Page:Edgar Allan Poe - how to know him.djvu/265

 THE WRITER OF SHORT STORIES 245 �II �The two stories that follow represent respectively the A type and the B type. To the prospective writer of short stories as well as to the general reader, a study of Poe's two structural routes climbing to a common peak of effect will prove a constant quicken- ing and enlargement of narrative power. �LIGEIA (1838) �And the will therein lieth, which dieth not. Who know- eth the mysteries of the will, with its vigor? For God is but a great will pervading all things by nature of its intentness. ,Man doth not yield himself to the angels, nor unto death utterly, save only through the weakness of his feeble will. JOSEPH GLANVILL. �[The text is found in the introductory quotation from Joseph Glanvill. Charles F. Richardson, in the Arnheim Edition of Poe, says: "The limner -of death [Poe] was what he was because he insisted that death must yield to the forceful self-assertion of a quenchless soul ... In one thing his name must rank high in the spiritual movements of his time and of all time : his insistence upon the earned perpetuity of personal assertion. The individual will live because it wills to live; that is his gospel from first to last." It is cer- tainly his gospel in Ligeia and its prototype, Morelld ( : 835). These two stories make an interesting com- parative study, both developing the same theme of will victorious over death and both being perfect examples of the A type of structure. Philip Pendleton Cooke wrote Poe that Ligeia would have been a better story if the reader had been made more gradually aware of the change from Rowena to Ligeia and "if Rowena's bodily form had been retained as a shell or case for ��� �