SOURCE: Thompson, G. R. “Edgar Allan Poe and the Writers of the Old South.” In Columbia Literary History of the United States, edited by Emory Elliott, pp. 262-77. New York: Columbia University Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Thompson contrasts the typically regional focus of nineteenth-century Southern writers with that of Edgar Allan Poe, whose work consistently transcends the literary tropes and stereotypes of his contemporaries.]

One of the most striking features of Southern literature is the contrast between writing of the late nineteenth and the twentieth century and that of the long preceding era. Before the war between the states, despite a powerful cultural construct informed by mythic significance, only one major national writer, Edgar Allan Poe, emerged from the “Old South.” This judgment is not merely a modern one. Antebellum Southern magazinists and publishers continually decried the dearth of Southern literature compared with that of the North, increasingly so as tensions mounted toward 1861. Southern culture, they protested, refused to support a regional literature. Yet they were convinced that the South possessed a “slumbering genius” that needed only to be awakened.

Southern concern for a unique Southern literature has been traced by scholars in the most famous of the magazines of the Old South, the Southern Literary Messenger. The significance of the Messenger comes partly from its association with Poe, who contributed poems, stories, and hundreds of reviews to its pages and increased its circulation sixfold in his brief period of editorship from 1835 to 1837. As the most enduring of Southern magazines (1834-64), the Messenger also reflects the shift away from cultural accommodation with the North. In its early years, it actively sought contributions from Northern writers and maintained a moderating position on Northern and Southern differences and on the issue of slavery. Its pages featured certain insistent themes: the beauty of the Southern landscape; the history of idealism and chivalry in the Southern people; the rightness of Southern institutions. Another major theme appeared early: the need for a professional class of men of letters to awaken the genius of the South. But the magazinists overestimated the desire of Southerners for their own press. Literary magazines in the South died young; books published in the South did not sell.

Over the decade of the 1830s the theme of the rightness of Southern institutions became more persistently linked with a conviction of the wrongness of the North. By 1841 the mild proslavery stance of the Messenger had given way to the idea of defending Southern rights and interests. The decade of the 1850s saw repeated complaints about the lack of patronage and payment for professional writers along with exhortations to Southern writers to defend the “identify” of their region.

The career of the Messenger replicates in little the germination of separatism in the South, seemingly present from the beginning. The justification of slavery in a class-conscious hierarchical system sanctioned by late medieval and Renaissance visions of world order runs a parallel course with visions of autonomy. As in the North, the idea of the New World was from the first charged with significance in the South: here was the world garden, the golden land of plenty. But whereas the Puritans sought by their “errand” into the wilderness to create an exemplary “City upon a Hill,” colonists in the South developed a vaguely medieval culture based on a mythologized glorification of feudal organization. This new culture was led, not by God-fearing divines, but by knights and cavaliers along a more worldly providential plan. The mythos of the separate “southern Country,” with the planter class the natural leaders, lay just under the surface during the years of the Revolution and the early republic; from these seeds the figure of the cavalier “Southern gentlemen” grew steadily as a counter to the image of the Northern money-making “Yankee.”

Intellectually, the great Southern mythos was informed by permutations of the Great Chain of Being. Economically, the established families were becoming dependent on a single crop requiring a large and cheap labor force; this conjunction solidified a theory of the natural gradation of all existence as a metaphysical justification for slavery and its ultimate benevolence. At first, the “southern Country” was not so unified as the myth suggests (South Carolina and Georgia were especially critical of the new American union under Virginian dominance); but when the North began in the nineteenth century to harass the slaveholding states, the South became more closely knit. After the Missouri Compromise of 1820 effected a balance of slave and free states, the abolitionist movement in the North became more vociferous. As it did, moderate Southern writers fell quiet, and the “literary” defense of the South as a separate culture intensified.

Yet the final exasperated calls for a uniquely Southern literature in the Messenger and other magazines strike a note of defensiveness. One can feel a frustrated sense of irony over the fact that the progeny of the early Puritans should have developed an art and literature seemingly superior to that of the descendants of noble adventurers and cavaliers with a vigorous literary tradition in England. Perhaps a more notable historical irony is that the one original voice out of the Old South is that of a writer whose “Southernness” is suspect—that of Poe.

Edgar Allan Poe and the historical romancer William Gilmore Simms are the two most important figures of the literature of the Old South. But unlike the works of Simms, whose settings, characters, and themes are centrally Southern, few of Poe's works feature Southern locales and characters, and virtually none has distinctive Southern themes. In his reviews of Southern authors, Poe usually ignored or played down the Southern element. Throughout his career, he fought for an honest, independent criticism and sought to create a literary magazine free of regional bias. In review after review, he strove to be impartial while attacking what he saw as the corrupt relationship among publishers, magazines, and reviewers. He was not totally successful, for he too got caught up in literary warfare and gamesmanship. Poe's driving ambition, partially imbibed from the literary situation of the South, was to become what the Southern literary leaders said they wanted—a genuine professional. But, for Poe, that meant that he could not be merely Southern in his views. Although concerned for a native American literature, Poe saw the proper stage for the professional man of letters as, not the South, nor even America, but the world.

In contrast to Poe, the typical nineteenth-century Southern writer was regional in focus. The important literature of the nineteenth-century South took four basic forms: nature lyrics on the Southern landscape; collections of framed sketches of backwoods character types; episodic novels or linked sketches on the model of the epic historical romance; and romantic-satiric narrations of idyllic plantation life. The major influences in poetry were the eighteenth-century British poets and the first generation of romantic poets, and in fiction the somewhat unlikely combination of Henry Fielding, Sir Walter Scott, and Washington Irving.

In poetry, the Old South was less fortunate than in fiction. Samuel Kettell, in his three-volume Specimens of American Poetry (1829), included only one Southern poet, St. George Tucker. Most Southern poets of the period, by common critical assent, are flatly imitative of British models and overly concerned (like Poe) with metrics and sonorous effects. Other than Poe, only two Southern poets are much remembered, Paul Hamilton Hayne and Henry Timrod, the latter known as “the Poet Laureate of the Confederacy.” Much of their work appeared only after the war. Timrod and Hayne both responded to the call for a Southern man of letters, although both were balked by circumstances. When Charleston, South Carolina, was burned by Northern troops, Hayne retreated to the pine barrens near Augusta, Georgia, where he built with his own hands a “shanty” for his family. There he spent the rest of his life trying to earn money by “literary craft” alone. He managed to write a large number of poems celebrating the Southern environment, most of them conventional and sentimental.

Timrod published one volume of poems (1859) but later became discouraged when the efforts of friends to publish a second came to nothing. It was only after his death that another volume appeared (1873), edited by his lifelong friend, Hayne. It is instructive to compare Timrod's early poems on the eve of the war with those in the middle years and after. “Ethnogenesis” (written 1861; published 1873), a poem upon the occasion of the meeting of the first Southern Congress, fuses nature imagery with a visionary evocation of the new republic of the South. “The Cotton Boll” (1861; 1873) asserts the coming of a final victory for the South that will make all the suffering worthwhile. Two years later, in “The Unknown Dead” (1863; 1873), Timrod conjoins the desire to read a storm as the skies' weeping for the martyred Southern patriots with the seeming indifference of “Nature's self.” In “Ode Sung on the Occasion of Decorating of the Confederate Dead, at Magnolia Cemetery” (1866; 1873), he writes that even though no marble column marks the spot, the seeds of flowers in the park are garlands of fame to come, for “somewhere, waiting for its birth, / The shaft is in the stone.” Even in the midst of defeat, the Southern mythos endures: the South will rise again when a new Arthur pulls the sword from the stone.

Of the more minor figures, only James Mathewes Legaré and Thomas Holley Chivers need be mentioned. The former is known for one slender volume, Orta-Undis (1848). The latter owes what modern reputation he retains to his association with Poe, who called him one of the best and at the same time one of the worst poets in America. Of his volumes published before the war, Chivers's The Lost Pleiad (1845) and The Eonchs of Ruby (1851) contain works that feature refrains, phrasings, and names similar to those of Poe's “The Raven” (1845) and other poems. Chivers claimed that the works in question were written before “The Raven,” but each poet, over the years, was accused of plagiarizing from the other.

The second important literary form, the framed and linked sketches and tales of the frontier settlements, constitutes one of the highwater marks of the literature of the Old South. Not all of the “Old Southwestern humorists” were born in the South. Among those who were, the most interesting are Augustus Baldwin Longstreet, David Crockett, Johnson J. Hooper, Joseph Glover Baldwin, and Henry Clay Lewis. Noteworthy for its focus on the Southern element, Longstreet's Georgia Scenes (1835) is the only volume of Old Southwest humor Poe reviewed. Poe remarks that Longstreet is “imbued with a spirit of truest humor” and possesses a “penetrating understanding of character in general, and of Southern character in particular.” He suggests that the book would make the author's fortune in England and that proper judges in America would see its merit, too—if they would sift its “particular merits from amid the gaucheries of a Southern publication.”

The other two major forms of the literature of the Old South, the plantation idyll and the historical romance, are closely related in theme, situation, and character types. These works sometimes took the form of linked sketches or letters, sometimes conformed to a main plot line with subplots, sometimes were a mix. Although the works were not unreservedly in favor of Southern institutions, the issues of feudalism and slavery were central, and the separatist sentiment shows a steady development. The sense of a separate “manifest destiny” is hinted at as early as Letters of the British Spy (1803) by William Wirt, in which a pattern typical of many a Southern narrative is set. As in the volumes of Old Southwest humor, an outsider visits a Southern locale; here an Englishman writes home from Virginia his impressions of the Southern landscape and of Southern ideals and manners.

In later versions of this form, a central device is a debate between the outsider and the planter aristocrat over Southern institutions. In The Valley of Shenandoah (1824), for example, George Tucker presents a Yankee visitor in conflict with a Southern plantation owner fallen in fortune. The two have discussions in which the Southern hero “defends” slavery and the feudal system while admitting gross injustices. Later, the Northerner stabs the Southerner to death in New York in a quarrel over a woman, is eventually exposed as a seducer and scoundrel, and dies a drunkard. Tucker, professor of moral philosophy and economics at the newly established University of Virginia, is one of the more interesting figures of the Old South. It is possible, for example, that he may have had a hand in the anonymous Letters from Virginia (1816), which condemns slavery and ridicules the planters. He wrote several economic treatises (in one of which he predicted the death of slavery by 1925 for economic reasons), a biography of Jefferson, lectures on rhetoric and belles lettres, and a satiric romance, A Voyage to the Moon (1827), which Poe, as his student at the university, seems to have read.

The long historical romance of the pre-Revolutionary and Revolutionary South, at the center of which is a knightly hero leading his companions to a present glory that implies a more glorious future, reached its height from the 1830s through the 1850s. Sir Walter Scott's Waverley novels, beginning in 1814, captured the imagination of the literary South, resonating as they did with the cavalier mythos. The Scott influence extended from John Pendleton Kennedy and William A. Caruthers in the 1830s to Philip Pendleton Cooke, who published several novellas and stories in the Messenger from 1848 to 1851, and his brother John Esten Cooke, whose The Virginia Comedians (1854) develops a somewhat different mode for the Southern romance. Cooke presents a tension between the old order and a new democratic sensibility, portraying the common man as more innately noble than the planter aristocrat; but he finds republican strength in the merging of the two classes (through, for example, marriage). Similar themes are found in his romance of the great-grandson of Pocahontas, Henry St. John, Gentleman (1859).

In the 1830s, John Pendleton Kennedy made use of both the plantation idyll and the cavalier romance in three novels set in the South prior to the nineteenth century. Swallow Barn (1832), like his earlier Red-Book (1818-19), shows the strong influence of Washington Irving in its linked sketches and humorous tone. A New Yorker visits the plantation of his Virginia cousin and finds that his Northern assumptions about the South are not entirely accurate. The Southern planter agrees that slavery is wrong but maintains that to free the slaves immediately would be to leave them in a deplorable condition. Although there are evocations of the beauty of the landscape and of the historical mythos from Pocahontas on, the book is also satiric in its descriptions of plantation life. Whereas in Rob of the Bowl (1838) Kennedy deals satirically with political and religious strife in seventeenth-century Maryland, in Horse-Shoe Robinson (1835) he depicts the Tory ascension in South Carolina during the Revolution by means of a series of adventures based on those of an actual partisan. In a review in 1835, Poe remarked that “the novelist has been peculiarly fortunate in the choice of an epoch, a scene and a subject,” but he makes no specific Southern reference.

In 1836, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker published two novels partaking of the conventions of the historical romance. George Balcombe, while condoning slavery, idealizing the planter aristocracy, and defending states' rights, has as its basic frame and plot a Godwinian mystery involving the recovery of a will. Reviewing the novel in 1837, Poe observes merely that the action covers the territory from Missouri to Virginia before turning his attention to matters of plot and structure. The Partisan Leader: A Tale of the Future bears the fictive publication date 1856 and projects the reader to the year 1849, when Martin Van Buren is about to run for a fourth term as president. The South has seceded without armed conflict; but Virginia, caught in the geographic middle, is in danger of being subverted by Northern agents. The polemics are shrill, but the conclusion is elliptical, merely implying the ultimate victory of the partisans, and, of course, in 1836, sounding the alarm.

In the 1830s and 1840s, William Alexander Caruthers published three books in the mode of the plantation idyll and cavalier romance. The Kentuckian in New York (1834) is an epistolary fiction in which two South Carolinians and a Kentuckian visiting New York correspond with a Virginian visiting South Carolina. The Cavaliers of Virginia (1835) and The Knights of the Golden Horse-Shoe (serialized 1841; book publication 1845) are notable for their mythic glorification of Virginia. Whereas The Kentuckian incorporates the idea that sectional differences can be resolved, the other two works embody an idea of “manifest destiny” for Virginia. The historical basis of The Cavaliers, for example, is Bacon's Rebellion in 1676. Nathaniel Bacon is portrayed as the defender of individual liberty and of the rights of the colony of Virginia against enemies both without and within. The Knights is cast as an American quest romance on the theme of the destiny of Virginia to expand westward. Its historical basis is the 1716 expedition of Alexander Spotswood, lieutenant governor of the colony, into the Valley of Virginia and to the Great Lakes. For Caruthers the destiny of American empire would seem to lie with Virginia.

William Gilmore Simms, of Charleston, South Carolina, on the contrary, portrayed his own state as the locus of Southern destiny. In his early days, he was, like Kennedy, pro-unionist; but Simms gradually became vehemently separatist. As a professional writer (with over eighty volumes of poetry, fiction, drama, biography, history, geography, speeches, essays, criticism) whose main theme was the South, he was exactly what the Southern editors had called for. Ironically, he was generally ignored in the South (except by Poe) and thus was dependent on readers in the North, who saw him as “the Southern Cooper.” Simms began his career as a novelist with a tale of crime, Martin Faber (1833), which Poe found attractive. In 1834-35, Simms published three historical romances, Guy Rivers, The Yemassee, and The Partisan. The last is the first volume of what came to be a seven-volume “epic saga” of the Revolution. Twenty-five years in the making, the saga covers three periods from the seventeenth to the nineteenth century: the “heroic” colonial period; the strife-torn Revolutionary period; and the “border” period of expansion westward and establishment of the new order of the present as the Southern Country.

In marked contrast to the ideas of Simms and the other writers mentioned above, Poe's conception of letters is virtually devoid of regionalist sentiment. Only once in nearly one thousand reviews, articles, columns, and critical notices written over a fifteen-year period does Poe let the issue of Southernness get the better of a purely literary judgment; and the brief flash of Southern temper is revealing—in its very singularity—of Poe's conception of the profession of letters. Moreover, this review of James Russell Lowell's A Fable for Critics (1849) is the only instance of Poe's taking any kind of stand on the issue of slavery. (The notorious review of two books defending slavery in the Messenger in 1836, upon which some critical interpretations of Poe's Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym have been based, was written not by Poe but in all likelihood by Beverly Tucker.) With this single exception, aside from an occasional comment that something promises better days for Southern letters, Poe does not campaign for a Southern literature. It is American literature on the world stage that is important to him.

Yet the question of Poe's Southernness is one of recurrent critical debate. Among his supposed Southern qualities are a high formalism of prose style, an idealization of women, a scorn for democracy and the idea of progress, and an uneasiness about the age of the machine. In addition, the Southern writer, like Poe, is supposedly preoccupied with death and fatality and addicted to the modes of the Gothic and the grotesque. Such elements; of course, do not bear up as specifically Southern. Many of them can be found in the work of Hawthorne, Melville, and other Northern writers. Moreover, Poe is not consistent in using them. His style is not always formal but frequently colloquial and humorous. His distrust of progress and criticism of abstract system are counterpointed by a fascination with physical science and mathematics. His book-length “philosophical” treatise, Eureka (1848), attempts a universal system of cosmology, embodying a concept of “progress” toward godhead, but it begins with the basic proposition that ultimate annihilation is fundamentally inherent in existence.

Whether or not the above qualities constitute Southern themes, or consistent themes in Poe, the point is that as a highly conscious man of letters Poe modifies theme and mode from an almost exclusively aesthetic concern for a particular effect. His portrayal of women, for example, depends on his literary objective. In one work he will use the image of a woman as a Hellenic statue in a window-niche, holding a lamp, symbol of the ideal (“To Helen”). In others, he will picture a woman as cadaverous and feverish (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Metzengerstein”), as the siren temptress of neurasthenic man (“Ligeia”), or as vapid and absurd (“How to Write a Blackwood Article”). His idealization of women in certain poems and essays (“The Poetic Principle”) is counterpointed in fiction by female characters who are subjected to violent physical assault (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Black Cat”). In one work, the beauty of nature may be enhanced by the intervention of the human will (“The Domain of Arnheim”); in others, nature is sublimely destructive (“A Descent into the Maelström”) or paradoxical (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym). As a professional writer, Poe fashions his materials for a literary end in each text.

There are, of course, pervasive and habitual features to Poe's work. An obsession with death and a predisposition to violence, perversity, and madness are among the traits familiar to every reader. Even in his obsession with dark forces, however, Poe exploits the contemporary taste for the Gothic and the grotesque.

Poe began his career as a poet, emulating Byron, Shelley, and Thomas Moore. In his early “nature” lyrics he employs an “indefinitive” imagery and diction rather than the beauties of a Southern landscape; he thereby reaches toward a visionary state of “supernal beauty” evoked by the manipulation of sound and rhythm and, increasingly, by incantatory repetition. His first volume was the slender Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827). The longish title poem casts the Mongol conqueror as a prideful and tormented spirit brooding over his worldly ambition and lost love. The tone recalls Byronic world-weariness; the imagery of dreams and distant stars, mist and night, suggests a theme of infinite regress consequent to a dimming of perception. The nine shorter lyrics recur to the same images and themes. In his second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), Poe added to the first collection the title poem and a half-dozen shorter works, one of which stands as an introduction to “Al Aaraaf.” The speaker of “Sonnet—to Science” laments the passing of ancient poetic myths before the encroachments of science; but he reembodies their poetic legacy by invoking Diana, the Hamadryad, and the Naiad. Al Aaraaf is a distant star world where “nothing earthly” save the reflected ray of “Beauty's eye” is to be found and where imagination has fled from an earth bereft of poetry; the poem begins with an evocation of “supernal beauty” and ends in the destruction of the star.

Poems, Second Edition (1831) contains extensive revisions of the earlier poems along with a handful of new works, some of which feature an ambivalent self-irony. Otherwise, except for the idealized peace restored to the “weary, way-worn wanderer” of “To Helen,” the implicit unrest of the first volume and the explicit apocalyptic vision of “Al Aaraaf” in the second volume have come to dominate the third. “The City in the Sea” presents a double picture of doomed Sodom and Gomorrah either visible under the waters or about to sink into their waiting reflections. “The Sleeper” and “The Valley of Unrest” depict bizarre landscapes in which the human world shades into nightmare. The blighted vision of the earthly poet vainly seeking the otherworldly is intensified in “Israfel”: the speaker claims that if he could but change places with the star god “a bolder note” might swell from his “lyre within the sky” and that Israfel “might not sing so wildly well—/ A mortal melody.” Themes of ruin and apocalypse intensify in several poems of the early 1840s, one of which, “The Coliseum,” retains the idea of poetic transcendence found in “Sonnet—to Science.” The speaker claims that the former glory of the Roman coliseum is not entirely past; the poet feels it again and re-creates it in his verse. “Dream-Land” returns to the trembling world of “Al Aaraaf,” evoking “bottomless vales” and “Mountains toppling evermore / Into seas without a shore,” seas that in turn surge into limitless “lakes of fire.”

In a series of essays and reviews from 1831 to the end of his career, Poe tried to develop a poetics of language as a medium of sensuous sound that embodied the idea of the otherworldly. The earliest of these pieces is the preface to Poems (1831), the “Letter to B——,” in which Poe distinguishes among the aims of poetry, music, and science and concludes that indefinitiveness is the most poetic of effects. These ideas are refined in a number of reviews and developed in such essays as “The Rationale of Verse” (1848) and “The Poetic Principle” (1850). The paradoxical relation between mundane reality and the otherworldly is likewise explored in Poe's Marginalia notes on Tennyson (December 1844) and on the “Power of Words” (March 1846). At the same time that Poe sought a visionary spiritual beauty, of course, he emphasized meticulous craftmanship and minute attention to detail. In his later poems, he transforms the dramatic monologue of “Tamerlane” into brooding scenarios constructed around the central issue of unconscious psychological revelation. In “Ulalume,” for example, the speaker is warned not to continue his walk down a cypress lane. He persists, however, and comes to the tomb of his beloved Ulalume. Only by forgetting her existence has he repressed his grief during the past year. Now his anguish erupts, like molten lava flowing down an ice-locked volcano, to neverending remembrance. Although the final stanza is ambiguous, the poem can be read as a study of the compulsive desire to torture oneself.

Such a theme is more clearly, though still ambiguously, embodied in Poe's most famous poem, “The Raven.” Anguished by the death of his beloved Lenore, and increasingly aware that the raven can speak only a single word, the narrator compulsively puts questions the answer to which heightens his pain. In “The Philosophy of Composition” (1845), Poe purports to explain the calculated manner in which he constructed this poem, though it is difficult to tell how serious he is. He reiterates his dictum that a conception of overall effect and precise denouement must precede actual writing. The first consideration, he says, was length: for unity of effect the poem must be brief enough to be read at a single sitting. The effect sought in “The Raven” was a sustained tone of melancholy beauty; and the most “poetical” subject linking melancholy and beauty was clearly the death of a beautiful woman. Among the most significant aspects of “The Philosophy of Composition” is Poe's ability to put his general ideas about poetry in the service of a specific strategy for the revelation of character. The lover-narrator enacts “that species of despair which delights in self-torture.” He asks the bird questions that will bring him the “luxury of sorrow, through the anticipated answer ‘Nevermore.’” An undercurrent of meaning, suggesting the supernatural but not “overstepping the limits of the real,” Poe continues, is designed to heighten the effect, so that the reader feels the scene as does the lover, even while maintaining aesthetic distance from the lover's point of view.

In “The Raven” and its attendant essay, we see the central artistic conception of Poe's more complex prose tales: a unified interior drama of the self with a careful balance of real, psychological, and supernatural elements—all of which yields an undercurrent of suggestion and a precise symbolic meaning, for the reader as distinct from the character. In such famous tales as “The Cask of Amontillado” (1845), “Ligeia” (1838), and “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), for example, understanding the character of the narrator is a thematic and formal necessity.

Montresor, the narrator of “Amontillado,” sets up two conditions for successful revenge in the opening paragraph of his story: the murderer must make himself known as an avenger, and he must get away with impunity. Yet the ironically named Fortunato never understands why Montresor chains him to the cellar wall and bricks him in. Moreover, the Catholic Montresor is telling the story as his deathbed confession to a priest. He has not escaped with impunity; he has carried his guilt buried in his heart for fifty years. The dramatic irony of the tale, the theme of self-torment, the subtle implications of the situation, and the manipulation of conventions (here especially Gothic) are parallel to the technique of “The Raven” and characteristic of Poe's fiction in general.

“Ligeia” and “Usher” are also structured around careful exploitation of point of view. It cannot be proved textually that “Legeia” is from first to last a rendering of psychotic mental experience from the internal perspective of the narrator, but the text is resonantly indeterminate in its presentation of two radically different interpretations of the described events, a supernatural story and a psychological story. This indeterminateness extends to compatible Freudian and Jungian readings and reveals Poe as strikingly modernist in his fictional conceptions. “The Fall of the House of Usher” takes point of view one step further. A seemingly objective and peripheral narrator appears to confirm the supernatural or preternatural events centered on Roderick Usher. But this conventionally Gothic tale exists within a structure of realistic and psychological explanations of events; the aura of Gothic mystery is not dissolved but held in tension with the other possible readings. The transformation of the reasonable narrator into the fearful double of Usher is accomplished without sacrificing a sense of supernatural mystery. A tour de force in point of view, “Usher” is a logical development from the strategies of “Ligeia.”

At an early point Poe conceived of an interrelated sequence of experiments with generic forms of popular literature. One of the first was called “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque.” Although what Poe meant by “arabesque” is not fully clear, one thing is certain: he did not mean by the term to distinguish between so-called serious tales of Gothic mystery as “arabesque” and comic-satiric tales of the “grotesque” when he called his 1840 collection Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque. “Arabesque” was a term then current from Germanic romantic literature; it indicates a form of “romance” embodying a pervasive irony of intent and structure, including self-reflexive self-parody.

The “Eleven Tales of the Arabesque” included the ostensibly serious Gothic tales, “Metzengerstein,” “MS. Found in a Bottle,” “The Assignation,” “Silence,” and possibly “Descent into the Maelström.” Among the other tales were such blatantly comic and satiric works as “The Duc de L'Omelette,” “A Tale of Jerusalem,” “Loss of Breath,” and “Bon-Bon.” The whole series? Poe explained to a potential publisher in 1833, was a burlesque not only of contemporary styles of tale writing but also of current modes of criticism for the tales were the products of a literary club, and after each author has read his tale, the other members comment upon it, the whole following a carefully determined sequence. Between 1831 and 1835, Poe wrote a preface for the collection, to be expanded and renamed Tales of the Folio Club. It was never published as such, though two sheets survive in manuscript. Especially significant for an adequate understanding of Poe's fictional genre is the probable inclusion of “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” among the Folio Club tales, indicating a highly complex and self-reflexive element of parody in these “serious” imitations of popular Gothic tales in the best-selling magazines, like Blackwood's.

The word “arabesque” also best describes Poe's puzzling extended work of fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837-38). One of the unifying themes of what seems initially a bewildering narrative of a journey to the end of the world is the experience of the inner mind. A perverse fate, augmented by man's own treachery and perverseness, repeatedly overtakes the characters; a series of plot reversals and ironies progressively reveals that the reality of the world is capable of sudden disintegration. The book was launched in the Messenger as a hoax, purporting to be a true account of Mr. Pym's adventure as written by Mr. Poe. In its later book publication the hoax was simultaneously continued and subverted. Pym says in the preface that he intends to give the reading public the true account of what actually happened rather than Poe's fictionalizing of his adventures. In addition to this initial ironic frame, the book concludes with an appendix (presumably the “publisher's”) in which we are informed that Pym's recent disappearance has prevented him from telling the final truth about what happened and that Poe, the original editor, had failed to see the significance of the narrative.

More than a straightforward journey to the South Pole, Pym's adventures suggest a journey back in time, a quest for origins and ends. But the narrative breaks off; the ultimate secret is not to be found. As suggestively indeterminate as Poe's famous Gothic tales, Pym has been read in radically different ways—as an adventure hoax, an experiment in science fiction, an allegory of the dispersed tribes of Israel or of black and white relations in America. Still other interpretations see Pym's journey as a Freudian retreat into the womb, a metaphysical disappearance into void, or an anticipation of Eureka in its suggestion that destructiveness abets the creative cycle of the universe. More recently, the book has been seen as an experiment in metafiction that goes beyond the foregrounding of narrativity in the frames. According to this view, Pym is an encoding of the artistic process: it is a fiction about fictionality that yields (in the very writing) the creation of the writing self. Despite the astonishing range of readings, what emerges from all the critical attention is that there is in Pym a coherent and symmetrical structure of events that generates a haunting ambiguity. Once regarded as an unfinished or a hastily finished mistake, the arabesque romance of Arthur Gordon Pym exemplifies Poe's method of resonant indeterminateness and his affinities both with modernism and with postmodernism.

In all this experimentation in fiction, Poe manipulates conventions even as he parodies the literary formulas of the day. Moreover, he resists the coercive cultural politics of nineteenth-century America. As practical critic, Poe exposed shoddy work and literary theft; as practicing journalist, he stood against literary cliques that promoted inferior regional writing, especially those centered on (but not confined to) Northern periodicals. Poe defended not the cause of Southern letters but the American quest for literary independence. Yet, at the same time that he attacked slavish imitation of European models, he opposed the excesses of literary nationalism. Although he was deeply involved in the literary warfare of his time, his driving force was to establish an eminent magazine of letters freed from petty conflict, social prejudice, and the prevailing moral bias of the age. To achieve this, he had to be free both from Northern and from Southern bias, while simultaneously encompassing both traditions—no easy task, but a necessary one given Poe's concept of the professional man of letters.

It was in the South, of course, that Poe first gained recognition as a professional—the fearless critic of the Southern Literary Messenger. As part of his campaign for what he called a national “republic” of letters, he attempted to write unbiased assessments of contemporary American literature. At the same time, he wrote essays on the evils of literary regionalism, on literary cliques, on the economics and ethics of publishing, and on the principles of literary criticism. Poe's effort to shape the Messenger into his ideal of a literary magazine, however, quickly evoked Southern opposition and interference with his policies. When he moved North, the pattern repeated itself with two projected ventures, the “Penn Magazine” and “The Stylus.” The prospectus for “The Stylus” promised “an absolutely independent criticism” guided “by the purest rules of Art,” a criticism “aloof from all personal bias” and steadfastly opposed to “the arrogance of organized cliques.” Poe's magazine would “endeavor to support the general interests of the republic of letters, without reference to particular regions; regarding the world at large as the true audience of the author.” The truth as Poe saw it had its costs: neither the “Penn” nor the “Stylus” attracted enough subscribers to go into operation.

Poe is quite consistent in this antiregionalist stand. In 1845, in response to attacks from Boston papers, he published in the Broadway Journal a defense of his poetry taken from a South Carolina paper. Although pleased that “friends in the Southern and Western country” are taking up arms for him and that the South apparently sees no “farther necessity for being ridden to death by New-England,” he comments that this defense is really “in the cause of a national as distinguished from a sectional literature.” But even a national literature was not quite the desideratum. Earlier in the year he had noted the many arguments in favor of maintaining a “proper nationality in American Letters; but … what this nationality is, or what is to be gained by it,” he continued, “has never been distinctly understood. That an American should confine himself to American themes, or even prefer them, is rather a political than a literary idea.”

Poe's outrage over the politics of publishing manifests itself in his first reviews in a sarcasm that seemed to his contemporaries unnecessarily vicious—though the reviews sold copies of the Messenger and called attention to the “tomahawk man” of the South. Poe took dead aim at the Boston and New York literary establishments, especially for their habit of “puffing” the books of friends and colleagues. One of their favorite devices was to announce a new book by an anonymous author of great talent, then to advertise the book in the papers they controlled with a guessing game about his or her identity. As early as 1835, Poe attacked this practice. Noting that the New York Mirror had identified the author of Norman Leslie as Theodore S. Fay, and that Fay was an editor of the Mirror, Poe blasts the novel as the “silliest” book he has ever read—“a monstrous piece of absurdity and incongruity,” with an incomprehensible plot and characters that “have no character.” But Poe's superlative could be overridden in the face of a more dismal example: reviewing Morris Matson's Paul Ulric, another clique-sponsored novel, Poe observes that “when we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we certainly had never seen Paul Ulric.” Such books, he asserts, “bring daily discredit upon our national literature.”

A few months later, in response to the criticism of his scathing reviews that was being printed in the New York Mirror and other Northern papers, Poe prefaced his assessment of the poems of Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz-Greene Halleck with remarks on “the present state of American criticism.” At one time, he says, Americans “cringed to foreign opinion” and would not read an American book without European sanction. But now we have gone too far in the opposite direction: we “often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.” Praise from personal, regional, or national bias brings no credit to American literature. Only honest and unprejudiced criticism will gain the respect of the world.

A decade later Poe was fighting the same fight. In the March 1845 Broadway Journal, he suggests that what is really appreciated by the general public is a “pungent impartially”—witness his having increased the circulation of Graham's Magazine from 5,000 to 52,000 in little over two years. As he had ten years before, he asserts that his own practice as critic derives from a “set of principles” and is not the product of a temperament given to habitual faultfinding. Never, he writes, has he rendered an opinion, positive or negative, “without attempting, at least, to give it authority by something that bore the semblance of a reason.”

This point of the critic's responsibility to give reasons for his judgments Poe had begun to address three years earlier in “Exordium to Critical Notices.” The original concept of a book review, he wrote then, was to “convey a just idea of its design,” to “survey the book, to analyze its contents and to pass judgment upon its merits or defects.” But present-day reviewers, hiding behind anonymity and paid by the line, substitute instead a “digest” with “copious extracts” and “random comments.” Perhaps worse, the review becomes a pretext for a “diffuse essay” on some other topic. Although Poe admits the value of “a good essay,” these generalized effusions, he feels, “have nothing whatsoever to do with … criticism”; for criticism “is not, we think, an essay, nor a sermon, nor an oration, nor a chapter in history, nor a philosophical speculation, nor a prose-poem, nor an art-novel, nor a dialogue.” Criticism is itself an art of high importance, a genre of “clearly ascertained limit,” which is “comment on Art.” The critic's concern is with “the mode” of a book: and “it is only as the book that we subject it to review.” The critic has “nothing to do” with “opinions” of a work except as they relate to the work itself.

Although his critical recognition is marked by strong disagreement over the intrinsic merit of his work, Poe's achievement in poetry and fiction, criticism and magazine journalism, is historically impressive. As a man of letters in a country that was seeking Old World acceptance, Poe tried in his career to unify the many roles of a writer staunch in his independence. In his personal life he was described by his contemporaries as a Southern gentlemen. In his writing, a certain Old Virginian condescension to the “mob” comes through from time to time, an attitude perhaps derived from the Southern mythos of a hierarchical society and cosmos. Otherwise, he conceived of himself as a man of letters on a broader scale, answering the call for a Southern man of letters in his own terms. Rarely does he employ Southern locales or character types; he does not embroil himself in the issue of slavery; he does not address matters of Southern autonomy and separatism; he does not confront Southern with Northern personages; he does not cast Southern leaders as knights in quest of glory. Rather, he focuses on the integrity of the work of art in terms of the ideal—a metaphysical ideal of “pure” poetry, an aesthetic ideal of total unity of effect in both poetry and fiction. These were the true concerns of the true man of letters as Poe conceived the role of the professional writer.