Revered as one of the key figures of the American Romantic movement, Poe was also a pioneer of the American short story, with poetry, suspense and thriller novels most prestigious, full of imagination and mysterious talent, became a banner of Gothic literature, an eternal black soul. The "fifth element" was proposed by Aristotle, symbolizing the moon and the world above the moon, quiet, beautiful, noble, and an important source of gothicism, closely related to Allan Poe.
The "fifth element" is an ancient philosophical concept dating back to the time of Aristotle. Aristotle believed that the earth was the center of the entire universe. On the outside of the earth, wrapped in layers of celestial spheres, the sun, moon and stars are each attached to different celestial spheres and operate in circular orbits— the circle is the noblest shape, flawless. The world below the moon is composed of four elements, wind, water, fire, and earth, and there is life and death, and it will only do low-level linear movements, which is the world of matter; however, above the moon, the world is composed of the fifth element, eternal and eternal, doing a noble circular movement, which is a "poetic world." Today, no one believes in Aristotle's beautiful, illusory universe — there is no fifth element at all! The position of the earth in the universe is also becoming more and more insignificant, not to mention the small human beings on this small earth. The history of science rejoiced and celebrated the progress of science, literature shifted its direction, its gaze toward deconstruction and meaninglessness, and even philosophy abandoned the study of such questions, and modern philosophy focused on mathematical logic, striving to find explanations and answers to modern science in the direction opened up by Russell and Wittgenstein.
However, one poet in history, Edgar Allan Poe, what Benjamin called the "lyric poet of the age of advanced capitalism," remained deeply fascinated by the mysterious universe of ancient Greek philosophers. Classical pastorals, classical poetry, classical love, classical moon, pure and untainted platonic love that existed only in ancient times. He believed that it was the most perfect world that the human imagination could reach, a poetic place, and he hated the disenchantment of modern science, and resolutely refused to let that ancient mysterious world completely erase, disappear, and disappear from people's hearts.
Let's look at a fragment of a sonnet (ending):
Didn't you pull Diana, the god of the moon, off the carriage?
He also gave the tree god who lived and died with the tree in which he dwelled
Driven out of the jungle? Is not you
Drive the fairies out of the turbulence,
and drove away the elves on the grass,
And my dreams under the tamarind tree?
This is Poe's sonnet dedicated to science, and the form of "sonnet" itself contains a great and deeply ironic conflict.
Sonnets are traditional grammatical styles that prevailed in the time of Shakespeare and Petrarch, the golden age of classicalism, and their place in English poetry is equivalent to that of the Seven Laws in China. Sonnets have almost harsh requirements for the rhythm of poetry, and they belong to antiquity. The poetic form of the sonnet itself expresses an attitude, a position: I, who am on the side of the classical, I, endorsing the classical, no matter how advanced and powerful modern science is, can beat the classical pastoral and poetic invulnerable, but my heart and emotions are always tilted towards the balance of the classical side, and I am deeply fascinated and loved the classical.
Poe deliberately adopts the classical sonnet form, like the ancients chanting in the Acropolis of Athens or the vines of Samos today, infinitely reminiscent of the Arcadia-style pastoral era. Plato classifies poets and wizards in the Ian of Ian, and treats poetry and myth as one country—yes, poetry is given to the earth by the gods, the sun-like golden god Apollo blows a delicate flute, the feathered foot of Pegasus splashes the blood of the gorgon sisters, and the evergreen spring water is taken by a silver cup and drunk by the poet, so there is poetry, and the poetry itself is of the same origin as mythology. Science seems to be the mortal enemy of wizards and poets, and the development of modern science may always be accompanied by the gradual death of gods, the gradual dissolution of myths, and the poets are increasingly unable to find their own destination.
There will always be people who are reluctant to find new myths, just as Nietzsche saw in Wagner's operas the birth of new myths, the great Valkyrie cycling parade, the grandeur of the New Age. Poe's concern, however, is by no means science itself. You know, he was a brilliant man, an extremely well-rounded genius, good at inference and speculation, quick thinking, meticulous logic, and the originator of speculative literature, the idol of Conan Doyle. Poe is not an overly emotional person (even looking down on the lyric poet in the traditional sense, scorned for his mental inferiority), never likes the impassioned speech and the surging emotional carol, does not despise the use of heroic rhymes to write love adventure stories one after another, disdains to hold up a fiery quill pen to chant the eyebrows and lips of the lover in turn, and disdains to pile up thousands of industrialized roses for the lover. Edgar Allan Poe did not abhor science per se, but the near-insane material civilization that modern science flaunted. He stretched out his hand in vain, vowing to keep the classical pastoral, the poetry, the love, and the moon, but found that they were like the sand between his fingers, disappearing rapidly, and could no longer be held, could not be held tightly.
When he was cornered, he remembered aristotle's fifth element, and he was willing to be a creature composed of the fifth element, with the beloved woman as the center of the circle, surrounded by life, and drawn his arc according to the noble nature of the fifth element, never converging, never aging, never extinguishing, never withering.
"Here, under the wasteland, the most unhappy souls of the New World are buried, the originators of detective stories, the bridges from romance to symbolism, the trembling of Germany, the clarity of France, the plagues of hell, the diseases of genius, the pain of life, the depression after death, the purest fear, the most cruel beauty... A hundred years later, the spirit scattered and died, and he had become the grass of spring, the corpse maggot under the grass. Yu Guangzhong wrote in "Black Souls" that he stood in front of Po's tomb, facing these five feet and three inches, facing this one hundred and fifteen pounds, and perhaps remembered a black soul wet by the ghost rain of late autumn, and the moon.