Poe’s Poetry Reconsidered

In this study, Jerome McGann offers the first major assessment of the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe in many years, one that considers the importance of poetry as such and examines the role of the engaged reader in producing meaning. McGann begins by revisiting the contradictory views of earlier critics, who have called Poe’s poetry “unremittingly vulgar” and at the same time “theoretically advanced, even pretentious”—contradictions with which T. S. Eliot wrestled for much of his professional career. McGann argues that, while Eliot criticized Poe’s verse, he wondered uneasily “whether Poe all along might have been a secret influence on his own poetry” [2]. If Poe had captivated the great French poet Charles Baudelaire, thought Eliot, then there must have been something American critics failed to notice. McGann’s book explores this “something” and makes a strong case for reading Poe, the “Alien Angel,” as a significant poet whose verse requires readers to participate in its meaning through performance.

McGann’s examination of the music of Poe’s poetry is one of the book’s many strengths. Addressing observations by Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams, McGann argues that Poe’s verse focuses on “the reader and the reader’s responses” [5]. Like Shelley, Swinburne, and Mallarmé, who “think about poetry along Poetic lines” [6], Poe demonstrates his aesthetic theory through sound, and it is through sound that he requires readers to reciprocate—to reveal their individual understandings of the verse by way of recitation. With regard to Poe’s side of the performative exchange: “no American poet,” in McGann’s view, “ever realized more completely Gertrude Stein’s program of ‘Composition as Explanation’” [6]. Consequently, McGann suggests that Poe’s obsession with literary “plagiarism” derives from his interest in “language as such,” yet he terms Poe a “literary privateer” for calling readers’ attention to these matters to reveal his own culpability [7]. McGann even posits that “an important and neglected ethics and social commentary pervade Poe’s work,” more “nakedly” in the poetics and poetry than in the prose [10]. Throughout the study, McGann makes a compelling case for the significance of Poe’s verse in itself even as that verse engages with key social, ethical, and aesthetic values of antebellum America.

In chapter 1, “Poe In Propria Persona,” McGann carefully examines Poe’s Marginalia and reviews, which he regards as constituting the “theoretical center of Poe’s work” [18]. While Eliot never questioned Poe’s “cultural significance,” he struggled nevertheless with Poe’s poetic significance. For McGann, that significance comes from his awareness that “writers are always also readers and, reciprocally, that readers are always rewriting what they read” [22]. It is in the Marginalia that Poe explicitly weighs this “performative” aspect of writing. McGann observes: “The idea of poetry, its conceptual basis, is not adequately conceivable except as a poetic execution. In this sense the subject of Poe’s poetry is always finally the idea of poetry itself, and that idea is only to be realized performatively” [34]. Music thus holds “intellectual primacy” in Poe’s artistic vision and poetic execution; all other elements in the poem serve as “functions of the music” [36].

Chapter 2, “Poetics and Echopoetics,” further considers Poe’s musical poetics and its suggestive qualities. Poe’s use of literary allusion, according to McGann, exemplifies what Charles Bernstein terms “Echopoetics,” and, “like Bernstein,” McGann goes on to assert, “Poe is a shameless thief of poetic fire because he wants to make the experience of poetry the subject of his poetry” [86–87]. Poe’s poetry, like Lord Byron’s, is meant “to be listened to and performatively translated” by the reader [90]. McGann concludes with a reading of Eureka as the work that “explains” Poe’s poetics [95–113].

In chapter 3, “Poetry: or Masks for a Read Death,” McGann counters Ivor Winters’s view that Poe’s poetry lacks “content” by arguing, again, that Poe’s poems are “performative rather than expressive,” and that like those of Arthur Rimbaud...