dois 'sneers'

antes de mais, a ligação para o trabalho crítico de Poe, o que ele fez na vida, o seu métier para além do outro, fantástico link. depois, e tal como cada vez que saio a pé, sair a pé em visita à Avenida Poe implica nunca se regressar de mãos vazias. desta vez, a sua impressão sulista e anti-establishment 'New Englandy' (para misturar autores sem vergonha) da feminista autora-agressiva-intelectual de “Woman in the Nineteenth Century”, Margaret Fuller:

"I put all this as a general proposition, to which Miss Fuller affords a marked exception — to this extent, that her personal character and her printed book are merely one and the same thing. We get access to her soul as directly from the one as from the other — no more readily from this than from that — easily from either. Her acts are bookish, and her books are less thoughts than acts. Her literary and her conversational manner are identical. Here is a passage from her “Summer on the Lakes:” —

The rapids enchanted me far beyond what I expected; they are so swift that they cease to seem so — you can think only of their beauty. The fountain beyond the Moss islands I discovered for myself, and thought it for some time an accidental beauty which it would not do to leave, lest I might never see it again. After I found it permanent, I returned many times to watch the play of its crest. In the little waterfall beyond, Nature seems, as she often does, to have made a study for some larger design. She delights in this — a sketch within a sketch — a dream within a dream. Wherever we see it, the lines of the great buttress in the fragment of stone, the hues of the [page 79:] waterfall, copied in the flowers that star its bordering mosses, we are delighted; for all the lineaments become fluent, and we mould the scene in congenial thought with its genius.

Now all this is precisely as Miss Fuller would speak it. She is perpetually saying just such things in just such words. To get the conversational woman in the mind’s eye, all that is needed is to imagine her reciting the paragraph just quoted: but first let us have the personal woman. She is of the medium height; nothing remarkable about the figure; a profusion of lustrous light hair; eyes a bluish gray, full of fire; capacious forehead; the mouth when in repose indicates profound sensibility, capacity for affection, for love — when moved by a slight smile, it becomes even beautiful in the intensity of this expression; but the upper lip, as if impelled by the action of involuntary muscles, habitually uplifts itself, conveying the impression of a sneer. Imagine, now, a person of this description looking you at one moment earnestly in the face, at the next seeming to look only within her own spirit or at the wall; moving nervously every now and then in her chair; speaking in a high key, but musically, deliberately, (not hurriedly or loudly,) with a delicious distinctness of enunciation — speaking, I say, the paragraph in question, and emphasizing the words which I have italicized, not by impulsion of the breath, (as is usual,) but by drawing them out as long as possible, nearly closing her eyes the while — imagine all this, and we have both the woman and the authoress before us."

o texto inteiro está aqui.

Edgar Allan Poe.

e engraçado: a dream within a dream de Fuller, em obra de 1843, texto reviewed por Poe em 1846, e usado para poema editado em 1849. e ainda: "This poem was written and rewritten throughout the span of Poe's life and has been shortened and elongated as well. It started off as a poem named Imitation and was later changed to To - - . Poe even took out line 10-24 of this poem and named it For Annie, so this poem has many variations."