The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America,
as Emerson s sneering quip about The Jingle Man testifies. That
these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a
persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they
attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and
especially France notably Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery has been
further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold
reassessment of Poe s achievement, arguing that he belongs with
Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural
presence.
Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson s dim
view of Poe s verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William
Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made
its first appearance in Poe s work. "The Poet Edgar Allan Poe"
explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they
understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive
influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann
contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the
creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic
attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The
ethical and political significance of Poe s work follows from what
the poet takes as his great subject: the reader.
The Poet Edgar Allan Poe" takes its own readers on a spirited
tour through a wide range of Poe s verse as well as the critical
and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas
about poetry and poetics."
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