Edgar Allan Poe and the landscape garden: between picturesque and sublime

Abstract

In 1836, Ralph Waldo Emerson published Nature, in 1845 his favourite disciple Henry David Thoreau began a retreat of "two years, two months, two days" in the woods of Massachusetts, an experience recounted in his influential work Walden (1854). In 1845 the first volume of Alexander von Humboldt's Cosmos also appeared. In the same period, during the last decade of his life (1840-1850), Poe published four short stories – The Island of the Fay, Morning on the Wissahiccon, The Domain of Arnheim and Landor’s Cottage –, a short article entitled Philosophy of Furniture and a cosmogonic essay, Eureka. The relevance of these writings lies not only in the literary stature of their author, which guaranteed their subsequent dissemination and impact, but also in the modernity of Poe's thought at a key moment in the formation of the nascent American landscaping and the renewed vision of the new continent and its overflowing and intact nature as a promising Eden for the American Adam.