In [the] second paragraph [of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe], Poe is 'complex, inspired, limited, pretentious, uncompromising, banal'; on page three his art is 'strange, haunted, tawdry, inexorable, remote yet inescapable'. And we've still got a long, long way to go. (p. 97)

Needless to say, Hoffman is a man obsessed, so much so that at times he apes his subject's manias: '… my chronicle of Poe's life and work and reputation and influence and how Edgarpoe wormed his way into my guts and gizzard and haunted my brain and laid a spell upon my soul which this long harangue is an attempt to exorcise'.

Now as Hoffman admits, a lot has been written about Poe. He is generous in his avowed indebtedness to fellow soul-critics such as Richard Wilbur, but crude in his dismissal of earlier biographers and analysts. Recounting Poe's marriage at 27 to his cousin Virginia, then 14, he condemns as 'an impertinence' the theory of two American psychoanalysts—based on Poe's poem Annabel Lee—that Virginia died a virgin because Poe was impotent. It's not our business, he declares, 'whether he could get it up or not'. What is our business? 'What he wrote'—in screaming italics. Why, then, does Hoffman himself waste so much expendable space on idle biographical gossip, not least incredulity that his hero should lapse so far as to try for a military commission at West Point?

I suspect Hoffman is modelling himself on Charles Olson, especially his erratic study of Melville, Call Me Ishmael. There is the same wild, self-indulgent theorising, the same embarrassing attempt at a winningly colloquial prose style (sentences beginning 'I mean,…', rhetorical questions to the reader: 'don't you think so?', two-word paragraphs, calling himself a 'dum-dum' for not having his blinding flashes of insight earlier et al). But where Olson is concise, Hoffman is diffuse; where Olson is original, Hoffman is simply inept. It is this hopeless attempt to be endearing that deprives his study of any vestige of seriousness or authority.

It's a great shame, really, because amid all the dross Hoffman serves his subject well. His review of the poetry rightly proves it underestimated; he affords proper status to often neglected works such as the Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka and the Imp of the Perverse. Above all, he demonstrates with remarkable effect the coherence of so diverse a body of work, so often taken as the random ravings of a mind half insane.

But the attempt is ruined by a failure that years of Poe involvement would understandably produce: overwriting. Mr Hoffman … sounds like a stimulating teacher. But the tone of his book, with its reckless enthusiasm, its unabashed egotism, its myopic sense of mission, is inexorably undergraduate. (pp. 97-8)