ABSTRACT
In 1839 there appeared in the Baltimore Book a brief prose work by Edgar Allan Poe. Its title was "Silence—A Fable." If in "Silence—A Fable" Poe constructs an opposition between a bearable audible desolation and an unbearable silent desolation, in "Sonnet—Silence" he contrasts two kinds of silence. They are the silence of the dead, which is harmless, and the silence of the absolutely nonhuman, which is ultimate horror. The exclusion of the necessity of human presence makes silence especially terrible for Poe. For Herman Melville, silence is the all-but-transparent mask of truth. Yet it is important that when Henry James and other realists do occasionally represent the condition of silence the experiencing of silence is sometimes felt as a valid, if provisional, alternative to the fundamental assumption of realism itself. In his Education, Henry Adams also writes of the periodic need for withdrawal from the world to silence.
