The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, EAP: Critical Theory (2009), title page and table of contents

Edgar Allan Poe's reputation as an enduring and influential American literary critic rests mainly upon the pieces in this edition. Editors Stuart and Susan F. Levine provide reading texts, detailed explanatory footnotes, variant readings, and introductions to show context. They also face frankly the contradictions in Poe's critical opinions. Poe argues both that poetry is for pleasure, not truth, and that poetic inspiration leads to truth. Great works, Poe maintains, result from studied calculation, but also from irrational, supernal sources. Poe, both a biting critic and the doughty defender of American artistic achievement, was contemptuous of democratic art — except when vigorously defending it. Critical Theory highlights such conflicting ideas and suggests the reasons they are present.

What was consistent in Poe's work was not a single theory, but rather wit, playfulness, concern for the strong effect, a bin of recyclable allusions, anecdotes and quotations, and a craftsman's discipline. Poe's writing on theory is of a piece with his fiction, poetry, and journalism. The Levines explain how these critical statements also tie tightly to the social, political, economic, and technological history of the world in which Poe lived.

EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-49), preeminent American writer and literary critic, exerted a worldwide influence on literature through his short fiction and his theoretical statements on poetry and the short story.

STUART LEVINE is founding chair of the American studies department at the University of Kansas. He is the author or editor of ten books, including Edgar Poe, Seer and Craftsman, and the founder of American Studies, which he edited for thirty years.

SUSAN F. LEVINE is a former assistant dean of the Graduate School at the University of Kansas. She is the author of articles on Latin American writers. Together with Stuart Levine, she is coeditor of The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe and coauthor of articles on Poe's work.

“This book provides scholars and students of nineteenth-century literary theory and Poe with a reliable edition of his essays of critical theory, heavily annotated by respected Poe scholars. The notes provide explications not easily attained elsewhere, including Poe's relationships with his contemporaries and allusions to works few of today's readers would recognize. Levine and Levine have thoroughly researched the textual variants on all of these essays and provided the most accurate texts available to date.”

— Scott Peeples, author of The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe