Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts by John Cullen Gruesser (review)

Edgar Allan Poe and His Nineteenth-Century American Counterparts serves two primary purposes. First, it contributes to debunking some of the more popular myths about Poe's life and literary achievement in a manner accessible even to readers who have no more than a passing familiarity with Poe's work. As Gruesser explains, "Because of his popularity and ubiquity, people today think they know all about Poe," yet continue to propagate falsehoods and misconceptions about the relationship between his life and writings. Gruesser's book aims to address "four widely held misconceptions" (5). First, Gruesser aims to "counter the mistaken belief in Poe's one-dimensionality," including the tendency to turn Poe "almost exclusively, and unfortunately, into the master of horror" (5). Second, Gruesser emphasizes that because Poe attempted to support himself, his young wife, and his mother-in-law through writing for magazines, he "wrote more criticism" than "he did creative works," and these writings shaped his relationship with his contemporaries as much, if not more, than his poems and tales. Third, he emphasizes that Poe's writings create their powerful effects through "deliberate design and meticulous craftsmanship." Recognition and elucidation of this counters the unfortunately persistent "assumption that Poe's characters, several of whom commit murder, otherwise engage in aberrant behavior, and have lost their sanity, are reflections of the writer himself" (5).

While correcting these misconceptions is a task that a large body of scholarship has previously undertaken, it nonetheless continues to be an important one, as so little of the large corpus of Poe scholarship manages to penetrate Poe's image in popular culture as a sort of gothic, demonic caricature. More importantly for academics and mavens of Poe or of American literature broadly, though, Gruesser's book counters misconceptions by presenting a series of original contributions to scholarship that are at once granular and important.

With the brief "Introduction: Dreams and Mystifications of Poe," Gruesser sets out the procedure that will also inform the following chapters, each of which focuses on the response to some aspect of Poe's work by other nineteenth-century American writers. The introduction's focus is on Walt Whitman, whose various remarks about Poe Gruesser uses to launch a re-valuation of Poe's importance for many of his literary contemporaries and immediate successors. Gruesser focuses on how Whitman's critical views regarding Poe's achievements evolved over the course of his own long literary career, but tended to reflect Whitman's concerns about his own authorial persona more than the actuality of Poe's life and work.

The rest of the book is divided into three parts and further subdivided into six chapters and a final Coda. Part one, "The Quixotic Quest for Literary Fame, Financial Stability, and a Republic of Letters in Antebellum America," begins with a short chapter that puts into context Poe's career as a magazinist, and his struggle to make enough money to survive and support his family. It explores the intersections between Ben Franklin's writings, literary philosophy, and publishing career and those of Poe, who in many ways presented himself as an anti-thesis to Franklin. Gruesser notes that as Poe started out in earnest to support himself as a writer in the early 1830s, he rejected Franklin's ideas, incorporating a non-pragmatic artistic philosophy into the "Prologue" for his planned, but ultimately aborted, "Tales of the Folio Club," while parodying Franklin's Autobiography" (11). Gruesser doesn't elide the fact that "Poe frequently made choices based on principle or personal animus that cost him financially." However, he does emphasize that "because of the deprivation resulting from such choices and the other factors making a literary career in the 1830s and 1840s all but untenable for someone without means or powerful connections, Poe knew only too well the value of the money he did not have" (19). The chapter concludes with the crucial recognition that Poe's art-for-art...