Edgar Allen Poe's The Haunted Palace

Introduction

“The Haunted Palace" is a poem, a ballad. It was published in American Museum in April 1839. In September of the same year, it was published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine as part of "The Fall of the House of Usher," one of Poe's most famous short stories. In the story, mentally unstable Roderick Usher sings the ballad while playing a guitar.

Edgar Allen Poe's The Haunted Palace

The atmosphere of "The Haunted Palace" is at first idyllic, dreamlike, angelic. Then it becomes nightmarish. To create the idyllic atmosphere, Poe uses words and phrases such as greenest of our valleys, fair and stately, seraph, glorious, golden, gentle, sweet, and luminous. To create the nightmarish atmosphere, he uses words and phrases such as evil, robes of sorrow, mourn, desolate, dim-remembered, entombed, discordant, ghastly, and hideous. The 48-line poem was first released in the April 1839 issue of Nathan Brooks' American Museum magazine. It was eventually incorporated into "The Fall of the House of Usher" as a poem written by Roderick Usher. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a known rival of Poe's, claimed that Poe had plagiarized the poem from Henry Wadsworth Longfellow's "Beleaguered City." Poe denied that charge and suggested that Longfellow had, in fact, plagiarized from him. Nevertheless, "The Haunted Palace" was one of the poems highlighted in Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America, one of the first anthologies of American poetry in 1842. When the poem was reprinted by the New World in 1845, Charles Eames introduced it as exquisite. "We can hardly call to mind in the whole compass of American Poetry, a picture of more intense and glowing Ideality."

The poem provided the title for a Roger Corman film of the same name in 1963. The actual plot of Corman's film The Haunted Palace comes almost entirely from "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward", a short story by H. P. Lovecraft. By 1963, Corman had produced several highly lucrative films based on Poe's work, but Lovecraft was not at that time a well-known author; according to Corman on the DVD making-of featurette, the studio forced him to name this movie after one of Poe's poems (and included a Poe epigraph in the credits) so that audiences would believe it to be another film based on Poe's writings. French composer Florent Schmitt wrote an etude, Le palais hante, derived from "The Haunted Palace" in 1904.

It is describing a life ...