Flight into Fancy: Poe's Discovery of the Right Brain
Mark Canada
The Southern literary journal March 1, 2001 DOI: 10.1353/slj.2001.0001 (opens in new tab)
Study at a glance
AI-extracted from the abstract| Characteristics | Theoretical or philosophical paper Peer reviewed |
|---|---|
| Citations | 7 |
| Key points | Argues that Poe identified what modern neurologists call the right hemisphere of the brain, conceiving a mental region remote from ordinary consciousness and characterized by nonverbal thought—visual imagery, music, and emotion—and expressed in dreams and destructive urges, even if he did not locate it in the skull. |
Abstract
Phrenology is no longer to be laughed at," Edgar Allan Poe wrote in an 1836 review of Phrenology, and the Moral Influence of Phrenology."It is no longer laughed at by men of common understanding.It has assumed the majesty of science; and, as a science, ranks among the most important which can engage the attention of thinking beings" (Essays and Reviews 329).Poe, of course, counted himself among these "thinking beings" and continued to be engaged by phrenology, which located various "faculties" such as "amativeness" and "cautiousness" in different parts of the brain.In a letter written in 1841, for example, Poe says that his head "has been examined by several phrenologists" (Thomas 345).Indeed, Poe's interest in phrenology was probably behind his discussion of the mind in his critical writing and detective fiction.In "The Poetic Principle" he divides the mind into "the Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense" (Essays and Reviews 272), and the narrator of "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" speaks of "the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul" and of "a double Dupin--the creative and the resolvent" (Poetry and Tales 402).What separates Poe from the phrenologists, who were right in conceiving of a divided brain but wrong in labeling its parts, is his keen understanding of a particular region of the mind.In a letter he wrote to Philip Pendleton Cooke in 1846, Poe says, "But, seriously, I do not think that any one so well enters into the poetical portion of my mind as yourself" (Quinn 514-515).Poe does not go on to say what he means by the "poetical portion" of his brain, but the rest of his writing contains several telling descriptions of an exotic region of the mind.These descriptions show that Poe correctly identified what modern neurologists call the right hemisphere of the brain, or simply the "right brain."That is, while he may not have pinpointed its location in the skull, Poe conceived of a mental region remote from ordinary consciousness and characterized by nonverbal forms of thought--specifically visual imagery, music, and emotion.He also understood that this region finds expression in dreams and in destructive urges.