New Light on the Genesis and Progress of Poe's Landscape Fiction

flf HE STORY OF POE'S LANDSCAPE FICTION begins in I841 with the pubA lication by the American architect Andrew Jackson Downing of A Treatise on the Theory and Practice of Landscape Gardening. Despite its learned and parochial title, the book proved a considerable success. Just as the Classical Revival in American architecture of the I820's had aped a similar one in the England of the 1790'S, SO the interest in landscape architecture which Downing's book set in motion in the I840's mirrored a wave of interest which had swept England a half century before. Not until Downing's treatise, however, had the subject of picturesque landscape gardening received comprehensive treatment by an American. A number of American periodicals gave over space to brief but enthusiastic review articles throughout i841. following year Downing published a second popular book entitled Cottage Residences, and Edgar Poe, seeing the light of public taste, wrote and published The Landscape Garden. Poe scholars have frequently suggested that Poe's landscape fiction draws directly on his reading of one or more of Downing's books. It is unlikely, however, that Poe had any first-hand acquaintance with Downing's works prior to writing The Landscape Garden. Although Downing's was the first major American work on landscape gardening, it was by no means the only source of raw material available to Poe. With some of these alternative sources Poe was demonstrably familiar. In I841, for instance, Poe had written a review for Graham's Magazine of several books by an Englishman, William Howitt, one of which was Rural Life of England (I838). A chapter of the book is given over to discussion of English landscape gardening, and this discussion includes a distinction between the geometric style of garden, which the author traces back to the Romans, and the later picturesque style, which aspired to a greater imitation of nature. Howitt's remarks on the unfashionable geometric garden are not at all unlike those of Ellison, the would-be creater of the greatest

Aesthetics · Art · Literature · Botany and Plant Ecology Studies · Botany, Ecology, and Taxonomy Studies · History · Tree Root and Stability Studies

• A estética do jardim na literatura

  Open Access•Esdras Araujo Arraes•Anais do Museu Paulista História…•2020

  Add to list