The Haunted Palace by Edgar Allan Poe

The last poem printed in Weird Tales in 1925 was "The Haunted Palace" by Edgar Allan Poe. It first appeared in a magazine published in Baltimore by Nathan C. Brooks (1809-1898). The original title of the magazine was The North American Quarterly. In or about 1838, Brooks renamed his new charge The American Museum of Science, Literature and the Arts, or The American Museum for short. Evidently, the magazine was also referred to as the Baltimore Museum. That's a lot to go through, but it seems like there is a lack of clarity and precision out there on the Internet as to the original source of "The Haunted Palace." The date of publication by the way was April 1839.

Poe soon incorporated "The Haunted Palace" into his short story "The Fall of the House of Usher," first published in Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in September 1839. "The Haunted Palace" is a poem in six stanzas of eight lines each. In "The Fall of the House of Usher," the stanzas are numbered. In Weird Tales, they are not. Without going through these two versions, I can't say whether they are word for word the same.

I have written before about "The Haunted Palace." First I listed it in Poe's works reprinted in Weird Tales. In writing about Charles Beaumont (1929-1967), I listed some of that author's screen adaptations of other works. These included the screenplay for The Haunted Palace (1963), which is actually an adaptation of "The Case of Charles Dexter Ward" by H.P. Lovecraft (Weird Tales, May-July 1941).

In 2021, I wrote about Les Baxter (1922-1996). Baxter wrote the scores for many Hollywood movies, including The Dunwich Horror, from 1970. Inasmuch as The Haunted Palace was the first film adapted from a work by Lovecraft, the composer of that score, Ronald Stein (1930-1988), should probably get credit for the first recorded musical adaptation of a work by Lovecraft, assuming a movie score is a kind of program music and therefore an adaptation. Prior to that, I had written about what I called "The Other Forms of Lovecraft," listing The Haunted Palace as the first adaptation on film of a work by Lovecraft.

That's a lot about Lovecraft and less about Poe. I'll close by letting you know that, according to Wikipedia, "The Haunted Palace" has been adapted to music four times, first in 1904 by French composer Florent Schmitt (1870-1958).

The cover of an album of musical works based on two stories and a poem by Edgar Allan Poe, including Florent Schmitt's symphonic poem Le Palais hanté, Op. 49, based on "The Haunted Palace" by Poe. I have this image from a very thorough blog entry called "Florent Schmitt and the French Fascination with Edgar Allan Poe: Le Palais hanté (1904)" by Phillip Nones, posted on December 10, 2012, here. Thank you to Mr. Nones and the conductor(s) of that blog. This is the kind of thing the Internet was supposed to be instead of what it is.

 

Text copyright 2025 Terence E. Hanley