The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel - Hardcover

Jerome Mcgann

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 067441666X ISBN 13: 9780674416666

Publisher: Harvard University Press, 2014

Synopsis

The poetry of Edgar Allan Poe has had a rough ride in America, as Emerson s sneering quip about The Jingle Man testifies. That these poems have never lacked a popular audience has been a persistent annoyance in academic and literary circles; that they attracted the admiration of innovative poetic masters in Europe and especially France notably Baudelaire, Mallarme, and Valery has been further cause for embarrassment. Jerome McGann offers a bold reassessment of Poe s achievement, arguing that he belongs with Whitman and Dickinson as a foundational American poet and cultural presence. Not all American commentators have agreed with Emerson s dim view of Poe s verse. For McGann, a notable exception is William Carlos Williams, who said that the American poetic imagination made its first appearance in Poe s work. "The Poet Edgar Allan Poe" explains what Williams and European admirers saw in Poe, how they understood his poetics, and why his poetry had such a decisive influence on Modern and Post-Modern art and writing. McGann contends that Poe was the first poet to demonstrate how the creative imagination could escape its inheritance of Romantic attitudes and conventions, and why an escape was desirable. The ethical and political significance of Poe s work follows from what the poet takes as his great subject: the reader. The Poet Edgar Allan Poe" takes its own readers on a spirited tour through a wide range of Poe s verse as well as the critical and theoretical writings in which he laid out his arresting ideas about poetry and poetics."

About this title

Review:

"The Poet Edgar Allan Poe "is a landmark intervention that helps to explain why, among his antebellum contemporaries, Poe alone has remained a fixture of popular culture as well as a globally familiar icon of literary art. --J. Gerald Kennedy, editor of "The Portable Edgar Allan Poe"

About the Author:

Jerome McGann is University Professor and John Stewart Bryan Professor of English at the University of Virginia.

About this edition

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Publication date: 2014
• ISBN 10: 067441666X
• ISBN 13: 9780674416666
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208