The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel

Describing Poe’s verse as “at once unremittingly vulgar and theoretically advanced,” McGann (Radiant Textuality) persuasively defends Poe’s poetry against its many detractors, who have criticized the work as all “jingle” (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and lacking in “intellectual content” (Yvor Winters). Through close readings of Poe’s marginalia, reviews, and letters, as well as his essays on poetic composition, notably “The Poetic Principle,” McGann shows how Poe worked out a sophisticated theory of poetics founded on two concepts that recur consistently in his writing: the “didactic heresy,” which disputes the criterion that poems must express morals and ideas, and the subordination of all other elements of a poem to the “Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,” by which a poem approximates music. Proof for Poe’s theory can be found in his prose-poem masterpiece “Eureka,” which demonstrates that Poe “wants to make the experience of poetry the subject of his poetry.” In McGann’s estimation, Poe’s deployment of rhyme schemes that erode the meaning of the words used in them and his deemphasis of the “Romantic first person” makes his verse an important bridge between Romantic and Modernist poetry. McGann’s argument may not convince Poe’s legions of critics, but it will certainly provide readers with a deeper appreciation of the writer’s achievements as a poet. (Nov.)