Critical Inquiry Critical Inquiry

Jerome McGann. The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel. Cambridge Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2014. 256 pp.

Review by Jonathan Elmer

19 February 2016

Jerome McGann is one of the most influential scholars and interpreters of poetry in English of the past half century. For that reason alone, McGann’s assertion that Edgar Allan Poe’s poetry “commands a global consequence” will be considered carefully (p. 5). McGann knows that Poe’s poetic achievement has often been slighted, which I suspect is why he refers to its “consequence,” rather than, say, influence. T. S. Eliot knew he was influenced by Poe, but unwillingly and unhappily: he felt responsive to a command, as it were, rather than a predilection. Poe’s “consequence” is “global” because it is not—ultimately—national. Contemporary Americanist scholarship on Poe has largely rejected the idea that Poe was somehow anomalous, not of his time. McGann agrees with this scholarship, in large measure. But he knows that Poe’s global consequence has less to do with his place in a national canon, and more to do with the fate of post-Romantic poetry generally.

Poe is a tonally unstable writer, and those who write on Poe must be able to negotiate that instability reflectively in their own prose. This McGann does, through a combination of erudition, fearlessness, and brio. He has a knack for phrasemaking and an urgency of assertion: Poe is a “literary privateer” (p. 7), while readers of “Ulalume” labor to control the work’s “catastrophic energies” (p. 131). But McGann ultimately manages Poe’s instability by acknowledging it as structural to his project, rather than an accident of bad taste. The problem is an old one: Poe’s poetry is at “at once unremittingly vulgar and theoretically advanced, even pretentious” (p. 2). In this sense Poe is indeed the close cousin of Charles Baudelaire, as Roberto Calasso has described him in La Folie Baudelaire, though Baudelaire’s inassimilable vulgarity had entirely different coordinates.

Riffing on Yvor Winters, who warned us away from the land of Primitivism and Decadence, McGann asserts: “This is where Poe, eyes wide shut, went. . . . It is possible to find one’s way to that place even with the deceptive maps of scholarship” (p. 13). Does he thus return to the old thesis that Poe lived in a no-place of imagination? I don’t think so. Much depends on whether one can make the leap from Poe’s poetics—and McGann has provided the most patient explication to date of Poe’s poetry as always a “performative explication of his theoretical ideas” (p. 6)—to anything that registers as a this-worldly politics or ethics. McGann characterizes Poe’s “neglected ethics” and “social commentary” as “intransigently humanistic and post-theological”(p. 10). Neither mirror nor lamp, the poetry exposes artifice as a method of disillusionment. But do Poe’s swooning sonorities, syntactical bizarreries, and obscurity of reference mark a path to an understanding of “Enlightenment” as “darkness visible at every point” (p. 10)? If Poe’s “global consequence” resides both in his impact on an avant-garde tradition, including Baudelaire, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Arthur Rimbaud, and in the leveraging of “special effects” by mass culture (p. 10), how do we get from here to there? What map is sufficient?