In symbolic terms this contrast pits Muhammad, the Oriental figure, who, like
Israfel, represents imaginative excellence, against Metzengerstein, who abandons his inheritance and devotes himself to crushing 'the Orient' in the person of Berlifitzing.
Moreover, the parody also takes many stabs at academic egocentrism, authorial control, and cryptic analyses manifested by the story's imaginary
Israfel Society, dedicated solely to the serious study and often convoluted interpretation of Poe's fiction.
Charlotte Purkis, a scholar of dance and performance arts across cultures, earns my personal thanks for introducing me to another critic, one who wrote as
Israfel Mondego, in her "'You Might Have Called It Beauty or Poetry or Passion Just As Well As Music': Gertrude Hudson's Fictional Fantasias." Hudson also revealed a "drive towards a performative kind of writing" as her quasi-fictional commentaries on music in Impossibilities: Fantasias (1897) and later writings showed.
(18) Hervey Allen,
Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1934), p.
of Hervey Allen's
Israfel in 1927 would have led him back to
At line 76, struggling out of this sordidness, the poet/Alexander climbs to the top of the mountain at the end of the world and sees
Israfel, the archangel, readying his trumpet to announce the end of time.
That same year his authoritative biography
Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe was published.