The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel by Jerome McGann (review)
Rent from DeepDyve- The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel by Jerome McGann
Bringing Poe's poetry forward is a good and too rare thing. McGann observes, as T. S. Eliot (whose response to Poe serves in this book as a signpost) did before him, that Poe's poetry is far more important in French than in English, because the French writers who loved his work could not really understand English. McGann returns to Poe's marginalia as a body of texts that help us to find the poetry's bearings, producing in the process a kind of marginalia on marginalia—quite a Poesque enterprise. Rather less is said than seemed promised about the implications of Poe for ethics and politics, or about the religious contexts of Poe's apocalyptism. Instead, the formalism that Poe helped invent is pursued as a critique of Romanticism, focusing on its performative self-reflection and, as any reader of Poe's poetry should and must, on the word echoes as they resound among each other. [End Page 319]
Shira Wolosky, professor of American studies and English literature at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, is the author of Emily Dickinson: A Voice of War; Language Mysticism; The Art of Poetry; The Riddles of Harry Potter; and the volume on nineteenth-century poetry in the Cambridge History of American Literature.
