Abstract
Short story writer, poet, and America’s foremost literary critic, Edgar Allan Poe remains an unrecognized founding father of American letters despite his imprint on Modernist and Postmodernist art. Poe, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson are the three great foundational figures of modern American poetry. While the last two have received the recognition they deserve, Poe’s role remains controversial. Widely read, his popularity worked against him. Emerson called him “the jingle man” (Chubb 1910, 285); James Russell Lowell considered his work to be “two-fifths sheer fudge” (Lowell 1848, 57); and Henry James condescended that “enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection” since “to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self.” James compared Poe to Baudelaire and considered that “Poe was vastly the greater charlatan of the two, as well as the greater genius” (James 1876, 280). In the twentieth century, Matthiessen withheld “a full length treatment” of Poe from his monumental American Renaissance (Matthiessen 1941, xii n.), while Yvor Winters censured his incoherence and obscurantism (Winters 1947). T. S. Eliot deemed Poe merely a littérateur for teenagers, a writer whose intellect was that “of a highly gifted young person before puberty” (Eliot 1965, 35).
This study is part of a research project funded by the Spanish Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades and by the European Regional Development Fund (Ref. PGC2018-097143-A-I00).
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Notes
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Psychoanalytic studies on Poe were initiated by Jacques Lacan and Jacques Derrida and were collected by John P. Muller and William J. Richardson in The Purloined Poe: Lacan, Derrida, and Psychoanalytic Reading (1988); see also Barthes (1981; rpt. 1987, 133–161). Gaston Bachelard analyzed Poe in The Psychoanalysis of Fire (1964).
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In Huysmans’ novel A rebours (Against the Grain), the main character, Des Esseintes, finds that among the few writers he can bear to read is Poe, in whom he sees a master and a strange, profound thinker.
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In 1925, Poe was mentioned in Chinese journals as the “founder of the short story” and an “extraordinary genius” (quoted in Vines 1999b, 3).
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In a letter to René Taupin of 1928, Pound insists on the relationship of Imagism to Symons and the French Parnassians (Pound 1971, 216–218).
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Poe assimilated Kantian philosophy through Coleridge, whose oeuvre, especially Biographia Literaria, he knew very well, to the point of appropriating some of his aphorisms (Davidson 1957, Pahl 2009, Stovall 1969). In the words of Floyd Stovall (quoting George E. Woodberry), Coleridge was “the guiding genius of Poe’s entire intellectual life” (Stovall 1930, 127; Bate 1990, 231–245).
- 9.
Monica Papazu bases her argument on Spinoza’s Ethics in The Chief Works, translated by R. H. M. Elwes (1951), vol. II, Part I, Prop. xi, xiii, xv, pp. 51, 54, 55, and Part II, Prop. i, ii, pp. 83, 84.
- 10.
On the implication of “analytical thinking” see especially Papazu (1989, 132–133).
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Patea, V. (2023). Poe Among the Modernists: A (Ghostly) Reappraisal. In: Ibáñez, J.R.I., Guerrero-Strachan, S.R. (eds) Retrospective Poe. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-09986-1_4
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