A Catalogue of Selected Rhetorical Devices Used in the Works of Edgar Allan Poe

TLDR: The issue of the style of Poe's writing has long been a contentious one as discussed by the authors, and it remains so even today, despite the fact that many of those who have found fault with his writing have often been little more than impressionistic; this seems especially true of those literary giants and scholars who have condemned his prose.

Abstract: The issue of Poe's "style" has long been a contentious one--and it remains so. Those who have found fault with his prose include Henry James, Yvor Winters, T. S. Eliot, Margaret Fuller, Mark Twain, Julian Symons, Harry Levin, and James M. Cox. Some of these have argued that Poe was a bad stylist and that his narrators all sound the same. Those who have championed him as a literary stylist, on the other hand--occasionally in extravagant terms--include James Russell Lowell, George Bernard Shaw, R.. D. Gooder, Donald Barlow Stauffer, Joseph R. McElrath, and James W. Gargano. I prefer to reside with this latter camp, some members of which have expressed the insight that Poe's narrators can be distinguished, stylistically, from one another and that Poe displays considerable stylistic versatility. He cannot be dismissed as having a single "style," and his various styles are more often than not felicitous. Unfortunately, pronouncements on Poe's writing have often been little more than impressionistic; this seems especially true of those literary giants and scholars who have condemned Poe's prose. In the (perhaps chimerical) desire to put an end to the contention once and for all, and to decide it in Poe's favor, I have charged onto the battleground armed with the catalogues of tropes and schemes: Lanham, Quinn, Sonnino, Espy, Taylor, Joseph, Dupriez, Cluett, Corbett, Crowley. While hostilities continue, I am patiently working my way through the Poe oeuvre trying to keep several hundred rhetorical, grammatical, and linguistic terms in my head at once (I always preferred to do things the hard way)--attempting to find patterns. After having read most of Poe's tales and much of his criticism (a rather large body), I have thus far identified 209 (mostly rhetorical) devices--aspects of his styles. I have catalogued them with definitions from the modern rhetors and exemplifications solely from the Poe canon. Using Lanham's system of classification in A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms (182-96), I have determined, for one thing, that Poe employs all of the types classified by Lanham. This would probably be true of any highly productive creative writer, but patterns would differ from author to author. For instance, up to now I have counted twenty-three types of devices of balance, including antanagoge, three kinds of doublets (antithetic, pleonastic and range), triplets (and other kinds of seriation), antimetabole, inclusio, and palindrome. I have not tallied instances of each kind of balance but I think it safe to conclude that Poe's prose suggests a fondness for parallel structure, sometimes antithetical. I have also catalogued nearly two dozen devices of description, from anemographia to triplets adjectival and adverbial, and conclude that Poe is a highly descriptive writer. (Everyone knows that, but it is better to be able to confirm it by patient analysis rather than merely to suspect it.) He is especially fond of enargia and its various subtypes. Additionally, I have enumerated three dozen types of emotional appeal and other devices of vehemence--no surprise to those well acquainted with the prose and poetry of the passionate and histrionic Poe. Not all of these are figures of emotion per se (such as figures of repetition), but in Poe's hands they often become devices of ardency. Perhaps the largest class of rhetorical terms in Poe's works is indeed that of repetition--the duplication of letters, syllables, sounds, words, clauses, phrases, and ideas (several of which are examined, below). What Lanham calls techniques of argument also abound; Poe is, after all, an eminently rhetorical writer not only in his literary criticism, where we woul d expect attempts at persuasion, but in his fiction as well. We do find instances illustrating what Lanham calls "ungrammatical, illogical, or unusual uses of language," but Poe uses many of these deliberately as devices of comedy--often verbal comedy: antistoecon, barbarismus, bomphiologia, epenthesis, metathesis, prosonomasia, and puns (indeed, most of these can be found in the playful tales included in David Galloway's The Other Poe). …