The undiscovered country from whose bourn some travelers do return. The final frontier in Poe and Dickinson

Resumen

This essay offers, to begin with, a discussion of Poe’s short story, “MS. Found in a Bottle”, as a quintessential American representation of the Romantic notion that death is the source of all imagination and, consequently, of all forms of artistic expression. It also posits that the model set forth in this story looks forward to later developments, such as the discipline of depth psychology and the absurd novels of Kafka and Beckett. From that point, it discusses how the various issues Poe broaches, i.e., the application of the idea of the frontier to the boundary between reason and irrationality, language and silence and, finally, life and death, can be seen reflected in the Modernist poetry of Stevens and Eliot. And finally, it offers a reading of several of Emily Dickinson’s poems on death (Nos 160, 280, 449, 712 and 822) as later variations on this same very complex American, and Romantic, theme.