The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel

by Jerome McGann

Overview

The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America, as Emerson’s sneering quip about “The Jingle Man” testifies. That these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and especially France—notably Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry—has been further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold reassessment of Poe’s achievement, arguing that he belongs with Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence.

Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson’s dim view of Poe’s verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made its first appearance in Poe’s work. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The ethical and political significance of Poe’s work follows from what the poet takes as his great subject: the reader.

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe takes its own readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe’s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780674745230
Publisher:	Harvard University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2014
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	253
File size:	633 KB

About the Author

Jerome McGann is University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

Table of Contents

Contents Abbreviations Introduction Chapter 1. Poe In Propria Persona Chapter 2. Poetics and Echopoetics Chapter 3. Poetry: or Masks for a Read Death Chapter 4. The Politics of a Poetry without Politics Coda Notes Index

Editorial Reviews

McGann succeeds in forcing us to rethink Poe’s poetry… Poe’s sound experiments, especially his strange variations on meter, deserve, as McGann shows by citing numerous rhythmic anomalies, to be taken seriously… In an age of predominantly, and purposely, flat and prosaic ‘free verse,’ mnemonic patterning is perhaps re-emerging as the emblem of poetic power. In this sense, Poe is once again Our Contemporary… In making the case for the close link between the poetry and the aesthetic theory, [McGann] succeeds admirably: Poe’s reputation as poète maudit belies the fact that here was a poet who knew exactly what he was doing.

Times Literary Supplement - Marjorie Perloff

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe is a landmark intervention that helps to explain why, among his antebellum contemporaries, Poe alone has remained a fixture of popular culture as well as a globally familiar icon of literary art.

J. Gerald Kennedy

In the process of clearing up so much of the critical fog that has enshrouded the poetry of Poe, McGann helps his readers understand how to read poetry more generally… McGann has demonstrated that Poe’s significance as a poet in his own time and as a major influence on the development of poetry for 150 years since makes him one of the two or three greatest American poets.

Books & Culture - Harry Lee Poe

McGann [wants] to set the record straight, right an imbalance and show why Poe deserves a place beside Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the venerated father and mother of American poetry. His marvelous short book combines old-fashioned ‘close reading’ with a capacious historical and theoretical sense of Poe’s place in American literature and mid-19th-century American culture… McGann’s basic thesis about Poe’s poems (he calls them ‘Poe-try’) and his remarks about individual gestures, lines, sounds and rhythms are constantly engaging. Readers who believe that God is in the details will find plenty to astonish them… By moving away from poetry’s expository and thematic features to its aesthetic and rhetorical ones, McGann has performed an important cultural and intellectual service.

Wall Street Journal - Willard Spiegelman

McGann has set out to address and correct the problem of Poe’s poetry, and the result is a necessary volume not only for those compelled and beguiled by Poe but for anyone who understands the importance of poetic tradition and its umbilical to American imagination. This book is McGann’s deep-seeing riposte to those critics—Emerson, Yvor Winters, D. H. Lawrence, Harold Bloom, et al.—who have dismissed Poe’s aesthetics as by turns decadent and preposterous… Part of the large pleasure of McGann’s book is his contra-academic gift of phrase, his parsed insights into Poe’s ‘legend-laden life’ and the ‘angel of the odd’ suspended over his writing desk.

New Republic - William Giraldi

From a close reading of Poe’s rhetorical tropes and careful reconstructions of context, McGann draws out a much richer understanding of Poe’s perspective on art and life.

Inside Higher Ed - Scott McLemee

Elegant… One of McGann’s greatest services is to introduce lay readers to Poe’s critical writings. He excerpts several longish selections from Poe’s correspondence and reviews as well as the Marginalia, sundry magazine pieces he authored between 1845 and 1849. What emerges is an Edgar Allan Poe who thought profoundly about poetry and literature and who was able, mostly, to express his ideas and theories in clear prose.

Virginia Quarterly Review - John S. Sledge

McGann restores Poe to his foundational role for American, and 19th century, poetics. McGann’s breathtaking scholarship makes Poe’s work thrillingly present and hauntingly prescient. Only this and nothing more.

Charles Bernstein

The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel promises to save Poe’s poetry from [a] dire critical fate… [McGann’s] aim is ambitious: to give Poe’s poetry academic significance, to establish both its aesthetic appeal and its political relevance. As Edmund Wilson does in his appreciative essay ‘Poe at Home and Abroad,’ McGann figures Poe’s work as the suspension bridge across the chasm separating romanticism and modernism. He situates Poe’s work alongside and against the romantic poetry of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth; evaluates Poe’s sonic influence on the writing of Rimbaud, Mallarmé, Baudelaire; and, expands upon Eliot’s essay ‘From Poe to Valéry’ to trace the influence of Poe’s critique of the romantic ‘I’ through symbolism into high modern elasticism, and then, into language poetry and the latest work of Charles Bernstein. He demonstrates Poe’s unquestionable impact on the way Americans thought about poetry and the way poetry thought about itself.

Los Angeles Review of Books - Ava Kofman

2014-07-22
A scholarly defense of Poe's aesthetics. Although Poe was a popular poet among his contemporaries, the eminent Ralph Waldo Emerson scorned him as "The Jingle Man," and many later readers concurred, including poet and critic Yvor Winters, who attacked Poe's "obliviousness to the function of intellectual content in poetry." Yet both T.S. Eliot and William Carlos Williams insisted that Poe was both significant and influential. McGann (English/Univ. of Virginia; A New Republic of Letters: Memory and Scholarship in the Age of Digital Reproduction, 2014, etc.) addresses this study to those "who remain uncertain" about Poe's poetic importance. The author provides meticulously close readings of poems and a few prose selections: Marginalia ("the theoretical center of Poe's work"), his reviews of Hazlitt and Longfellow, and a long, discursive letter to poet James Russell Lowell. "Poe stands out," writes McGann, "…because of the intimate connection between his theoretical writings and poetic practice." Poe conceived of poetry as oral performance, using imagery and language whose "predominant power is acoustic." Vehemently opposed to what he called the "heresy of The Didactic," Poe believed that "social and ethical attitudes had ossified into various kinds of American ideologies, American exceptionalism and social progress being two of the most baneful." Such ideas did not inform his poetry. Annotating poems' literary allusions does not enrich a reader's experience but rather "can be quite misleading if it suggests that the poetry requires the external control of translation or decoding," and in fact, such scholarly investigations can undermine the force of "the work's catastrophic energies." The author finds recurring use of uncanny words, "dazzling verbal transformations" and unexpected rhymes. In a book for literary critics, scholars and instructors, Poe as a consummate craftsman who daringly reimagined how poems invent meaning.

Kirkus Reviews