Literary History and Editorial Method: Poe and Antebellum America

An acute sense of what Marjorie Perloff named "the poetics of indeterminacy" has marked criticism and scholarship for at least thirty years. Synthetic narratives—historicist, dialectical, psychoanalytic—have seen their truth values turn imaginary, becoming what William Blake in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell called "poetic tales": arbitrary constructions, "fictions of lineage" and order.¹ With the space of knowledge grown so radically volatile and complex, even "contested," the teacher's watchword became "teach the conflicts," the scholar's, "explore the contradictions." So David Reynolds dives "beneath the American Renaissance" to expose the fault lines of F. O. Matthiessen's famous normative narrative, and Timothy Powell's Ruthless Democracy makes a polemic on the issues: "The real subject of Ruthless Democracy is … not simply a revision of the canon of American literature, but rather an argument for how engaging a multiplicity of cultural perspectives (both historical and literary) can lead to a greater understanding of the richly complicated, infinitely conflicted nature of 'American' identity."²

Although we have long questioned the literary history—even the kind of literary history—laid out in Matthiessen's American Renaissance, we have found trouble devising alternatives. New Historicism emerged as a corrective response to the market collapse for normative, canonical, and synthetic histories. Its work came in two forms. On one hand, New Historicists devised collage or case-history approaches, building presentations—more maps than narratives—with deliberated "fissures" to provoke "reader response." On the other, they sponsored a valuable range of microhistorical investigations that could leave the rest, the synthesis, to silence.

Because of its extreme social and cultural volatility, antebellum America brings these issues of critical and scholarly method into sharp focus. Recent scholars push at the limits of New Historicist strategies when they wonder, for instance, how to develop "a[n Edgar Allan] Poe biography with multiple endings";³ "a literary history of multiple narratives";⁴ or a criticism focused on "forms of authorship" that are not "author-centered" or even authoritative.⁵

As it happens, we can actually do these things. Indeed, the tools and procedures for their implementation have been in place, have even been deployed, for quite some time. Because this work has developed in the marches of our literary and cultural centers—in bibliographical, editorial, and textual studies—it has, until recently, passed without much notice. The emergence of internet culture and, for humanist scholars, of online research and publication spaces has begun to bring such work to greater attention. Before looking more closely in that direction, however, we should return to antebellum America and consider once again the vexed cultural status of Edgar Allan Poe. For scholars and educators interested in literary history, the problem of Poe runs out far and in deep.

I. Whitman's Dream

Few literary commonplaces are more clear than the antithesis of Walt Whitman and Edgar Allan Poe. Whitman's angel, Ralph Waldo Emerson, had little interest in Poe's work, and Poe, for his part, was contemptuous of Transcendentalist optimism, its belief in social and cultural progress, and—perhaps most of all—the dominance of its social and cultural authority. In this network of antagonisms, Poe's importance in relation to the so-called American Renaissance has been greatly obscured, as we know. It has also been, until recently, misunderstood.

The nineteenth-century escape from this misunderstanding was through protomodernist aesthetic thought developed in England and France in the latter half of the period: that's to say, through Dante Gabriel Rossetti and Algernon Charles Swinburne, on one hand, Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé, on the other.⁶ Profound as this way has been, there's another way, nativist and surprising, that we have forgotten—through Whitman.

When the Poe Memorial was unveiled in Baltimore in November 1875, Whitman—remarkably—made a special point to attend. Struck by the "Conspicuous Absence of the Popular Poets" at the ceremony, he used the situation to reflect on what he would later call "Edgar Poe's Significance" for American literature and culture. His initial comments came in the Washington Star's account, probably written by himself...