Landor's Cottage

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The north wing, I now saw, was a bed-chamber: its door opened into the parlor. West of this door was a single window, looking towards the brook. At the west end of the parlor, were a fire-place, and a door leading into the west wing—probably a kitchen. As it came fully into view—thus gradually as I describe it—piece by piece, here a tree, there a glimpse of water, and here again the summit of a chimney, I could scarcely help fancying that the whole was one of the ingenious illusions sometimes exhibited under the name of "vanishing pictures." Presenta una historia bastante mala y nada atrayente, ni siquiera existe un propósito, cosa que queda evidenciada con el final. Final que, si se los incluí, es porque hay ediciones (incluso en inglés) que le recortan una gran parte a esta conclusión y carece de sentido si no se le conoce íntegramente. Of course, the natural setting is long gone. Instead of apple orchards, the cottage is now surrounded on all sides by wide, multi-lane streets and tall apartment buildings like a rural oasis in the middle of a concrete ocean. It is the only surviving residential from old Fordham and a testament to preservation - not only of Poe’s history, but of New York’s history. Sometimes, for a few brief seconds when car horns quiet and traffic stops and the wind carries the sound of the bells bells bells bells of nearby Fordham University Church, you can imagine this place as it was during Poe’s life, a quiet respite from the city.

The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage". The Bronx County Historical Society. Archived from the original on May 10, 2008 . Retrieved March 17, 2008. The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it—the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the widely projecting eave these steps gave access to a door leading into the garret, or rather loft—for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store-room.What to make of all this, of course I knew not. Here was art undoubtedly — thatdid not surprise me — all roads, in the ordinary sense, are works of art; nor can I say that there was much to wonder at in the mere excessof art manifested; all that seemed to have been done, might have been done here— with such natural ‘capabilities’ (as they have it in the books on Landscape Gardening) — with very little labor and expense. No; it was not the amount but the characterof the art which caused me to take a seat on one of the blossomy stones and gaze up and down this fairy-like avenue for half an hour or more in bewildered admiration. One thing became more and more evident the longer I gazed: an artist, and one with a most scrupulous eye for form, had superintended all these arrangements. The greatest care had been taken to preserve a due medium between the neat and graceful on the one hand, and the pittoresque, in the true sense of the Italian term, on the other. There were few straight, and no long uninterrupted lines. The same effect of curvature or of color, appeared twice, usually, but not oftener, at any one point of view. Everywhere was variety in uniformity. It was a piece of ‘composition,’ in which the most fastidiously critical taste could scarcely have suggested an emendation. The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it—the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the widely projecting eave these steps gave access to a door leading to the garret, or rather loft—for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store–room.

Vandalism continued to occur over the next few years, [34] though it tapered off by the end of the following decade, becoming less of a risk [35] due in part to the increased use of live-in caretakers. In the late 1990s, the cottage was under the care of a graduate student in philology who lived in the basement. [36] The blank wall of the eastern gable was relieved by stairs (with a balustrade) running diagonally across it -- the ascent being from the south. Under cover of the widely projecting eave these steps gave access to a door leading to the garret, or rather loft -- for it was lighted only by a single window to the north, and seemed to have been intended as a store-room. For The System of Landor’s Cottage, Graham was inspired by the novels of the French writer Raymond Roussel (1877–1933), whose complex texts, which play with systems of language, were favoured by the surrealists. Graham’s narrative extends Poe’s with a series of stories within stories in the spirit of Roussel (Russell Ferguson, ‘«French Novelist»’ in Rodney Graham, exhibition catalogue, Whitechapel Art Gallery, London 2002, p.59). The artist has explained: ‘I have tried to make (my) text from pre-fabricated textual elements, and through a kind of ready-made rhetorical style – somewhat flat and rigid – with the hope that by means of a stress on grammatical and rhetorical “rigor” I might erect a hollow structure in the shape of a novel out of sentences of maximum structural integrity’ (quoted in Rodney Graham, 1988, p.7). The north wing, I now saw, was a bed-chamber: its door opened into the parlor. West of this door was a single window, looking towards the brook. At the west end of the parlor, were a fire-place, and a door leading into the west wing — probably a kitchen.

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a b Phillips, Mary E. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man. Volume II. Chicago: The John C. Winston Co., 1926: 1115.