Chapter 12 Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe excelled in several types of writing, publishing tales of terror and supernatural agency, detective stories, romantic and narrative poetry, burlesques, hoaxes, and literary criticism. As a magazine editor, he hoped to elevate American literature to world prominence; he therefore rejected the idea that there should be a specifically national character to American writing, and severely criticized contemporary authors when they failed to meet his standards. Quarrelsome, temperamental, alcoholic, unreliable, he made few friends and many enemies. The facts of his life, the most melodramatic of any of the major American writers of his generation, have been hard to judge, but lurid legends about him circulated even before he died, some of which were spread by Poe himself.
Poe always put his highest stock in poetry, which he called a“passion” and not merely a “purpose”. As he remarked in The Philosophy of Composition, poetry, even more than fiction, provides the possibility of taking the reader out of body, in effect out of time, through “that intense and pure elevation of soul” which can come with “the contemplation of the beautiful”. In a life filled with a tangled mess, the pursuit of the beautiful in works of art motivated Poe’s writing to the very end.
Critical Perspectives
1.Aesthetic Study
Erin E. Forbes, in “Edgar Allan Poe and the Great Dismal Swamp: Reading Race and Environment after the Aesthetic Turn”, offers criticism of the poem Dream-Land by Edgar Allan Poe. It explores the characteristics of the poem in terms of environment and race following its aesthetic turn. It discusses the claims of the poem in transcending into everyday life, and the aesthetics in the American literary history.[1]
Daniel Hoffman, in “Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the Beautiful”, discusses the life and poetry of American author Edgar Allan Poe; childhood; tragedies which marked his life; Poe’s first volume of poems, Tamerlane; criticism and interpretation of his poems; Poe’s influence on poets and authors that succeeded him.[2]
2.Canonization Study
Robert Albrecht,in “Song of the Poet: Lost in Translation or Re-discovered in a New Form?”, discusses a compact disc (CD) entitled Song of the Poet, which sets various poems to music. Robert outlines the process of turning poems from written form to music to electronic media and discusses copyright issues. He explores the challenges of translating between languages and between media. Particular focus is given to his interpretation of the poems Annabel Lee by Edgar Allan Poe, Mending Wall by Robert Frost, and I Hear America Singing by Walt Whitman.[3]
3.Psychoanalytical Criticism
John Samuel Tieman, in “Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe”, uses psychoanalytic theory to frame Edgar Allan Poe’s history as an enlisted man in the United States Army. For Poe, these were years of accomplishments as both artist and soldier. When researching this article, two forms of comment are readily detected. Military historians immediately understand the significance in Poe’s meteoric rise to sergeant major. But these writers tend not to appreciate the literary history. Literary historians often note that Poe was an enlisted soldier, but, beyond that, seem not to appreciate that information. In none of this is there any sense that Poe sought, and for two years found, a degree of emotional stability. The social structure of the army contained and maintained Poe’s psychic structure. This intertwining of the military and the literary, coupled with an understanding of psycho-social development, is the frame needed to understand Sergeant Major Poe.[4]
4.New Historicism(https://www.daowen.com)
Philip D. Beidler, in “Mythopoetic Justice: Democracy and the Death of Edgar Allan Poe”, focuses on the mystery involved in the strange death of the poet Edgar Allan Poe. To update the cultural connection, Poe, it also turns out, could easily have explained to me why, as recently as 20 years ago, in my hometown of Tuscaloosa, Alabama, it was illegal to sell beer, wine, or liquor on election day. Nor would the historic interest of the conversation have been diminished by the fact that the town in question, the seat of the state university and the state hospital for the insane, had also once, in its days as the old frontier capital, flourished as one of the literary epicenters of “Southwestern Humor”, including service as the fictional site of some the most celebrated episodes in the career of the rapscallionish hero of Johnson Jones Hooper’s 1845 Adventures of Captain Simon Suggs, itself a roistering, vicious parody of Jacksonian campaign biography. It was the final playing out of a political theater of the absurd that Edgar Poe would have understood. It may have been the final act of the political drama that he saw in his last moments on earth.[5]
5.Cultural Study
Christopher Peterson, in “Possessed by Poe: Reading Poe in an Age of Intellectual Guilt”, enters the debate over the French appropriation of Poe not by seeking redress for the supposed political misdeeds of either Poe or the French, but rather, by addressing itself to the American response to the French reception of Poe. While American cultural studies critics in particular have sought to hold the French accountable for ignoring Poe’s troubling biography—one in which the question of Poe’s relationship to, and possible support of, antebellum slavery remains unanswered to this day—Christopher argues that the important question of how we as critics situate ourselves in relation to material history is too often buried under a moralizing rhetoric of accountability. Following from, and extending, Jacques Derrida’s notion of “spectrality”, Christopher maintains that material history is itself a kind of conjuration that belies any strict distinction between the material and the immaterial. Against the demand for accountability, the notion of history-asconjuration allows us to address questions of historical responsibility in a manner that circumvents the impulse to hold Poe accountable for his crimes.[6]
【注释】
[1]Forbes E E. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Great Dismal Swamp: Reading Race and Environment after the Aesthetic Turn”. Modern Philology, 2016, 114(2):359-387.
[2]Hoffman D. “Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the Beautiful”. American Poetry Review, 1995, 24(6):11-18.
[3]Albrecht R.“‘Song of the Poet’: Lost in Translation or Re-discovered in a New Form? ”. ETC: A Review of General Semantics. 2010, 67(2):177-190.
[4]Tieman J S. “Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe”. International Journal of Applied Psychoanalytic Studies, 2016, 13(4):351-366.
[5]Beidler P D. “Mythopoetic Justice: Democracy and the Death of Edgar Allan Poe”. Midwest Quarterly, 2005, 46(3):252-267.
[6]Peterson C. “Possessed by Poe: Reading Poe in an Age of Intellectual Guilt”. Cultural Values, 2001, 5(2):198-220.