Romanticism in a New Key and the Case of Edgar Allan Poe

If we follow the thought laid out by a. o. lovejoy in his celebrated essay “On the Discrimination of Romanticisms” (1924), every author we call Romantic is playing “Romanticism in a New Key.” The point is elementary, perhaps even banal, but not unimportant. Romantics all, Blake, Wordsworth, and Byron could scarcely be less alike. If your focus is politics and history, however, they share a common ground. But, of course, that ground was in each case sharply contested and seen very differently. Or take “Nature,” that pressing Romantic subject: for each of them it was judged very differently.

Yet differences in a common pursuit are sometimes so marked they force us to recognize the onset of consequential change. That’s what I want to discuss here: Romanticism in an American Key, which is definitely Romanticism in a New Key.

A few decades ago David Porter wrote a superb study of Emily Dickinson (1981). His subtitle, The Modern Idiom, gets at Modernism’s distinctive contribution to Romantic ways of thinking and writing. For all its interests in classical tradition, Modernity birthed some of the wildest forms of Romantic expression—Lautréamont, Wilde, Jarry, Futurism, Dada, Hart Crane. And as it’s now widely understood, classicism was reborn and, according to many, actually invented in the Romantic Movement.

I recall these commonplaces because the signal exemplar of the Modern Idiom Porter was talking about has always been Edgar Allan Poe. This was the argument first made by Baudelaire and Mallarmé and it has been regulative ever since, from Lautréamont and Rimbaud, through Kafka, Valery, and Borges, to Angela Carter and Arno Schmidt. Poe descends to us through such formidable European lines of reception that T. S. Eliot, who resisted Poe as strongly as Poe resisted Wordsworth, struggled to make sense of it. And remember something else: these lines of interpretation are primarily cast in creative rather than critical idioms. Especially important are the artists who interpret Poe by performative remediations. Rossetti, Manet, and Redon led the way, but their trenchant reading moves have not flagged even to the present, as we know from the distinguished line of twentieth-century graphic illustration, popular and highbrow.¹

These writers and artists have been reading Poe in the same spirit that the author was writing. We can see this from Poe’s first critical manifesto, the Preface to his 1831 Poems, as well as the second, the Preface to his 1840 collection, Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. Both lay out Poe’s approach to the cultural claims of poetry (in the first case) and of imaginative literature more generally (in the second). Between those two documents Poe worked up a book collection of fantastic fictions he first titled Tales of the Arabesque and, subsequently, Tales of the Folio Club. It was never published as a book, though its individual pieces appeared in scattered periodicals during the 1830s. When Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque appeared in 1840, Poe’s newly keyed Romanticism was fully developed. With the partial exception of certain of De Quincey’s works, nothing in England or America bore even a remote resemblance to such strange and singular creations as “Epimanes” and “Siope.”

In the Preface to the 1831 Poems, Poe lays out an approach to interpretive reflection that he and his inheritors have always recognized and tried to follow: “Against the subtleties which would make poetry a study—not a passion,” Poe observed, “it becomes the metaphysician to reason—but the poet to protest” (13). For Poe, the claims of poetry are adequately validated by demonstrative action, not rational argument. “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), Poe’s most famous critical protest for those claims, is best read as Mallarmé read it: as a first-person imaginative fiction.²

Long ago René Wellek pointed out that while a visionary discourse shapes British Romantic discussions of poetry and imagination, the Germans and the French found a musical vocabulary and grammar most useful.³ It needs no argument that musical categories are indispensable for Poe, Emerson’s “Jingle Man,” especially when...