Poe, Edgar Allan - David Leverenz (essay date 1995)
David Leverenz (essay date 1995)
SOURCE: Leverenz, David. “Poe and Gentry Virginia.” In The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, pp. 210-36. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.
[In the following essay, Leverenz situates Poe within the Southern literary tradition.]
Allen Tate's remarkable 1949 essay, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” defines Poe as southern not only for his high sense of a writer's calling but because Poe understood better than anyone else that the modern world was going straight to hell, or to the bourgeois, commodifying North. For Tate, a culture not controlled by leisured gentlemen means Dante's Inferno, which Poe rewrites: a disintegration from reason and community into machine-like, alienated egotisms of the will, vampiric women, and cravings for sensations. Tate mournfully concludes, however, that Poe lacked the stylistic and moral control to be a true...
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