A New Poe Companion

REVIEWS A New Poe Companion Kevin J. Hayes, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2002.xx, 266.$70.00cloth, $23.00paper. Iam inclined to take the title of TheCambridgeCompanion to Edgar Allan Poe seriously. Teaching at a smallundergraduate collegein upstate NewYork, I could use an accessible companion to help introduce students to the study of Poe. The p u b lisher’sblurb claims that the essays are “specially tailored to the needsof undergraduates,”but Iam skeptical, after long experience of using critical texts designedostensiblyfor the students I teach. And I am not encouragedwhen the editor,Kevin J. Hayes,reveals in the introduction that he challenged contributors to write “forstudents returning to Poe for the first time since their youth”and for “seasonedPoe scholars,”to combine “general overview and original insight” [3].I understand the marketing motive here, but scholars have enough difficultywritingfor studentswithout being tempted to please their peers, which is what theyareinclinedto doby trainingand professional necessity.Hayes believeshis crew has successfully accomplished its task, but the Companion he has assembled is not as friendly to undergraduates as it might be. The collection containsfourteen essays on a wide range of subjects,a brief chronologyof Poe’s life, and a selected list of editions of Poe’sworks, bibliographies and reference guides, and biographicaland criticalstudies.Topical essays treat Poe’scriticalcareerand aesthetictheories;hisrole in the literarymarketplace;his humor,gothicism, science and detective fiction, idealization of women, exploitationof racial sensationalism,and influenceupon popularcultureand modernistart. Three essaysfocuson individualworks: TheNawatiue ofArthur Gordonfim, “TheFall of the Houseof Usher,”and “TheRaven”and “Ulalume.”The traditional and the trendy in Poe studies are represented , in both topics consideredand criticalperspectives employed. The coverage is admirable, except for the relative neglect of Poe’s poetry, which Hayes excuses as consistent with a shift in emphasisin Poestudiesafterpoststructuralism“to those works that could be analyzed in relation to their times” [3]. The argument seems odd: what in Poe’s canon is more characteristic of his times than his poetry? Organized to lead us from theory to practice, the Companionopenswith three essays on Poe the critic. Each of these reveals, however, that Poe’s aestheticsreflect a practice of criticalwritingthat was geared for the periodicals in which he published his poetry and fiction. In “The Poet as Critic,”Kent Ljungquist deftly outlines the journalistic contexts and development of Poe’s critical career and ideas. He notes Poe’s capacityfor tailoring his criticism to fit requirements of the periodical press, for combiningcriticism and fiction , and contends that, despite the diversityand ephemeral nature of these publishing outlets, Poe’scriticism expresses “aremarkably coherent, selfconsciousview of poetry and the creativep r e cess” [181.Ljungquist’srelatively brief treatment of Poe’scriticismis extended in RachelPolonsky’s essay on “Poe’sAesthetic Theory.” She observes that Poe drewupon antitheticalcriticaltraditions: he subscribed to romantic ideas of poetry as expressiveof an excited imagination or soul and accessibleonly to poetcritics like Coleridge;but he was swayed by the circumstancesof reviewingfor popular magazines to adopt a practical criticism of technique, following Aristotle and Horace, which demystifies the romantic imagination to reveal the means by which poets please, instruct, or otherwise affect readers. Like Ljungquist, Polonskystressesthe importance of thejournalistic context in which Poe formulated his aesthet- 102 Poe StudiedDark Romanticism ics,but she comes to a different conclusion about it. FollowingT. S. Eliot,she argues that Poe’s critical writings have “had an effect arguably disproportionate to their coherence or originality,”that they are more style than substance, written mainly forjournalistic effect [44].Poe sold out, as far as she is concerned, in order to develop a practical criticism that would play in the magazines. His capitulation to the tumultuous milieu of periodical writing explains why he failed to theorize systematicallyabout romantic concepts of beautyand imagination and focused increasingly on a unity of “effect”in poetry and fiction that is readily accessibleto analysis.Polonskyargues,moreover,that Poe was acutely aware of the absurdity of writing systematic criticism for cut-and-paste periodicals, a situation he satirizes in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq.” Thus she confirms from a different angle Ljungquist’spoint about the merging of journalism, criticism, and fiction in Poe’s canon. These two studies leave students to...