The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America, as Emerson's sneering quip about "The Jingle Man" testifies. That these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and especially France—notably Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry—has been further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold reassessment of Poe's achievement, arguing that he belongs with Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson's dim view of Poe's verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made its first appearance in Poe's work. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The ethical and political significance of Poe's work follows from what the poet takes as his great subject: the reader. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe takes its own readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe's verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics.
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The American poet and critic E. C. Stedman once asked Swinburne to give a brief account of himself. Swinburne replied that “knowing as you do the dates and sequence of my published books you know every event of my life.”1 In fact of course a biography of Swinburne’s life would hold anyone’s interest, though its gravitational field will always be his remarkable literary and cultural career. Poe’s life, however, is different—as is clear from the unabating flood of biographical work, popular and scholarly, that keeps trying to wrestle it to earth.
Poe’s writings are deeply meshed with his life—more meshed even than Swinburne’s, for the brilliant English poet did not spend himself, as Poe did, working in literary trenches, and often in trench warfare. Swinburne fought at Salamis, Poe at Verdun. Poe’s life is thus fraught with misery and a chaos of misfortune, more painful exactly because so relentlessly quotidian. As such, his life throws up obstacles to a clear view of the work and its significance, which is very great—as even Eliot was reluctantly forced to insist.2
And yet the life, taxed and agitated though it was, must be brought to bear. But if we want a clear view of the work rather than the man—and in particular, of the poetry, which is the focus of this book—we need to step back from the clamor of Poe’s driven American world, so energetic and sordid, bound for hope and glory and everywhere bound as well by illusions, lies, betrayals, and self-betrayals.
I say “step back” not to set those matters aside nor to discount their importance, however, as the last section of this study shows.3 I want to step back to gain a critical perspective that might escape strangulation by the various narratives that have been laid over that legend-laden life. Poe’s work, like his life, does not shape itself to that critical form so much in current vogue, a “trajectory.” Even his death was, in narrative terms, incoherent.4 Indeed, biography struggles with his “career” because Poe’s life is so bizarre, at once driven and helplessly disordered. Few poets’ lives are as painful to read as Poe’s.
Those life conditions make a clear view of Poe’s work very difficult. The explanatory frameworks that biographers pursue—the many myths of Poe’s life—are efforts to discover an order in the extreme disorder of his life and world. In doing this they distract us from the work itself. What is far worse, however, they create an assumption that the work is confused as well: in Lowell’s notorious remark, “three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”5 Poe’s work thus often comes before us as if it were in desperate need of an enlightened interpreter or the steady hand of critical judgment.
In those circumstances, we want a map for the work that depends less on Poe’s life stories and myths, important as they are, than on the life documents that stand behind those narratives. A documentary orientation—the basis of all biography—helps to blunt the pre-emptive interpretational drive that biography, or history for that matter, introduces into any study of cultural materials. It helps to isolate the works as such and so concentrate our critical attention. Paradoxically, the historical importance and originality of Poe’s work will, I believe, come into sharper focus as a result. More than that, a documentary approach can help us see that the critical integrity of the work is responding to the territory’s discontinuous character. An ordinance survey map is less useful for locating Poe’s work in its historical context than a topological space with basins of order shifting under the force of arbitrary and strange attractors. As to such a critical method, the analogy would be to a cubist or action painting or—perhaps even better, given Poe’s story-telling interests—to the multiperspectival pictures of an artist like Christopher Derek Bruno.
To that end, I begin with a set of documents of recognized importance. Their chronology is inconsequent to my concerns, except where they show internal revisions. Only slightly less inconsequent, in a general sense, is the order in which these documents will be examined. Not that my arrangement is undeliberate. But I can imagine someone else examining them in a different order, as I can imagine someone else choosing another set, perhaps with some overlaps. My sequence reflects a long struggle to see Poe’s poetry steadily and to see it whole. An angel of the odd hovers over Poe’s work, not least in the mysteries that leak from and then haunt textual details that often seem too trivial to command close attention. Why does Israfel’s music come from “unusual strings” (such a pedestrian and colloquial word!), or why is the dream vision of “The Sleeper” located in “the universal valley” (my italics)? What did Poe mean when he told James Russell Lowell, “At death the worm is the butterfly”? (Had he written “becomes the butterfly” we would have sailed right past that sentence.) Or how does one pronounce “Porphyrogene”? Knowing Poe’s conviction that “[a] passionate poem is a contradiction in terms” (Marginalia Dec. 1844), what are we to make of Israfel’s contempt for “an unimpassioned song”? Or given the explicit theatrical setting of “The Conqueror Worm,” did Poe intend to pun with the phrase “condor wings”? And if so, why “condor”? In general, if we say—following Poe’s lead—that these texts are meant to be what Poe repeatedly calls “suggestive,” is that judgment critically sufficient? And if not, where does the insufficiency lie? In Poe? In us?
I’ve come to believe that the insufficiency has largely been ours (or mine). What follows is an effort to make it up. The effort is in great part inspired by T. S. Eliot’s lifelong struggle to understand what Whitman, radically revising his own earlier negative judgment of Poe, called “Edgar Poe’s Significance.”6 Eliot never doubted Poe’s enormous cultural significance—how could he, given the importance of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry for Eliot’s work and view of Modern culture? At the same time, he wondered how anyone could not judge the poetry “slipshod,” “puerile,” and “without perfection in any detail” (“From Poe to Valéry,” 327.) He did not himself make those judgments; he was joining his voice to an influential line of English and American reading. But his assent left him dissatisfied because he recognized that Poe was the master spirit of an important Modern tradition—for Eliot, the most important tradition. I suspect as well that the author of Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats (1939) spent a lifetime outgrowing his grey-headed youth.
This study presents an argument for the importance of Poe’s poetry as such. Making the argument will require that we clarify the relation that issues of “cultural significance” have to issues of language and poetics. The methodology is thus ultimately philological, a critical dimension where close linguistic questions are studied in the context of material and especially documentary culture. In that perspective, Poe’s Marginalia seems to me the theoretical center of Poe’s work.
1. Marginalia, November 1844 (M 1– 4)7
In getting my books, I have been always solicitous of an ample margin; this not so much through any love of the thing in itself, however agreeable, as for the facility it affords me of pencilling suggested thoughts, agreements and differences of opinion, or brief critical comments in general. Where what I have to note is too much to be included within the narrow limits of a margin, I commit it to a slip of paper, and deposit it between the leaves; taking care to secure it by an imperceptible portion of gum tragacanth paste.
All this may be whim; it may be not only a very hackneyed, but a very idle practice;—yet I persist in it still; and it affords me pleasure; which is profit, in despite of Mr. Bentham with Mr. Mill on his back.
This making of notes, however, is by no means the making of mere memoranda—a custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. “Ce que je mets sur papier,” says Bernardin de St. Pierre, “je remets de ma mémoire, et par consequence je l’oublie;”—and, in fact, if you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
But the purely marginal jottings, done with no eye to the Memorandum Book, have a distinct complexion, and not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is which imparts to them a value. They have a rank somewhat above the chance and desultory comments of literary chit-chat—for these latter are not unfrequently “talk for talk’s sake,” hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought;—however flippant—however silly—however trivial—still a thought indeed, not merely a thing that might have been a thought in time, and under more favorable circumstances. In the marginalia, too, we talk only to ourselves; we therefore talk freshly—boldly—originally—with abandonnement—without conceit—much after the fashion of Jeremy Taylor, and Sir Thomas Browne, and Sir William Temple, and the anatomical Burton, and that most logical analogist, Butler, and some other people of the old day, who were too full of their matter to have any room for their manner, which, being thus left out of question, was a capital manner, indeed,—a model of manners, with a richly marginalic air.
The circumscription of space, too, in these pencillings, has in it something more of advantage than of inconvenience. It compels us (whatever diffuseness of idea we may clandestinely entertain), into Montesquieu-ism, into Tacitus-ism (here I leave out of view the concluding portion of the “Annals”)—or even into Carlyle-ism—a thing which, I have been told, is not to be confounded with your ordinary affectation and bad grammar. I say “bad grammar,” through sheer obstinacy, because the grammarians (who should know better) insist upon it that I should not. But then grammar is not what these grammarians will have it; and, being merely the analysis of language, with the result of this analysis, must be good or bad just as the analyst is sage or silly—just as he is a Horne Tooke or a Cobbett.
But to our sheep. During a rainy afternoon, not long ago, being in a mood too listless for continuous study, I sought relief from ennui in dipping here and there, at random, among the volumes of my library—no very large one, certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous; and, I flatter myself, not a little recherché.
Perhaps it was what the Germans call the “brain-scattering” humor of the moment; but, while the picturesqueness of the numerous pencil-scratches arrested my attention, their helter-skelter-iness of commentary amused me. I found myself at length, forming a wish that it had been some other hand than my own which had so bedevilled the books, and fancying that, in such case, I might have derived no inconsiderable pleasure from turning them over. From this the transition-thought (as Mr. Lyell, or Mr. Murchison, or Mr. Featherstonhaugh would have it) was natural enough:—there might be something even in my scribblings which, for the mere sake of scribbling, would have interest for others.
The main difficulty respected the mode of transferring the notes from the volumes—the context from the text—without detriment to that exceedingly frail fabric of intelligibility in which the context was imbedded. With all appliances to boot, with the printed pages at their back, the commentaries were too often like Dodona’s oracles—or those of Lycophron Tenebrosus—or the essays of the pedant’s pupils, in Quintillian, which were “necessarily excellent, since even he (the pedant) found it impossible to comprehend them:”—what, then, would become of it—this context—if transferred?—if translated? Would it not rather be traduit (traduced) which is the French synonym, or overzezet (turned topsy-turvy) which is the Dutch one?
I concluded, at length, to put extensive faith in the acumen and imagination of the reader:—this as a general rule. But, in some instances, where even faith would not remove mountains, there seemed no safer plan than so to re-model the note as to convey at least the ghost of a conception as to what it was all about. Where, for such conception, the text itself was absolutely necessary, I could quote it; where the title of the book commented upon was indispensable, I could name it. In short, like a novel-hero dilemma’d, I made up my mind “to be guided by circumstances,” in default of more satisfactory rules of conduct.
As for the multitudinous opinion expressed in the subjoined farrago—as for my present assent to all, or dissent from any portion of it—as to the possibility of my having, in some instances, altered my mind—or as to the impossibility of my not having altered it often—these are points upon which I say nothing, because upon these there can be nothing cleverly said. It may be as well to observe, however, that just as the goodness of your true pun is in the direct ratio of its intolerability, so is nonsense the essential sense of the Marginal Note.
This—Poe’s first marginalium—gives his theoretical justification for the general marginalian undertaking. At its core is one of those small and seriously provoking textual events. Distinguishing Marginalia from Memoranda, Poe takes up the former because they have “not only a distinct purpose, but none at all; this it is that imports to them a value.” He goes on to explain the value of their purposeless purpose by making another distinction: between marginalia and “literary chit-chat.” The latter is a form of “talk for talk’s sake” whereas with a marginalium “the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought.” Poe—the writer of this marginalium—exposes the fact that writers are always also readers and, reciprocally, that readers are always rewriting what they read. In that event readers have been provoked to expose themselves, their thinking, to themselves.
That view of the textual event is perhaps the most fund...
