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The Jingle Man

© Linda Sue Grimes

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, and died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore. His literary infuence has been noted world wide. He excelled as a literary critic, and his short stories are credited with beginning the genre of detective fiction, as he is hailed as the father of mystery writing.

Because of the abundance of rime, Edgar Allan Poe was labeled by his contemporaries as "The Jingle Man." It was probably Ralph Waldo Emerson who first applied that term to Poe, but Walt Whitman also felt that Poe overused rime. His poem, "The Bells," is, no doubt, the one piece of work that is responsible for the jingle man appellation; listen to the first stanza:

Hear the sledges with the bells -
Silver bells!
What a world of merriment their melody foretells!
How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,
In the icy air of night!
While the stars that oversprinkle
All the heavens, seem to twinkle
With a crystalline delight;
Keeping time, time, time,
In a sort of Runic rhyme,
To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells
From the bells, bells, bells, bells,
Bells, bells, bells -
From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.

(Read the entire poem "The Bells")

But in most cases, it takes a long time for a literary reputation to be established. Although Poe's merit as a writer was debated in his own day, and still is in some quarters today, he has definitely taken his place as a writer of mystery. His short stories "The Gold Bug," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter" influenced the mystery genre, and some credit Poe as the inventor of detective fiction. Poe, like Thomas Hardy, considered himself primarily a poet and preferred writing poetry, but he found that he could make money writing prose, so, as Thomas Hardy turned to writing novels, Poe turned to writing short stories, and they both were able to bring in some income with their prose writing.

Poe also wrote essays literary criticism, and his "The Philosophy of Composition" reveals his favorite subject, or at least, the subject he considers most poetic: "the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world." This reasoning certainly helps account for his predilection for melancholy of the sort we find in "The Raven."

Despite Poe's reputation as the father of detective or mystery fiction, I suggest that to experience the real Poe, we have to experience his poetry and when we do, we have to admit that he was much more than his contemporaries saw; he was much more profound than a mere "jingle man."

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