gment can be preemptory; yet Poe's system of mind deserves our efforts to comprehend his system. Certainly Poe recognized the lure of alcohol; yet he chose to examine the primitive cause for the urge, rather than submit to the prescriptions of the moralists of his time. So let us, too, seek to discern Poe's intentions. And what of this flailing narrator who possesses seemingly so little command of his life? He knows that he has violated his own vitality by removing Pluto's eye, and by later hanging the cat in the tree. He displays regret for his actions, a conscience. But what can his conscience constitute in Poe's system of morality? And for that matter, what is morality when one leaves Gods intention for man out of the picture? Poes pervesity is taken further with his story "The Imp of the Perverse" opens in the style of an essay, describing "the prima mobilia of the human soul," a propensity which has been ignored by phrenologists and moralists, "although obviously existing as a radical, primitive, irreducible sentiment." (Poe 271) The sentiment thus described as "perverseness is subsequently delineated in three examples: The first involves a speaker's tantalizing an audience by circumlocution, fully aware that he displeases, and though intending to please, he opts to indulge the "uncontrollable longing" to displease. (272-73) After its July, 1945 publication of "The Imp...," Poe spoke to open the Lyceum season on October 16. One cannot help wondering whether Poe's self-effacing introduction and his reading of the whole of "Al Aaraaf" to an audience of Bostonians did not represent enactment of this episode from his story. (Silverman 267) The second example is much like that of the graduate student cited earlier. Procrastination as an agency of the perverse also seems to have plagued Poe before the Lyceum reading, since he had promised to read a new poem, which he never wrote, then disappointed with the lengthy and unsuccessful poe...
