Poe's Alien Poetics (original) (raw)
Poe’s Alien Poetics 1{ }^{1}
Robert T. Tally Jr.
Edgar Allan Poe has always been a great outsider in American literature, a status that has conferred upon him an almost cult-like following in twentiethand twenty-first-century popular culture. The characteristics of this mythic Poe, so beloved by his fans, are well known: he is a dreamer, a half-mad, alcoholic lost soul, “out of space, out of time,” a poète maudit who is haunted by ghosts of his lost loves, spinning eerie tales of the supernatural and crafting lyrical poetry of hopeless melancholy, the formal beauty of which works barely masks the deeply autobiographical content that must lie at their heart. Several generations of Poe scholars have now largely disabused us of this mythic image, not that the pop culture purveyors of Poe’s legacy notice or care, and the Poe who has emerged from recent biographical investigations appears to be an earnest, hard-working professional writer, a “magazinist” whose marketing savvy and commercial skills, along with his own writerly talents, increased the circulation of every periodical he was associated with. Poe did not linger upon the margins of nineteenth-century American society, but operated at the decentered centers of its intellectual and artistic life, as his notoriously nomadic movements from place to place-he lived for a time in each of Richmond, Boston, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, among other cities - were less matters of transcendental homelessness than rather worldly attempts to find better, more stable, or more lucrative employment. Indeed, considering the mercantile hustle and bustle of life in the antebellum United States, Poe might be better viewed, not as an outsider, but at the representative American writer of the era.
But, as I have suggested in Poe and the Subversion of American Literature, Poe’s almost universally recognized outsider status in American literature has far more to do with the development of American Studies as a disciplinary field in the twentieth-century than with the historical condition of his life and work in the nineteenth-century. The image of “America” produced by that field was not particularly inclusive of a writer like Poe, whose critique of a certain national ideology (and of nationalism itself) was so virulent. Indeed, Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture, a recent collection of essays
- 1{ }^{1} Review of Jerome McGann, The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2014. 256 pp . ↩︎
edited by J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann, demonstrates the degree to which American studies as a whole could be transformed by placing Poe in a central position, or perhaps more accurately, at the nexus of conflicting forces in U.S. social and literary history. As Kennedy points out in the introduction to that book, the newly formed field of American Studies managed to create a distinctively “national” literature by tethering major works produced in the United States to regional developments like “the New England mind” or “the war of words and wits” in New York City (to cite the titles of two books by Perry Miller). The goal of Kennedy and McGann’s project was to " [t][t] o remap literary America not by focusing on a cluster of luminaries in the Northeast but rather by reconstructing the network of relationships, authorial and institutional, within a decentralized system of distribution." 2{ }^{2} Although it is not his main point, or even an acknowledged one, I believe that Jerome McGann’s recent study, The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel (which is dedicated to Kennedy, “the angel of Poe and American Studies”), participates in this revisionary project by revealing a poetics wholly at odds with the Americanist cultural program, and therefore suggesting alternative directions for future enquiry.
McGann is not an Americanist by training, and he has come to examine American literature more closely in recent years partly through his interest in Poe. Thus, McGann also has a sort of outsider status, which perhaps enables a productively alternative perspective on some of these matters. He is less interested than many other Poe scholars in defending Poe’s own place in American Studies, and it is possible that McGann recognizes the degree to which Poe’s ill fit within American Studies is actually a good thing. McGann is probably best known as a scholar of British romanticism, and he brings his prodigious knowledge of Coleridge, Wordsworth, Byron, Shelley, Keats, and Swinburne to bear on his analysis of Poe’s poetics. The poet who is revealed in McGann’s analysis is decidedly post-romantic, but also one who has drunk deeply of romantic values while also pointing toward a more modernist tendency. McGann’s Poe does not neatly fit in with his contemporaries in the United States, and he stands apart from the standard literary historical narrative of poetic developments in the nineteenth century.
In a bold move, McGann insists that Poe’s poetry and poetics be understood almost exclusively in connection to form. In fact, McGann warns, any attention paid to the content of the poems-themes, moods, characters, and perhaps, meanings - is apt to lead us into the “heresy of the Didactic,” against which both Poe and many of the romantics strenuously cautioned. As McGann puts it, “[p]oetry in his view should not be approached as a repository of ideas or an expression of feelings but as an event of language” (2). In this, Poe distances himself both from the tradition of contemporary poetry - whose tutelary spirit, Emerson, was not only didactic but downright preachy - and from the vision of twentieth-century American Studies, which
- 2{ }^{2} Kennedy (2012,3)(2012,3). ↩︎
felt the need to discover an allegorical significance in every literary work (namely, the way in which the work “expressed” some fundamental truth about America itself). Poe’s own irrepressible formalism, as McGann rightly observes, positions him more closely to the modernists of subsequent generations, as well as to a sort of transnational or postnational “world” literature, in which the poem need not be pressed into service for particular ideological or national aims.
This feature of Poe’s poetry and his poetics is partly why so many respected poets and scholars hold his work in disdain, while other equally well respected writers champion that same work. As McGann notes, Poe’s poetry is “at once unremittingly vulgar and theoretically advanced, even pretentious” (2). Speaking of his tales, rather than his poems, Jonathan Arac has observed that contemporary readers had difficulty understanding Poe’s tone. In particular, given the absolute earnestness of the narrator’s presentation of materials that verged on the ridiculous or absurd, Poe’s tales could be hard to categorize. “Readers were confident in laughing at southwestern humor, and Hawthorne’s complex ironies only emphasized his thoughtfulness, but Poe’s work provoked a fundamental uncertainty in response. Was he serious? Should his readers be serious? The problem is one of genre: What kind of work is this?” 3{ }^{3} The same sort of question might be asked of Poe’s poems, which often combine the loftiest aesthetic modes of beauty with downright absurdities, not to mention wholly jangling or maddening repetitions (as in “The Bells,” for instance).
McGann’s study attempts to rescue Poe’s poems and poetics from those who, following in the tradition of Emerson’s well known “jingle man” insult, find fault with Poe’s work and take umbrage at his popularity; the list of prominent critics dismissive of Poe is impressive, as it would include, after Emerson, T.S. Eliot, Yvor Winters, R.P. Blackmur, and Harold Bloom, to name a few. (In its original context, it is clear Emerson’s “jingle-man” was less an assessment of Poe than an insulting rebuke to another young writer, William Dean Howells, who immediately dismissed Emerson’s remark as further evidence of the Sage of Concord’s “defective sense as to specific pieces of literature.” 4{ }^{4} The pertinacity of this minor “jingle man” story in Poe Studies primarily serves to demonstrate just how wounded scholars and fans feel about it, but Emerson’s own literary judgements are rarely worth sharing, as Howells himself noted.) The problem for such critics is less that Poe remains wildly popular among the hoi polloi, but that so many gifted poets and critics also admire Poe, among them Baudelaire, Whitman, Swinburne, Mallarmé, William Carlos Williams, and-as McGann tantalizingly hints, without offering a satisfying follow-through-T.S. Eliot himself. 5{ }^{5} Not surprisingly,
- 3{ }^{3} Arac (2005,68)(2005,68).
4{ }^{4} See, for example, Tally, Jr. (2014, 141-142).
5{ }^{5} McGann suggests, but does not quite argue, that T.S. Eliot’s views on Poe developed over a nearly lifelong meditation on the nineteenth-century writer’s work. As such, McGann thinks that Eliot’s anti-Poe position is far more nuanced than is usually thought. Alas, the chapter on ↩︎
McGann sides with the latter group, but he also demonstrates the degree to which the detractors are, in some ways, missing the point. In McGann’s view, Poe’s assiduously formal, language-based, and above all sonic or “echopoetical” poetry distills his own poetics into an almost perfect, crystalline form, thus incorporating and expressing the theory through the practice. In other words, Poe is not trying to write a sincerely romantic poem and doing it poorly, but is establishing what McGann calls a “theatre of post-Romantic artifice” (9) in staging the theory of poetry in these starkly formal experiments. Poe’s infamous lack of passion, which James Russell Lowell satirized as a “heart somehow all squeezed out by the mind” and Whitman compared to "electric lights, “brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat,” is shown to be entirely consistent with the theory and practice of Poe’s poetics.
McGann’s focus is on Poe’s poetry and his poetics, which means that this study for the most part resists making reference to Poe’s tales. However, McGann does not limit himself to Poe’s poems or to his literary critical or theoretical pieces, such as “The Philosophy of Composition” or “The Poetic Principle,” but explores a number of lesser known texts. McGann is particularly effective in bringing a sense of critical coherence to Poe’s sprawling Marginalia, seemingly fragmentary or aphoristic texts published in different venues over several years, which McGann mines for golden insights about Poe’s intensive poetic project. In addition, McGann avoids drawing too heavily upon Poe’s biography, which allows him to present a sort of synoptic view of Poe’s poetry and poetics. That is, McGann does not really look at how Poe’s poems developed from the early juvenilia of “Tamerlane” to the later polished work, such as “Annabel Lee.” Nor does he try to connect Poe’s ideas to events from the poet’s own life, as so many biographically oriented critics have done.
Indeed, McGann opens with a chapter titled “Poe In Propria Persona,” and his use of this arcane, legalistic phrase is telling. Rather than citing biographies or summarizing his life story, McGann selects seven passages from Poe, written in Poe’s own words, and then performs theoretically elaborate close readings. The examples come from Poe’s letters, reviews, and Marginalia, instead of from the more familiar published texts, and they do not follow a neatly chronological or recognizably thematic trajectory. Yet McGann’s serial reading of them helps to form a sort of narrative about Poe’s theory of poetry. Or, rather, I might say that McGann uses these texts as a means of constellating Poe’s ideas, from which arrangement a kind of whole emerges. This chapter is a tour de force in critical juxtaposition and close reading, and it helps to establish McGann’s later arguments for Poe’s echopoetics, theoretical practice, and even politics.
On this last matter, McGann is particularly astute, since Poe’s work-especially his poetry-appears to be entirely apolitical. McGann acknowledges
- Eliot’s Poe that McGann hints at is not included in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe, but I for one hope that McGann delivers it in the future. ↩︎
the problem in his chapter title, “The Politics of a Poetry without Politics.” Poe lived in an era in which poets and poetry were frequent interlocutors in expressly political conversations over matters of national and international controversy, as might be witnessed in John Greenleaf Whittier’s abolitionist verse, or, more canonically, Whitman’s Civil War and postbellum poems. The politics of Poe’s poetry does not operate on this level, which smacks of the “Didactic Heresy” writ large (148). “But,” as McGann observes, “Poe’s ‘unusual strings’ - his poetry of intertextual appeal and suggestion-clearly anticipate the aesthetic emergency that we associate, for example, with Benjamin or Adorno” (154). 6{ }^{6} By remaining at the (superior) level of aesthetic surfaces, we can see an intensely ideological aspect in Poe’s form. In fact, McGann argues that Poe’s work has a revolutionary charge. As he puts it,
When societies become caged by moral, behavioral, and religious norms - as they were for Blake, as they were for Poe and Rimbaud - poetry becomes an imperative political resort. This is because poetry does not involve itself in the matrix of worldly illusions, where redemption comes only as another illusion. Poetry works instead to cleanse one’s powers of elementary perception, the redemption of sensory experience itself, the chief inlet of soul in every age. (171)
Riffing on Whitman’s well-known depiction of the poet as a diagnostician of “this disease called humanity,” perhaps, McGann finds in Poe’s poems a “critical reflection on poetry’s social function: to put us at our dis-ease” (200).
Such “dis-ease” is a powerful part of Poe’s lasting appeal, of course, but it is also part of what always made him appear as an outsider within the American literary tradition, a national narrative typified by its “optative mood” (Matthiessen) or its flipside, the “American jeremiad” (Bercovitch). By establishing a “horizontal” register in which to view antebellum print culture, the Kennedy, McGann, and the other contributors to Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture demonstrated the ways that Poe’s life and works, when used as a touchstone for such a project, can enable a significant reorientation of American Studies through a sense of spatial displacement and textual circulation. Poe’s own nomadic, decentered literary trajectory could establish a new frame of reference for American literature in the twenty-first century, and I think McGann’s study of The Poet Edgar Allan Poe offers a glimpse of a different sort of transnational studies organized around an exemplary figure, both “alien” and “angelic,” rather than according to a nationalist “image repertoire,” as Donald E. Pease has called it. But then, a Poe-centered American Studies would not be American Studies at all, but
- 6{ }^{6} The phrase “unusual strings” appears in Poe’s poem “Israfel.” McGann elsewhere in The Poet Edgar Allan Poe notes that the adjective in that context seems all too “pedestrian and colloquial,” noting that “[a]n angel of the odd hovers over Poe’s work, not least in the mysteries that leak from and then haunt textual details that often seem too trivial to command close attention” (16-17). “The Angel of the Odd” is the title of a bizarre tale by Poe. ↩︎
something else, a zone no longer shaped by a particular moral or ideological program, but continuously formed and reformed through the connections made between various forms, across periods, borders, genres, and theories. It becomes, as McGann notes, a poetic project “haunted in intertext” (148), and this formal ingenuity and limitless textuality might lay the foundations for a thorough remapping of these spaces, which may in turn disclose new places, sites of unexpected correspondence and novel inquiry.
TEXAS STATE UNIVERSITY
References
Arac, Jonathan. The Emergence of American Literary Narrative, 1820-1860. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 2005.
Kennedy, J. Gerald. “Introduction.” Poe and the Remapping of Antebellum Print Culture. Eds. J. Gerald Kennedy and Jerome McGann. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State UP, 2012.
Tally, Jr., Robert T. Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique. New York: Bloomsbury, 2014.