Poe, Edgar Allan | John Brooks Moore (essay date 1926)
John Brooks Moore (essay date 1926)
SOURCE: Introduction to Selections from Poe's Literary Criticism, F. S. Crofts & Co., 1926, pp. vii-xix.
[In the following essay, Moore argues that Poe's main ambition was to be a magazine proprietor. He therefore examines Poe primarily as a journalist who was committed to the growth of the American magazine culture and, through it, the construction of an American literary criticism distinct from the English critical tradition.]
As soon as Fate allows I will have a magazine of my own, and will endeavor to kick up a dust.
—Poe to P. P. Cook, 1839.
I
That Poe was apparently first of all a journalist—neither a poet nor a writer of fiction—cannot well be doubted. Those of his contemporaries who knew him and left some record of their knowledge almost invariably owed their acquaintance with Poe to his journalistic...
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