The Poet Edgar Allan Poe
Jerome McGann
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The Poet Edgar Allan Poe
Jerome McGann
Ă propos de ce livre
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 Franceânotably Baudelaire, MallarmĂ©, and ValĂ©ryâhas 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.
Foire aux questions
Informations
1
Poe In Propria Persona
IV. xv. 78â82
1. Marginalia, November 1844 (M 1â 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;âyet 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 memorandaâa custom which has its disadvantages, beyond doubt. âCe que je mets sur papier,â says Bernardin de St. Pierre, âje remets de ma mĂ©moire, et par consequence je lâoublie;ââand, 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-chatâfor these latter are not unfrequently âtalk for talkâs sake,â hurried out of the mouth; while the marginalia are deliberately pencilled, because the mind of the reader wishes to unburthen itself of a thought;âhowever flippantâhowever sillyâhowever trivialâstill 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 freshlyâboldlyâoriginallyâwith abandonnementâwithout conceitâmuch 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,âa 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 âAnnalsâ)âor even into Carlyle-ismâa thing which, I have been told, is not to be confounded with your ordinary affectation and bad grammar. I say âbad grammar,â 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 sillyâjust 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 libraryâno very large one, certainly, but sufficiently miscellaneous; and, I flatter myself, not a little recherchĂ©.
Perhaps it was what the Germans call the âbrain-scatteringâ 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:âthere 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 volumesâthe context from the textâwithout 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 Dodonaâs oraclesâor those of Lycophron Tenebrosusâor the essays of the pedantâs pupils, in Quintillian, which were ânecessarily excellent, since even he (the pedant) found it impossible to comprehend them:ââwhat, then, would become of itâthis contextâif transferred?âif 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:âthis 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 dilemmaâd, I made up my mind âto be guided by circumstances,â in default of more satisfactory rules of conduct.
As for the multitudinous opinion expressed in the subjoined farragoâas for my present assent to all, or dissent from any portion of itâas to the possibility of my having, in some instances, altered my mindâor as to the impossibility of my not having altered it oftenâthese 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.