Text: Stuart Levine, “Introduction,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. ix-xii (This material is protected by copyright)

[page ix, unnumbered:]

INTRODUCTION

Stuart Levine

 

Writing in 1861, Fyodor Dostoevski said that he was struck by Poe's Americanness. Comparing Poe to E. T. A. Hoffman, he argued that Hoffman's fantasy is fantastic, while Poe's is subject to rational analysis, grounded in fact and detail. He took that grounding to be a national characteristic.(1) What Dostoevski wrote about Americanness and concreteness in Poe's fiction could be said of some of his critical theory as well. That is one reason Poe appears in histories of criticism. Perry Miller said he was “the first important American critic”; another writer called him “First of the New Critics.”(2)

In their reprint of Frederick Prescott's 1909 collection of Poe's criticism, Lasley Dameron and Eric Carlson added a revealing page of “quotables from notables” to suggest how seriously major figures have taken Poe as a literary theorist: James Russell Lowell, George Bernard Shaw, Edmund Wilson, William Carlos Williams, and Allen Tate say impressive things about his significance.(3) The critical writing continues to attract useful scholarship.

Critical Theory: The Major Documents gathers Poe's statements on the theory of writing and the theory of criticism. Its contents were in large part suggested by Burton Pollin, for it was originally to have been part of his Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe. It attempts to present a critical text for each work, showing variants, explicating, and setting each in the contexts of Poe's career, practices, influences, and society. Variations in his texts posed special problems in a couple of instances. In the case of the prospectuses for the magazine Poe hoped to found, the most economical way of showing variants was simply to print one prospectus after another. They are short, but they change in numerous ways, and so a list of variants would have been bewildering. Similarly, “Notes upon English Verse” should be considered one long variant of “The Rationale of Verse.”

Our headnotes are meant to be useful to readers interested in just one or two documents as well as to those who want to examine a large sample of Poe's writing. [page x:]

By and large, Poe's critical work is tightly written, solidly reasoned, and effective. But we would caution readers against using it to support strong conclusions about Poe's convictions. It is very difficult ever to be certain about what Poe believes. The headnote to “Letter to B ——.” spells out in some detail what remains constant in Poe's writings on literary theory. That does not have much to do with an artistic creed.

This is because Poe comes down strongly on both sides of his favorite major theoretical problems. Poetry is about beauty, not truth; poetry is a prime source of truth. A long poem cannot exist; this long work is a poem. Criticism must be based upon rigorous close analysis; all great art is based upon a spiritual, supernal something that defies analysis.

Poe's “Sonnet — To Science” sees science preying “upon the poet's heart”; science — facts and analysis — is a “Vulture, whose wings are dull realities.” Yet Dostoevski rightly detected and praised just those “realities” in Poe, who was plainly fascinated by the exciting scientific breakthroughs of his era, ghost-wrote a scientific treatise, grounded Eureka on a solid understanding of the complex body of observational data and theory in mid-nineteenth-century astronomy, and boasted of his analytic ability.(4)

One should not, then, expect to discover a consistent aesthetic in Poe's literary theory (although he does display a quite consistent taste).(5) It is easy enough to reconcile the contradictions by thinking of Poe as a pragmatic author who knows that effective literature is the result both of inexplicable inspiration and “scientific” plotting and scheming, the sort he develops when he claims, in “The Philosophy of Composition,” that he is describing how he wrote “The Raven.” Blend “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition” and the result is “a rather level-headed definition of an artist's practical problems. They express for the writer just about what Edison's famous old saw expresses for the empirical inventor, assuming, of course, ... that Poe was artist enough to understand inspiration, and human enough to perspire.”(6) The trouble is that Poe never “blends” the two.

For Poe seems to have been less concerned with reconciling the apparent contradictions than we are. Perhaps this is simply because other professional forces were at work. Edgar Poe was a “magazinist,” and a magazinist is in many ways a journalist, always concerned with effect. He wanted each story, poem, review, or essay — even editorial squibs, of which he produced hundreds — to serve an end, to make a strong impact. Indeed, even this concern for strong impact can be shown to connect to specific journalistic events. Richard P. Benton argues, for example, that Poe's “theory [page xi:] of the totality of effect in short compositions” developed directly from his repeated and complex dealings with Nathaniel P. Willis, perhaps the best-known journalistic celebrity of Poe's era.(7) Poe's criticism, like most of his other writing, grew out of an interesting publishing environment. The explosion of literacy in his lifetime had immensely increased the demand for printed material. Redefinitions of gender roles, the development of instantaneous communication, photography, the spread of literacy, and powered transport all created something much closer to the modern sense of immersion in the “media” than had existed just a few years before. Poe, who used the word magazinist to describe that new creature we would call the media artist, was one himself, and rather proud of his skills.

Although most of the magazines for which he wrote had small circulations by more recent standards, their numbers and readership had grown immensely in his era. Most were allegedly “literary” (most, but not all — Poe wrote for political and sports periodicals as well). But even the literary magazines were very different from our quarterlies and reviews, much closer in content, really, to the yeasty general popular magazines that flourished in the United States when I was a child in school. The contents of magazines of the 1830s and 1840s included not just poems, fiction, and reviews but also what we would today call features. Illustrations, often unconnected with other contents, were known to build circulation; there were puzzles as well as fashion material, celebrity gossip, music meant to be performed by amateur pianists and singers, and “puffing” pieces praising things written by other magazinists who were expected to return favors by puffing things written by the puffer. Puffers also extolled the products of advertisers.

Editors knew that arresting material sold copies. Poe was a crack magazinist who could write controversial reviews, fiction of high impact, polished verse, and essays with — and let's use the journalistic word I was brought up with — “punch.”(8)

So although is it easy to reconcile contradictions in his critical pieces, Poe never does; each is intended to be freestanding, a satisfying read by itself. There are, to be sure, some apparent contradictions even within single essays. His clearest art-for-art's-sake statement, in “The Poetic Principle,” for instance, seems undercut by the examples he uses. The contradiction strikes us more strongly than it would Poe's audience, for we have some advantages of detachment. Poe's eye was on totality of effect. In the special context of the piece, the examples he used were the best he could think of and probably worked well enough. [page xii:]

With what, then, are we left? I would say that Poe's critical theorizing is the work of a brilliant but overworked media artist trying on any individual project to craft something challenging and arresting. He worked from a decent but not very large store of readings in the writing of other theorists and from a readily available grab bag of quotations, anecdotes, and ideas that served him also in his fiction, poetry, lectures, and other work. He used all this material repeatedly and inconsistently. An item used to argue one position in one piece might appear to illustrate the opposite in another.

Poe's “critical position” cannot really be fixed with any degree of reliability, for it shifted with the context of each writing assignment he set himself. But his impact on subsequent writers is undeniable, even though the honest observer feels duty-bound to add that the impact is usually the result of single essays, or even single extracted portions of those essays, with the surrounding landscape of his life as a writer, sometimes even the surrounding content of the individual piece, blocked out.

Notes

1. Fyodor M. Dostoevski, “Three Tales of Edgar Poe” (Dostoevski's preface to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” and “The Devil in the Belfry” in his magazine), Wremia [Time] 1 (1861): 230; quoted in Carlson, The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe, 61

2. Snell, “First of the New Critics.” Perry Miller's pronouncement comes from SGL's notes from Miller's English 7 class at Harvard University in the spring of 1951.

3. Poe, Selections from the Critical Writings, vi.

4. An interesting article by Richard P. Benton shows Poe grousing that N. P. Willis, his popular friend, rival, and sometime employer, was “weak in analytic power.” Benton, “The Works of N. P. Willis as a Catalyst,” esp. 323.

5. Discussion of the nature of Poe's taste appears in Stuart Levine, Edgar Poe, esp. 10-15.

6. Ibid., 14.

7. Benton, “The Works of N. P. Willis as a Catalyst,” 315. Scott Peeples, after explaining why Willis was a bigger star than Poe, finds that “Poe came to use Willis as a foil for commenting on his own career, to see himself in terms of Willis.” “ ‘The Mere Man of Letters Must Ever Be a Cipher,’ ” 135.

8. An interesting theory on how Poe and two contemporaries, Willis and Rufus Griswold, sold themselves to the new audience is argued in Sandra M. Tomc, “Poe and His Circle,” 21-41, esp. 27 and 29.