May 1978

The Clinical Significance of Poe’s Critics

by Lyndon LaRouche

[Print version of this article]

Editor’s Note: This is part one of a two-part article first published in New Solidarity, the newspaper of the LaRouche movement, Vol. 9, No. 24, May 23, 1978, and is provided to EIR courtesy of the LaRouche Legacy Foundation.

The most notable correlative of the treasonous spread of British-style liberalism among the so-called educated strata of the United States is that systematic destruction of the student’s mind which is accomplished by procedures widely esteemed as the hallmarks of scholarly practice. The direct connection between academic liberalism and the liberals’ propensity for treason is most efficiently and directly demonstrated by considering the mass of what passes for “accredited scholarly opinion” respecting the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).

I was struck by the efficiency of this connection in the course of my current participation, as a working advisor, in a project chiefly developed by Allen Salisbury and Pam Lowry. Salisbury, whose current specialized researches are focused on the American Federalist-Whig movement of the pre-1865 period, was agreeably startled to discover Poe among the important political collaborators of Henry C. Carey, John Quincy Adams, and others, and for this and other reasons undertook a work on Poe to follow his recently completed study of Carey. Pam Lowry is currently completing a key working paper on crucial phases of the overall undertaking. Salisbury drew me into the ongoing effort at various points, and more recently my duties in this connection have been increased—as the time approaches for settling some crucial matters of evaluation. It was in this latter connection that I was struck forcibly by the extraordinary usefulness of the Poe case for exposing most directly the enormity and treasonous implications of the corruption of current liberal arts notions of scholarly practice.

The point to be made is economically and adequately developed by laying before myself a recent edition: Stuart and Susan Levine, editors, The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1976). The collection published is, apart from the crucial defect of overlooking the poetical side of Poe, a representative offering for a reader who wishes to know that writer. Everything crucial about Poe’s outlook and method is represented. Excepting the preface and introduction, which tell us more about the editors than Poe, about half of the bits and pieces of the editing of the collection are useful, although the remainder, like the introductory material, are downright pathetic. In these features, the Levines’ work clinically exemplifies the miserable state of Poe scholarship generally, and also typifies the characteristic incompetence of liberal-arts scholarship on subjects generally.

As we have indicated, the vicious incompetence of Poe scholarship is extraordinarily relevant because of the direct connections between academic liberalism and the propensity for treason directly embodied in accredited misappreciations of Poe. Contrary to the broad features of the mythical Poe appreciations, Poe was not some egregious literary talent grafted onto the publishing and social circumstances of the first half of 19th-Century America. He and his work were an integral and prominent feature of the Whig counterintelligence effort concentrated against the anglophilic treason of that period. So integral are Poe and his writings to that aspect of the nation’s history, that the way in which an author distorts Poe is immediately a corresponding falsification of the most essential features of United States history, a falsification of the 1830-1849 period which has the most significant practical implications for the leading political issues of the present day.

It should be stressed at this point that the subject of this report is not Poe, but rather the issue of academic liberalism as a wellspring of potential treason characteristic of the self-designated “liberal,” “libertarian,” and “radical” minority within the United States. Essential facts concerning Poe are cited here to demonstrate empirically the inherent treasonability of liberalism, not to develop in full the Poe case as such.

Nonetheless, I emphasize a political portrait of Poe—as I am obliged to do according to the nature of the task as I have defined it above. There are certain features of Poe’s life and internal geometry of his mind which are so clear to me, so conclusively established by the evidence, that those aspects of my judgment on the matter are conclusive.

Yet, by the very fact of reaching those most essential conclusions, Salisbury, Lowry, and I have opened up exciting new dimensions of further investigation respecting the early 19th-Century Whig conspiracies and their international connections. What we are already in the process of discovering concerning Poe’s life would excite the pleasure of the Poe within his Dupin. It is already clear that the continuing filling-in of the jigsaw puzzle pieces opens up to us an entire new dimension of historical research into American life during the first half of the last century.

Although the broad conclusions are already conclusively established, the richness of what is in the process of being discovered on secondary matters is so great that we wait a bit longer before offering our definitive, more-elaborated view of Poe. In any case, even though I were disposed to push our working team toward immediate publication, I would not preempt that undertaking here, since Poe serves here as the means for efficiently developing the indicated point identified.

It should be added that there are two, complementary points of Poe for which I have unusual personal competencies. First, the political commitments of Poe, his dedication to anti-British counterintelligence on behalf of the most vital interest of the United States, is essentially identical with my own work. Second, despite the outward differences in our careers, there are remarkable similarities in our internal intellectual history, the same Neoplatonic sense of the unity of poetry and mathematics which dominated my life into the 1952-1954 period, and upon which preoccupation my later developments were premised.

I am consequently enabled to echo a reliable approximation of Poe’s thinking within myself, and am not astonished that his methodological approach to many topics, including that of poetry, is almost identical with the process of development of my own youthful convictions. The application of that point of view to a task agreeable to its nature, to counterintelligence efforts against anglophile treason among U.S. liberals and radicals, draws me immediately to the inside of Poe’s work at the most crucial points—just as Poe himself prescribed the task of getting inside the mind of another in “The Purloined Letter” and other locations.

Where I disagree with Poe, I have fought out the same methodological issues and related judgments during my adolescence and young adulthood, and also with reference to the standpoint of Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz and Leibniz’s allies. If I differ with Poe on various specific matters of this sort, the difference is between two persons of the same species of spirit. In some respects, it must be added, my own significant advantages over Poe involve the fact that I am now 55 years of age, whereas he was cut off, most probably murdered, at the age of 40. These advantages also reflect my good fortune in developing the position I currently enjoy, intellectual and related resources far beyond anything Poe was provided in his time.

Poe of the Whig Central Intelligence Agency

When the treasonous work of neo-Fabian Morton Halperin has been undone, and the reforms of the CIA and FBI I have proposed implemented, a competent presentation of Edgar Allan Poe will be of special importance within the CIA and the FBI counter-intelligence detachment. There is nothing wrong in the use of appropriate hero-models for reference in the self-development efforts toward adult maturity by the young, and for strengthening the historical moral sense of place among the dedicated professionals of important institutions. I am not much for fetishes, but it would be fair and useful to hang portraits of Poe in the proper sort of public locations in CIA and FBI offices.

Early in the course of my discussions of Poe with Allen Salisbury, I found myself voicing the concept that sprang forcibly into my mind: Poe was certainly some sort of intelligence operative working at a high level in the U.S. interest. Salisbury replied with some facts which coincided with that judgment. The hypothesis soon gained the quality of a certainty. The basis for the original hypothesis was that there are outstanding features of Poe’s work, including his selection of adversaries, which could not have prevailed as they did unless Poe were governing his post-1831 literary efforts by overriding intelligence-professional concerns. On this basis, I proposed that further investigations concentrate on the circumstances surrounding Poe’s separation from West Point, to the purpose of determining the nature of the official or private form of the intelligence organization for which Poe was in fact a leading operative.

Poe was the grandson of a Revolutionary War officer politically close to Lafayette. The orphaned Poe left an unsatisfying University of Virginia, and joined the U.S. Army as an enlisted man during the same year his first collection of poetry was published. Reaching the rank of sergeant-major in approximately two years, Poe left the Army for appointment to West Point. At first, his career at West Point proceeded as Poe’s precocious intellectual prowess and enlisted-service record portended. Then, abruptly, ostensibly (in terms of facts known to date) by his own arrangement, Poe secured a court-martial discharge from the academy for cause of alleged inattention to his studies.

Despite the court-martial, Poe suffers none of the disgrace the separation might have suggested among either his fellow cadets or among leading Federalist-Whig circles associated with the leadership (at the time) of John Quincy Adams. Rather, his writings of that period are rather sophisticated counterintelligence work on behalf of the United States against the anglophilic treason running rampant under conditions of the Presidency of Andrew Jackson.

Although the quality of Poe’s work develops, there is an unbroken continuity—backwards and forwards—in the political counterintelligence character of his literary work from his departure from the academy until his death. The included element of mystery (which we have so far not adequately resolved to the best of my judgment) is that the West Point under Thayer was a hotbed of Federalist-Whig Neoplatonist republicanism, a principal center of patriotic resistance to every treasonable and scalawag impulse which dominated Martin Van Buren and Van Buren’s puppet Jackson. Poe’s counterintelligence work profoundly represents the essential world outlook and Neoplatonist literary predicates of Thayer’s West Point prior to the Jackson wrecking operation.

However Poe’s separation from West Point is later shown to fit into the overall picture, there is no doubt that his later career was governed by his professional commitment to the role of a leading anti-British U.S. counterintelligence operative. It is also beyond the slightest doubt that Poe’s most prominent superior in the intelligence organization of which he was a part was former President John Quincy Adams, and that this organization—modeled upon the Federalist Junto of Franklin and the Cincinnatus Association—was the kernel of the Whig organization of which President Abraham Lincoln was also a part.

The case of the assassinations of three U.S. Presidents—Lincoln, Garfield, and McKinley—is directly related to the case of Poe.

Although the relevant War Department records of the attempted and actual assassinations of Abraham Lincoln are not available to the present day, the evidence in hand demonstrates conclusively that the British Secret Intelligence Service assassinated Lincoln, and that the U.S. accomplices in the plot were coordinated not from Washington or the defeated Confederacy, but by way of Canada and the Manhattan Democratic Party machine, with Manhattan-centered inside-Republican (and Administration) complicity. In the case of McKinley’s assassination, we have British SIS red-handed in the person of the assassin, with the Manhattan Henry Street Settlement House complicit in the affair. The case of Garfield points circumstantially to the British SIS. In Lincoln’s case, August Belmont is the key British agent, as well as the Booth deployed through London and Canada for the deed. In McKinley’s case, it was the anglophile liberal Republicans who picked up the immediate advantage, and the element of the Democratic Party associated with Woodrow Wilson and Walter Lippmann which more blatantly represented the forces of anglophile treason.

In each of these three assassinations of U.S. Presidents, the victim was a focal point for policies in defense of the most vital interests of the United States against a directly contrary British policy. In each case, the assassination brought about a change in policy, in which U.S. interests were abandoned in favor of the policies previously demanded by the British. If President Jimmy Carter were assassinated under circumstances such as the present policies of the London press and treasonous Washington Post suggest, and if a President Walter Mondale brought the Institute for Policy Studies and Americans for Democratic Action crew into full anglophile control of U.S. government policies, that assassination of President Carter would represent a fresh SIS murder of an American President continuing the pattern of the previous SIS assassinations of Lincoln, McKinley, and (probably) Garfield. (If SIS did not murder Garfield, the killing by some other party was a most extraordinary coincidence.)

In Lincoln’s case, the murder of Lincoln was directed by the British to the purpose of decapitating the Whig network, the same Whig anti-British network of which Poe, Carey, Clay, and John Quincy Adams had been prominent parts. The effect of the Garfield and McKinley assassinations more or less completed that process. In each assassination, the anglophilic faction of the Republican Party took over from the forces associated with the victim. The McKinley assassination placed the nation at the mercy of anglophile Teddy Roosevelt, and cleared the decks for the treasonous influences of such creatures as William James, Frederick Jackson Turner, Charles Beard, John Dewey, Colonel House, Bernard Baruch, Samuel Gompers, Victor Berger, Walter Lippmann, and the Minnesota-Wisconsin-centered populist form of anglophile liberal “progressivism.” The United States was left to be most prominently defended by a Senator [William Edgar] Borah.

Poe’s literary work was focussed principally against three points of the anti-American SIS operation. Inside the United States, Poe focussed against the two principal centers of treason, the New England Transcendentalists and the Manhattan scalawag political machine of Martin Van Buren. Abroad his chief target was, appropriately, Edinburgh, the SIS network operating under the cover of Walter Scott’s Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s Magazine. All of the slanders against Poe, all those issues which ignorant scholars, such as the Levines, attempt to trace to personal grudges or Poe’s defects of character, were reflections of the fact that a bitter, if semi-covert, intelligence warfare is the key to all the conflicts between Poe and his principal adversaries.

Poe the Philosopher

The Levines purport to explain the (nonexistent) occultism of Poe’s outlook by situating Poe among the 19th-Century romantics, just as with similar incompetence and irrationality they equate Poe’s contempt for Benthamite “Democracy” with anti-Republicanism. (They argue such latter drivel, apparently oblivious of the fact that they themselves are elsewhere occupied in reporting Poe’s profound hostility to aristocratic social strata and outlooks.)

Immediately following Poe’s death, an anglophile agent, publisher Rufus Griswold, secured control over his literary remains, and employed that advantage to manufacture by outright fraud the image of Poe one might associate with macabre roles of the actor Vincent Price. This Griswold hoax was easily discredited, as soon as anyone took the pains to attempt to discredit it: the sheer mass of work reflected in Poe’s literary productions leaves no time for opium or alcoholism. Even the sheer extent of his literary production would dispel the Vincent Price version of Poe. Once one probes the writings for the mass of workmanship embedded in them, the only notable self-abuse which might be attributed to him is a shortage of time left for sleep.

In any case, the old witch’s tale of the opium-eater was pretty much discredited in all professedly scholarly circles by early during the present century, even in Britain.

However, in the process of throwing overboard one indefensible slander against Poe, the anglophile liberals substituted emphasis upon another: Poe the “romantic occultist” of regrettable grudges and personal disposition generally. Today, this second fraud generally adopts the models of hoaxes against Plato and the Neoplatonists associated with SIS executive Gilbert Murray and such notorious frauds as [F.M.] Cornford. The same thesis of Neoplatonism-equals-occultism-and-mysticism is, of course, the fraudulent line associated with the Warburg Institute. The Levines credulously parrot this anglophile hoax.

The charge of “romanticism” against Poe is 180 degrees out of phase. Romanticism was organized as a movement in literature, poetry, music, and politics as an operation coordinated by the Edinburgh Review and the Review’s leading figure, the hoaxster Sir Walter Scott. The kernel of the romantic movement of the 19th Century was Scott’s Ossian cult, which portrayed the British royal family as descended from Wotan and Frigga. The Thule and Odin cults of Germany and Austria, which produced, among other notables, Adolf Hitler and Nazi Culture Minister [Alfred] Rosenberg, were subsequent outgrowths of this SIS project.

The most notorious continental center for perpetrating the hoax of romanticism was the salon of SIS agent Madame de Staël in Geneva, and the circles of [Alphonse de] Lamartine in France. This romantic ferment later developed, under SIS guidance, into impressionism and surrealism, with surrealism and various forms of “neo-realisms” (e.g., “naturalism”) dominant as the main stem of this degenerating romanticist root during the present century.

There is a complication in 19th-Century romantic figures, an ambiguity determined most immediately by the fact that romanticism was a superimposed fad, not an internal outgrowth of cultural ferment. The more credible of the romantic poets, for example, represent for the critics, as they did for Poe, a picture of a conflict between artistic impulses and the effort to adapt artistic skills to the standards of romantic-fad influences. Poe’s wrestling with his criticisms of Tennyson and [Richard Henry] Horne are exemplary of this problem of ambiguity as Poe viewed it. Shelley’s view of Wordsworth’s degenerations is a comparable instance.

Poe’s line of thought on poetical and prose composition, a line of thought corroborated in a special way by the case of “The Raven,” is to my view inadequate, but is essentially on the proper track, and axiomatically anti-romantic.

To term Poe a romantic deserves flunking grades for the case of a high-school sophomore. Since Poe’s most embittered conflicts in artistic and related matters were with the Edinburgh SIS cabal and its New England Transcendentalist branch (Longfellow, Emerson), and the reciprocated hostilities centered on the axiomatics of Edinburgh romanticism, to call Poe a romanticist is rather more extreme a blunder than terming Adolf Hitler a Zionist—in a certain perverse aspect of their policy, prior to 1943, the Nazis, like the Romanian Iron Guard, were in favor of Zionism.

Not only was Poe a Neoplatonic, but his included achievement as a writer was the facility with which he articulated the issues and principles of Neoplatonic scientific method for the literate popular-magazine audiences of this time. His detective stories, notably the “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Case of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” are brilliant popularizations of the differences in method expressed by Socratic, Aristotelian, and Baconian methods. His concern was to demonstrate the efficiency of lawful principles of hypothesis standing outside the inferior methods of the Kantian understanding and British empiricism—to which latter he ascribes the name of hoggism (Baconian method), and dubs it otherwise the method of hoggish crawling, inferior to the Aristotelian method, creeping. Kant Poe refers to insightfully as “cant.” His detective stories select two ideal and one actual case in which a predictably successful path of analysis exists for cases in which both ordinary deduction and empiricist induction fail. This is associated with an insightful and exceptionally sophisticated critique of the limits of Laplace’s calculus of probabilities.

This same occupation with demonstrating scientific method for formulating hypotheses permeates most of his writing in one way or another, his presentation of the method of composition used for “The Raven” one of the most important. In the case of “The Raven,” he invented a successful new form of poetry to demonstrate how identifiable principles of musical-like composition and development properly governed the production of an artistic effect. (The similarities of Poe’s and Beethoven’s methods of composition are significant enough to be notable.) In his “Eureka,” he attempts to sum up these principles of “scientific guessing.”

It is stunning but not surprising that Poe’s notion of scientific method should be essentially identical with that of G.B. Riemann and the transfinite notions of Georg Cantor. All three shared a common direct debt to the work of Gottfried Leibniz, in which these issues of scientific method are developed to the point of ripeness for the relativistic physics of Riemann. Poe emphasizes, for example, that the equation

x² + px = q

may not always hold, even though it previously appears to have been proven for the overwhelming number of ordinary cases.[fn_1] This is not Heisenberg-like irrationalism, not some Stoic derivation. It is the principle otherwise associated with Riemann, that at the extremities of a physical function there arise crucial phenomena which not only violate the ordinary rule for that function, but in which crucial exceptions are the access to higher manifolds of physical reality, higher orders of human knowledge of physical reality. This is otherwise very modern high-temperature plasma physics.

It is this scientific rigor in Poe which the Levines identify as part of the alleged occultism of Poe, parroting the “secondary authorities” before which they genuflect in this fashion. Such “occultism” is nothing but that of which the Stone Age savage accuses the geologist seeking “ore.”

The other presumed basis for the charge of occultism is Poe’s psychological excursions. Poe, a counterintelligence specialist occupied with detecting and neutralizing British intellectual subversion operations, frequently sets forth his rule-of-thumb method for penetrating the mind of his adversaries. His discussion of whist-play, which he prefers over chess chiefly for reason of the latitude for psychological warfare, is one illustration of this. His passion for parodying the forms and styles of his adversaries (in particular), the dominant formal feature of his satirical works, also reflects this preoccupation with getting under the skin and into the mind of his adversaries and their dupes. The case of “The Raven,” already cited, is a masterpiece of such specialized aspects of psychology and psychological warfare.

In all the various aspects of Poe’s fascination with mastering and explicating matters of method, Poe is both extraordinarily learned as well as an avid and successfully original experimenter. His mastery of scientific method is far more learned as well as far more rigorous than that available to most graduate physics students today.

To be continued.

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[fn_1] In “The Purloined Letter,” C. Auguste Dupin argues that “In short, I never yet encountered the mere mathematician who could be trusted out of equal roots, or one who did not clandestinely hold it as a point of his faith that x² + px was absolutely and unconditionally equal to q. Say to one of these gentlemen, by way of experiment, if you please, that you believe occasions may occur where x² + px is not altogether equal to q, and, having made him understand what you mean, get out of his reach as speedily as convenient, for, beyond doubt, he will endeavor to knock you down. [back to text for fn_1]