Text: Michael Allen, “Conclusion: Poe and the British Magazine Tradition,” Poe and the British Magazine Tradition, 1969, pp. 199-203

[page 199:]

XI

Poe can thus be seen as coming at the conclusion of a particular movement in journalism. There was, in the earlier nineteenth century, something which could genuinely be called a tradition in journalism, and Poe was, as a journalist, the “individual talent” exercising itself within that tradition. As a serious writer, he was attracted to the literary journalism of Blackwood's and other British magazines of the earlier nineteenth century, although his conscious attitude to them was ambivalent. He used, with an intensity all his own, several conventions clearly related to those of the British journals: projecting a literary personality in the same way; engaging in the same kind of critical controversy: striking a similar self-consciously learned pose in his fiction, criticism, and general writing; exploiting the hoax in a similar way; and imitating several of the British modes of [page 200:] magazine fiction, in particular the burlesque and the horror tale. And even after the exigencies of his profession had forced him to try and simplify much of his journalism, he retained in the rest of his writing, and in his plans for the “Stylus,” many of the characteristic assumptions of the Blackwood's type of journalism. Of course, his attempts to break free and the idiosyncratic use that he made of the conventions reflect a considerable dislocation, the dislocation of parent and child nations with their confused loyal- ties and antipathies. They reflect, too, the attempt to adjust his European and Southern inheritance of literary ideas to the rapid acceleration in mass-publishing techniques which was going on in his lifetime. And the tension between tradition and exigency was so profound that Poe became, and remained, a radically divided man.

The fact that Poe was a serious writer as well as a journalist gave the British journals their peculiar significance for him. In their tradition, he recognised the possibility of combining economic subsistence with the continuity of a relationship with the great literature of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Here were magazine conventions, he thought, that would carry and contain his literary impulses, provided he could control and balance the opposing allegiances to the “many” and the “few” as Blackwood's had done. And it is in this context that his inconsistency becomes significant. As Kenneth Burke says:

The contradictions between a hierarchic social system which, whatever its faults, maintained literary values, and the demands of the business ethic were visible already in the British situation; and they were exaggerated for Poe in America until he became an inclusive and emblematic figure. The balance momently achieved by the British journalists was impossible in the American situation. The result was Poe's exaggerated and painful vacillation from obeisance to the “many” to the virtual imaginative construction of his own elite.

In the nature of this situation and the complicated strategies which Poe devised to deal with it lies a large part of his interest for us. The problems he grappled with are the basic problems facing the writer during the slow transition from an elite to a democratic society — how to realign himself socially in the new situation, how to support and secure literary values in a commercial world, how to continue to exist in the increasingly utilitarian atmosphere of modern life. These questions have increasingly occupied the minds of modern writers. Of course, as we have seen, the issues were by no means new, even in Poe's time. But Poe was inevitably confronted by the gulf between minority-culture and mass-civilisation more starkly than were any of his European contemporaries. And the intense conflict between his acquired Southern values and haughty temperament and the necessities and ambitions of journalistic practice made him uniquely sensitive to the whole question. He was one of the earliest writers fully to comprehend its dimensions and to act out its possibilities. Implicit in Poe's approach to the potential audience for his art and his journalism are many of the rationalisations and repudiations which have been employed by writers ever since. We have seen how, in the case: of this one writer at least, intentional statements and practice [page 202:] are related to his audience situation. And our attention is obliquely drawn to the ways that writers (and critics) think about writing, to the strategies and intensities of that complicated rhetoric of intention and achievement whereby they rationalise the aims and functions of literary creation.

This study of Poe's use of British journalistic conventions has, of course, been intended throughout to throw critical light on his work. Here, one could say that its function has been mainly descriptive. A sense of the importance of learned conventions, for instance, helps to explain why Poe, in Alfred Kazin's words,

And a recognition of the nature of the convention of literary personality consolidates our sense that a serious interest in Poe involves responding to his literary persona and allowing one's sense of the writer to inform and humanise his writing. Poe has always seemed a significant writer when the implications of his life and writings have impinged jointly on his readers’ minds. And this remains the case in our own day.

But the descriptive and the evaluative elements in literary criticism are very difficult to keep separate. I myself have at no point allowed to Poe the “greatness” which Baudelaire ascribed, and which, until fairly recently, all his defenders tended to assume. The change of status which such an admission [page 203:] involves is more usefully seen as one of degree than of kind, but it has to be implemented. And in the business of newly placing Poe in relation to other writers, a sense of the British magazine tradition is of use. In the course of finding Poe's theory “bad,” his practice “bad,” and his taste “vulgar,”(3) for example, Yvor Winters quotes, without further comment, G. E. Woodberry: “He had in the narrowest sense, a contemporaneous mind, the instincts of the journalist, the magazine writer. ... ”(4) And what is more or less a plain statement in Woodberry's biography sums up for Winters a devastating hostile judgement of Poe. But I have established that Poe's instincts as a journalist were not, in fact, contemporaneous; that they involved a desire for continuity, through the British journals, with the European literary past. And this discovery in itself, to some extent, undermines Winters's evaluative absolutism. My own view of Poe is rather like that of Edmund Wilson:

But a sense of the European magazine tradition in which Poe was working reinforces Wilson's sense of Poe's “more constricted personality,” and suggests, in writers like De Quincey and Bulwer, more accurate and modest parallels for the kind of “inquiring and versatile mind” that Poe possessed.