how he intended to get the personal, incalculable effects his stories and poems like “The Raven” have on us. This theoretical bottom to Poe, but also to his translator Mallarmé and his friend the painter Manet, made them akin to my mind to the great turn-of-the-century philosophers Frege and Wittgenstein, who wrestled with how limited animal minds with a rough and ready language can know eternal truths of logic and mathematics. These thinkers in turn were friends in real life and connected in the history of philosophy. My one originality, which I think justified, has been to bring them together: Poe and Frege, Wittgenstein and Mallarmé. It is their shared ideas and the common difficulties they wrestled with, such as the possibility (or impossibility) of a private language, that to my mind justifies the combination. It might also allow us, having the benefit of their insights, to see farther than these geniuses.

ZB: How did you find and curate the illustrations for the book?

AP: Some of them have been with me since student days — especially the Manet lithographs of Poe’s Raven, which I stumbled across in the Fogg Museum print study room while studying for grad exams at Harvard: a scary rite of passage where you could be shown any object in the enormous collection without being told what it is. The Manets didn’t come up, but a seed of curiosity was planted. Another work, Van Gogh’s otherworldly green portrait of his mother, painted from a black and white photograph by the homesick son, is one of the first artworks I discovered on starting high school in Southern California in the 1990s. Others, like Seurat’s Grande Jatte and the chest, painted and carved by Gauguin, I’ve seen repeatedly over the last few years at the Art Institute of Chicago. Many I found in books, and are only to be found there, being book illustrations. One particular drawing was known to scholars over the last quarter-century only in reproduction. I finally tracked down the original just as the book was being printed this summer 2019. So it is quite a cast of characters, from familiar friends to chance acquaintances. They belonged in the book if I could explain what drew me to them, and what made them speak to each other. I have also given each a little commentary on the page where they are reproduced, in addition to the main text. They deserve the second look!

ZB: At one point, you outline that there are aesthetic, scientific, political, and other signs. What are the other kinds of signs might one encounter?

AP: There may not be “countless uses of language” as Wittgenstein thought, but indefinitely many sign systems: as many as activities requiring coordination. Every sport has its gestures and slogans, there are lovers’ hearts carved into trees, rituals and regalia for every priesthood and profession. A whaler and a thief have their own patois, and possibly worldview: modern stories like Moby Dick show us that. Music is fascinating because its signs are often implicit. Key signatures can convey mood, like the bleak D minor heralding Mozart’s stone guest, who drags Don Giovanni to hell. I have always wondered: are keys really signs to “be read” correctly, or just sound patterns to which people respond freely? One may ask the same about animal calls: stomping tails to indicate danger may be a sign, but what about pheromones that animals and even plants release unwittingly? The American logician Peirce, who makes a cameo in my book, was fascinated by natural signs, like smoke for fire. (He was doubtless acquainted with Native American communication systems). In the book I focus on symbols, which are signs intended to be recognized as intentionally made to be such. I’ll end with an odd one: martial arts. I practiced judo a lifetime ago, and knew the names for the grabbing at each other’s kimonos and trying to trip each other up that we did. These were ordinary Japanese words, but our fumbling moves were themselves signs of the elegant modes of flooring the opponent to whose ideal beauty we aspired in vain.

ZB: It seems that symbols have the potential to communicate a common visual language, but also to be overlooked, or misunderstood. How do you see the artists of the 19th century grappling with that issue?

AP: Enlightenment thinkers, confronted with classical Chinese and ancient Egyptian writing, thought pictures could be a new universal language, imparting wisdom impossible to misinterpret. Alas, two centuries of false starts with hieroglyphs taught them, by the end of the 19th century, that pictorial language, being immediate and intuitive, can give rise to the wildest misunderstanding. That has its bright side too: one doesn’t misunderstand prosaic interactions like paying for groceries. It is with singular, puzzling, dark or dazzling things or happenings that we have a hard time saying what they are. In my book I quote some classic vitriol, such as the painter-poet Dante Gabriel Rossetti, a visionary artist in his own right, exclaiming that Manet’s Raven illustrations are only fit for insane asylums. The old art critics were interested in such outbursts because they showed what prejudices modern innovators had to overcome. The Marxist critics on the other hand think they stem from class tensions. Both might be right: but there are more immediate causes of misunderstanding, from the state of one’s own body to the education one brings to the artwork. The artists in my book were used to being called incomprehensible: they did not despair, but patiently asked that viewers look closer, and think longer. It’s good advice for us too, as distractions and the demands on our time have multiplied.

ZB: Going further, you discuss the slippage between private and public meaning. Is there something that viewers of art can do to recognize public meaning more often?

AP: The 20th century, from Wittgenstein to various technocratic states, was haunted by the idea that all meaning is public and so all our thinking ought to be as well. In art, this amounts to going into the gallery and doing long division out loud: the only reason we’d speak is to show off our facility doing something trivial. This has been the ideal of some old academic art institutions, but fortunately art is too unpredictable to achieve it. The opposite extreme, a purely interior world of unutterable feelings, is unfortunately closer to the cliché of museum as temple: silent people looking pained, furrowing their brow at artworks, grunting now and then. Much better, both for personal enjoyment and for any kind of political, moral, or scientific insight, is a balance between the experiences we have as individuals and shared content — the plot of a story, the sitter of a portrait, the mode of representation or the use of material, which points to historical context. The private too can be given its due, without being remorselessly made public: a parent’s pain for a deceased child, or the artist’s commitment to a cause, which thankfully we need not share to appreciate. One might say with Freud that “I (the ego) will be where It (the unconscious) was”, that is, become self-aware. But I prefer to think we can make articulate in dialogue what we both see as well as the marvelous fact that we do not both see everything one of us sees.

There may not be “countless uses of language” as Ludwig Wittgenstein thought, but indefinitely many sign systems: as many as activities requiring coordination. Image: Wikimedia Commons

ZB: You write that “the logical content of pictures is richer than generally supposed.” How can one learn to identify the logical content?

AP: “Logical” here doesn’t mean syllogisms or standard notation out of a first-year college course. By those standards, pictures are judged logically boneless, flabby, formless; but so is much language. Take the simple utterance “See Spot run”. Nothing follows from it syllogistically. Yet there is logical content: the scaffolding on which its meaning is built. The request or command to the hearer to perceive something, the claim that what will be seen is an action of the subject Spot, perhaps even the suggestion, built on Anglophone traditions, that Spot is a dog. Here we see how the logical blends into the factual, but there are facts about the world that are not logical: whether there is a Spot, who or what that is, and so on. Likewise, in pictures, such matters as the causal means of their making (mechanical, optical, by hand?), whether they belong to the past or to timeless imagination, whether they represent sentient beings, and those beings are meant to be doing or thinking something, or showing awareness of the presence of spectators: all this belongs to the scaffolding of meaning, which historical detail fills out. There is no algorithm for figuring out what is logically implied in an image and what we need to know about the world to grasp it; it is a mutually informing process. The payoff to perceiving what is there logically is that we are more likely to look in the right place for the facts that bring the picture to momentary life.

ZB: Do symbols help people to see an artwork in the way that the artist intended it?

AP: Writing this book, I grew fascinated and finally impatient with all the catchy terms for what is really the same thing: sign, emblem, allegory, Leitmotiv, Ur-form, Gestalt, schema, and of course symbol and all its variations. What is important about symbolist art — and science, which is not usually called symbolist, but should be — is that it regards symbols as purposely devised to function as such. An artificial, that is a human-made object, be it paint or sound or ink on paper, stands for some reality, abstract and conceptual like Number or Truth or concrete and dusty like a bone or a tree. The point of the symbol is to not confuse it with the thing symbolized. Even if you take a tree to symbolize another, say a bonsai for a mighty oak, you do not conflate the two. The artwork describes reality at a distance, and it is good to know the distance. This is already a step along the road to understanding art rightly, that is self-reflectively and intelligently. Whether it is also what the artist intended depends on the artist — was the artist careful and reflective? It is possible to notice something in an artwork that the artist totally missed. But the greatest artists invest their work richly with meaning, whether they are aware of it or not. So knowing the art helps up enormously to know the people. It is the closest we will ever get to reading the minds of those long gone.

ZB: You write that “Color is, as much as pain, a paradigm case of the private.” Yet, today, marketing and psychological studies try to find common, if not objective, effects of color. Is color still private? Would one’s experience of color and its symbolism have been more private in the 19th century?

AP: Advertising wouldn’t earn its keep if it didn’t explore our hopes and fears — as do doctors for nobler purposes. I would say pain is analogous: it is colonized today by states seeking ways to torture without hurting the body (waterboarding?) and pharmaceutical companies peddling opiates, but also to cure, and if not, to understand the experience of those living in pain. These developments start in the symbolist 19th century, prior to which little was known about how the eye processes light, not to mention the liquor-and-a-board-to-bite-on approach to anesthesia. So it certainly seems as if the lonely part of our minds is shrinking. But: to this we must always add, “approximately.” An adman or dietician might know that this or that hue will make you hungry or kill your appetite: they still don’t see what you see when you have that measurable public reaction. In science fiction, authors imagine telepathy or ‘feely’-machines. The hero of William Gibson’s Neuromancer feels the excruciating pain of the heroine when she breaks her leg. Frege foresaw this scenario a century ago and replied: is it the same pain, or a different one beamed now into a second person? He thought there could be no right answer, unless we were both people at once. So there will always be metaphysically private experiences, no matter how intrusive Big Brother becomes. The challenge is how to make them count: like aesthetes circa 1900, many of us want transformative experiences that also matter to the world we inhabit.

ZB: Can you say what you’re working on next?

AP: I think it might already be obvious from the last answer: science fiction! Like symbolism, it explores the farthest imaginable reaches of human — and not just human — experience, but it does so often in a naïve, breakneck fashion that is a lot of fun after the subtleties of Manet or Frege. And if symbolism is inseparable from my experience of growing up intellectually, science fiction has been with me even longer: as long as I could read or write, and certainly before I spoke the American English that even the most exotic Hollywood aliens favor. It stayed with me too. Today literary scholars look to this genre for answers, or at least questions about our uncertain future: climate change, human migration to the stars, a world of radical genetic and computer science. That is important, but for me it is also exciting to attend to earthy and disposable materials like pulp paperbacks and magazines, lurid space films from the dawn of cinema and today’s slick video games, so different from the fastidious elegance of symbolism. Although there is symbolist science fiction too: not for nothing was Poe a pioneer of the genre. His revived Mummy observes that they had Progress in its time too, but it never progressed. I find what is absurd and funny as important as what is sad and portentous, and only together do they capture our experience of that part of reality that does not yet exist — the Future.

Zone Books is an independent nonprofit publishing house founded in 1985. Zone Books are edited by Jonathan Crary, Michel Feher, Hal Foster, and Ramona Naddaff, and designed by Bruce Mau and Julie Fry. They are distributed by the MIT Press.

A Forest of Symbols: In Conversation With Andrei Pop.  By: Zone Books/The Editors.  The MIT Press Reader , December 9, 2019.

On the face of it, art historian Andrei Pop, in his latest book, A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century (Zone Books, 2019), sets out to achieve something rather concrete—a reevaluation of the French symbolist movement in art—and yet the reader soon becomes aware that much more is at stake, as Pop weaves together art history with an account of early analytic philosophy to raise questions about the very nature of truth and human ways of meaning-making in artistic and scientific practice, which are further explored in this interview with David Kretz.

DK : A Forest of Symbols: Art, Science, and Truth in the Long Nineteenth Century begins by characterizing a type of mid-19th-century reductionism about the self and the mental that finds expression, for example, in Ernst Mach’s psychologistic philosophy and impressionist painting, which, roughly speaking, presents the viewer with sensations of color pigments rather than with objects. You then establish a surprising parallel between two counter-reactions to this Zeitgeist: symbolist art and early analytic philosophy, especially Frege and the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Can you sketch the parallel in their responses for us?

AP : The predominance of positivism and various forms of mechanistic philosophy and science, including physiological psychology, was no ideological conspiracy but a result of real progress: the invention of analytic chemistry, the refinement of celestial mechanics, and the rapid strides in comparative anatomy, microbiology, and the rest, crowned as we still think by Darwinian evolutionary theory. To say nothing of practical gains from pasteurization to electricity. This materialist front faltered a little when confronting the mind and subjectivity, but here too advances were legion: from the study of the eye and physiologic color to the psychology of counting and their manifold applications, from calculators to color printing, early motion pictures, and, yes, realist and impressionist painting. These art practices, of course, were not always understood as reductive, but insofar as they were—as they answered to the decree of “paint only what you see”—they fit the positivist lockstep.

Only they also produced weirdness: what an impressionist ‘saw’, made up as it was of blocky saturated brushstrokes, differed markedly from what anyone else saw, live or through a camera. So the act of translating vision to canvas produced an effect different in kind. At the same time, positivism was of little help in the foundations of arithmetic, or physics, where explaining natural law mechanistically and psychologically (a tendency called “psychologism” on the model of scientism—taking psychology beyond its field of application) led to theories of numbers as consensual hallucinations, or meaningless counters in a game. This self-undermining nature of positivism—its search for verification leading always to unstable mental states that could deceive the verifier—naturally led to revolt among ambitious scientists from Boltzmann to Cantor. The revolts tended to assert the reality of things unseen and strictly unseeable: whether infinite sets (Bolzano) or irrational numbers (Weierstrass) or both of these (Dedekind, Cantor, Frege). This is a reformed Platonism, because it doesn’t point us to the perfect Bed in the sky, but to what is necessary for there to be anything at all—the laws of arithmetic describe any possible universe. They certainly underlie the mathematical natural science on which positivism relied while undermining it.

It is perhaps surprising then that the scientific revolt against equating truth with the perceptible or verifiable, which issued in mathematical logic and philosophy of language that you call “early analytic philosophy”, also made room for domains inaccessible to it, what it called the subjective realm, which stretched from color perception and proprioception to poetic nuance to aesthetic judgment. If we identify the later tradition with the elimination of subjectivity and a nearly algorithmic commitment to the application of logic to philosophical problems, we may, ironically, regard Frege and the young Russell and Wittgenstein as backward Romantics, because they sought to delimit objective sense and laws from realms of radical subjectivity that separate each mind from each other: the very notion of private language, which the older Wittgenstein violently rejected. The philosophical point of this book is to show that the objective requires the subjective as a foil if it is to play the scientific role late nineteenth-century philosophers assigned to it, not to mention to become accessible through our perceptual apparatus in new kinds of mathematical and logical symbolism. As for the symbolist artists, they frankly acknowledged that the mind contributes as much as the hand in reproducing reality, so that continuous color and contour, which impressionism and the opticians had rejected as found nowhere in nature, reappear as signs of our subjective activity as perceivers as much as our logical activity organizing percepts into objects. The category of the image serves as a useful beacon, joining theoretical speculation to plastic art: it is structured sense itself, distinct from and mediating between the concrete things embodying it and whatever else, concrete or abstract, they stand for or refer to. But once one has noticed the affinity between the artistic and philosophical project, there is no reason to leave out photographers, realist painters, or romantic poets like Poe, when one finds them engaged in a project of exploring the interface between the logically objective, or public world, and the private, subjective worlds which Heraclitus already said we each possess.

DK : You agree with historians of science like Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison that there is an artistic aspect to scientific practices of observation and documentation, for example, but want to also claim the inverse: that artworks are, in a sense, truth-apt and logical. Truth in art, moreover, on your view lies not so much in its power to disclose a world (Heidegger, Gadamer). Rather your concept of truth in art seems to follow along representationalist lines: Frege and the early Wittgenstein. Could you tell us more about your understanding of truth—in art, in science? Are they the same? Is truth in art the same as meaningfulness?

AP : The opposition between disclosive and representationalist accounts of truth requires some scrutiny. I take it by the latter you have in mind the view that sentences or images build up models of reality, which we compare with their referent and judge to be true in case the representation corresponds to reality. Frege in fact denied that such a view is generally applicable to pictures—as he pointed out, we would only call a picture of Cologne Cathedral “true” in this sense if we appended the sentence “the cathedral looks like this”, so that what we are really judging true is the sentence. But then he went further and pointed out that the correspondence theory doesn’t explain truth in language either! For if you ask just what makes this sentence correspond to reality, and I provide an answer, you can still ask whether the answer is true, which on the correspondence theory would lead to asking for another object of correspondence (not of the sentence, but of the sentence asserting the truth of the sentence), and thus a vicious regress. So correspondence will not explain truth in general: but it certainly plays a role in much everyday language and imagery, from ID cards to IOUs.

So it won’t do to dismiss representation altogether and insist on elevated uses of “world-disclosing” language and images: it matters whether I owe you or you owe me a sum of money, just as it should matter to the disclosing of a peasant world whether, say, a pair of boots painted by Van Gogh belonged (are painted as belonging) to a peasant woman or not. What matters still has to do with the language or the image: these are logically articulated, which needn’t mean reducible to language. What it does mean is: properly interpreted, it is responsive to true or false propositions about it. This is how a picture differs from the object which is its bearer, as it differs from a stone or a leaf, which are neither meaningful nor potentially true or false, though we can say meaningful, true or false things about them. As for the worry that pictures allow for multiple plausible interpretations, that doesn’t differentiate them from language qualitatively, only quantitatively. A picture might seem awfully ambiguous about, say, the intentions of the person it portrays, but it is merely compatible with several different ones. In turn, a sentence describing a face, as Lessing noticed, is endlessly more ambiguous than even a crude visual image of that face. Logically articulated, then, in every domain, means something like this: the object would mean different things if it were structured otherwise.

Likewise, context matters: language abounds in indexical expressions whose full significance (as opposed to linguistic meaning) depends on who is speaking and listening, and the sense of images may depend on assumptions about who is looking, what goes on beyond the frame of the picture, and so on. This is why I like to say that a historian may not be a Platonist, but a Platonist must be a historian: you never reach mind-independent meaning from a historical artifact unless you account for specific human conventions and acts. As for truth, that is once again a further step: it is not objects as such, but the thoughts they provoke, which are true or false. The only guaranteed truths are the tautologies held in such suspicion by Wittgenstein—which are perfectly respectable logical truths, true solely due to their structure (the same goes for contradictions, which are necessarily false). As for other thoughts, their truth and falsity depends not so much on correspondence to fact (which, inconveniently, tends to ape the representational content of the thought), but on what they really mean. Again artifact and world, structure and context interlock, while remaining very much distinct.

And that is why images, and not just texts or scientific sentences, may be logically articulate: it’s because they are interesting, eventful. The Nelson Goodman line, according to which pictures are just analog color gradients with no structure, is as implausible as Heidegger’s speculations on peasant shoes, which he claims are accessible only in looking at a Van Gogh painting, but which in fact can only be had by reading Heidegger. In order for this kind of art theory to reestablish contact with ordinary acts of looking, and with communication between lookers, and their other intellectual activities (including science), logical structure has to be recognized wherever it is found. It is naturally rather unevenly distributed among meaningful artifacts (perspectival pictures may be dreadful at tense, but they are far better than sentences at describing spaces, and both are terrible at clarifying inferences). We also have to recognize and respect the incommunicable aspect of each subject’s experience, which we can sense rather than verify and which I suspect is what drives the world-disclosing philosophers to their premature attempts at disclosure.

DK : Is there anything that would make an artwork logically inarticulate? Would you rule out the possibility of interesting, eventful nonsense?

AP : I rule out “nonsense” understood as “no sense”, a degree zero of sense: the nonsense poems of Lear, Carroll, dada, medieval monks, etc. are in fact full of tidbits of sense, arranged less than sentence-wise (or even word-wise at times). So the “may be” above applies to the degree of coherence a particular artwork aspires to. A monochrome may well occupy a monistic logical space akin to David Chalmers’ fantastic “consciousness of a thermostat”. If so it is quite dull, perhaps inarticulate by our usual standards, but never unintelligible or senseless in a pure way. Poésie concrète, doodles, automatic writing are telic activities too, with a minimal sense that is requisite to being an interesting representation. Of course, a fossil or a blank wall may be interesting, but not as representation: only as a natural object about which questions may be asked.

DK : How does your understanding of these larger metaphysical and epistemological issues inflect your own methodology as a historian? What do you think art historians should learn from philosophy—and philosophers from (art) historians?

AP : I more than once heard a celebrated philosopher say that his only method is to never say anything that is obviously false. One could do worse! The use of external “theory” in art history once had a dogmatic cast—the writer “knows” that Marxism or Lacanian psychoanalysis or structural linguistics is right, and rearranges art, or rather the extant writings on it, in accordance with this certainty. The old (“classical”) Germanophone art historians by contrast had some philosophical training (generally neo-Kantian), which they did not flaunt, instead inventing terms like Kunstwollen (‘art-willing’), Pathosformel (‘pathos formula’) or symbolische Form (this one due to a philosopher, Ernst Cassirer) to do their philosophizing, still in a broad generalizing vein, but generally asserting a continuity or change over time in how concrete objects embodied these more abstract patterns or schemata. I hope I have learned some lessons from both traditions: to think on our feet when the form of artifacts is meaningful and to look outside them when artifacts reach into the world. Still, art historians must learn not just philosophical theories, but some habits of mind philosophers take for granted (notably analytic philosophers, whom too few of us read, but above all the great philosophical minds, wherever those occur): not to adopt any position because they think it’s right or will elicit admiration without understanding it, but to think for themselves, accepting only what on their best efforts they regard as the truth. This, of course, need not involve certainty, but includes possibilities and hypotheses and the most plausible conclusions.

Can philosophers in turn learn anything from art historians? Well, besides learning what not to do (in the bad case), most art history, and certainly art history at its best, abounds in careful and explicit observation of meaningful artifacts, from all known human cultures and epochs: I think it does so in a way that if properly taken up could challenge the philosophy of mind, of language (which really should be a branch of a larger philosophy of meaning), and of logic and science. Art history isn’t just interesting to aestheticians. Questions ranging from the compositionality of semantics to the nature of things can be elucidated, if not definitively answered, by closer attention to art and artifacts. Not that this will involve taking anything art historians say at face value, but most of what philosophers think about the limits of thought, discursive language and the expressible, would benefit from an acquaintance with a wider range of meaning-making tools. Knowing symbolic logic helps, but so do comics or sculpture or opera! I am just as bad, I have no clue what to make of key signatures and chord changes in music, which can be instruments of thought, as much as any syllogism or perspectival projection. The key to wisdom, I’d agree with Socrates, is knowing that we don’t know. That is something art historians and philosophers have in common with each other—and with everyone else.

Andrei Pop is a professor in the Committee on Social Thought and the Department of Art History at the University of Chicago. Previously, he has taught eighteenth- and nineteenth-century art history and aesthetics at the Universities of Basel and Vienna

David Kretz is a Ph.D. student in the Department of Germanic Studies and the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. His current project contrasts poets and translators as complementary paradigms of historical agency in times of crisis

French Symbolism and the Origins of Analytic Philosophy. By David Kretz.  Journal of the History of Ideas Blog, December 16, 2019.

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