Text: Stuart and Susan Levine, “Exordium - Headnote,” The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe — EAP: Critical Theory (2009), pp. 37-39 (This material is protected by copyright)

[page 37:]

 

The title “Exordium” is one which editors have provided; they take it from Poe's first paragraph. When the piece appeared it was simply the untitled first ten paragraphs of the column “Review of New Books” in Graham's Magazine for January 1842. Poe had joined the staff of Graham's in January 1841; this statement of principle leads off his second year on the job (Poe was to leave Graham's in May). It was followed immediately by reviews.

Poe's comments on literary nationalism are sophisticated and well-taken, and his brief history of national self-consciousness in literature is accurate.(1) French and Latin American critics in particular have been certain that Poe detested his country. Perhaps they were unaware of several essays in which he shows literary patriotism, for Poe was more concerned with the national image than is generally imagined. The opening paragraph of his 1836 review “Drake's Culprit Fay,” which he reworked to provide the discussion in paragraph 3 of the “Exordium,” also contained a list of areas in which America was, Poe felt, no longer inferior to Europe, in which, indeed, “we have no competitors whatever.” Nationalistic bragging was not, of course, Poe's usual tone; the same review says that the United States could not be expected to be the equal of older European cultures in literature. But let a foreigner malign a worthy national writer and Poe would rise to the defense, as he did in an angry response in the Broadway Journal for October 4, 1845, to a piece in Blackwood's by John Wilson (“Christopher North”) that insulted James Russell Lowell:

There is not a more disgusting spectacle under the sun than our subserviency to British criticism. It is disgusting, first, because it is truckling, servile, pusillanimous — secondly, because of its gross irrationality. We know the British to bear us little but ill-will — we [page 38:] know that, in no case, do they utter unbiased opinions of American books — we know that in the few instances in which our writers have been treated with common decency in England, these writers have either openly paid homage to English institutions, or have had lurking at the bottom of their hearts a secret principle at war with Democracy: — we know all this, and yet, day after day, submit our necks to the degrading yoke of the crudest opinion that emanates from the fatherland. Now if we must have nationality, let it be a nationality that will throw off this yoke.

“Exordium” is better known, however, because in it Poe emphasizes criticism as analysis than because it shows Poe manning the barricades to defend American authors. Historians of criticism differ in their judgment of the sincerity, originality, and consistency of many of Poe's critical ideas, but agree that in insisting on close analysis of the document on the page he made a major contribution. In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe — not entirely seriously — offers a model demonstration of how one literary artifact works; in “Exordium” he charged the critic to study other works as closely. His argument is unrelentingly New Critical: The critic's task is internal, almost hermetic. He is concerned only with how the piece functions, within itself, as a work of art. Even its ideas are off-limits for the critic except “in their relation to the work itself.” Carried to such logical extreme, of course, criticism can become pedantic and obscure, as in the case of the most doctrinaire followers of the New Criticism of the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s in America, and in the case of fanatic partisans of more recent modes of literary analysis fashionable since the 1970s in Europe and America. But Poe taught criticism a great deal; the corrective was needed.

This line of thought in his criticism gave fuel also, as is well known, to advocates of art for art's sake in several countries. One can complete the argument by fitting “Exordium” into the pattern of others of Poe's essays: If literature exists for pleasure and beauty alone, then the task of the critic is to analyze how and how well the work under review creates the beautiful effect and experience.

A Note on the Text

We follow the text of the January 1842 Graham's Magazine. There is a minor inconsistency in hyphenation: “art novel” is not hyphenated in paragraph 7; it is in the quotation in paragraph 6. That is probably a typo, though in a Poe essay that contains discussion of proofreading one can never be certain. There are documented [page 39:] examples of places in which Poe inserted deliberate errors into his work because the context made them appropriate — although, to tell the truth, the joke in such cases is quite private, likely to be noticed mainly by Poe himself. On the chance that Poe meant to speak to the critic who “hands over” such matters to the proofreader (see the quotation from Cornelius Mathews in paragraph 6), we decided to leave the typo alone and to allow the spelling “Kaimes” for “Kames” on the chance that error is also intentional. See our edition of Eureka, paragraphs 12 through 24, and the notes to those pages, for examples of deliberately misspelled proper names in Poe. What is plainly a typo appears in the second sentence of paragraph 6, where an extraneous quotation mark within a quotation mark is printed before the word Reviews so that it reads “‘Reviews” instead of “Reviews.”

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 37:]

1. Poe also had extensive relations with the literary nationalists of “Young America.” Meridith L. McGill discusses the complicated nature of that connection in “Poe, Literary Nationalism, and Authorial Identity.”