edgar allan poe essays and reviews pdf

Edgar Allan Poe : Essays & Reviews

“[Poe’s] most thoughtful notices set a level of popular book reviewing that has remained unequalled in America, and that led George Bernard Shaw to call him ‘the greatest journalistic critic of his time.’”— Kenneth Silverman

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“The first truly dependable collection of Poe’s poetry and tales…. Poe is central to the American canon, both for us and for the rest of the world.” — Harold Bloom, New York Review of Books

With this inaugural volume of what will be a series devoted to Edmund Wilson’s work, The Library of America pays tribute to the writer who first conceived the idea of a publishing series dedicated to “bringing out in a complete and compact form the principal American classics.” Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s and 30s presents Wilson in the extraordinary first phase of his career, participating in a cultural renaissance and grappling with the crucial issues of his era.

Axel’s Castle (1931), his pioneering overview of literary modernism, includes penetrating studies of Yeats, Eliot, Proust, Joyce, Gertrude Stein, and others. For several generations this book has stood as an indispensable companion to some of the crucial turning points in modern literature. Both these classic works display abundantly Wilson’s extraordinary erudition and unquenchable curiosity, his visionary grasp of larger historical meanings, his gift for acute psychological portraiture, and the matchless suppleness and lucidity of his prose. For Wilson, there are no minor subjects; every literary occasion sparks writing that is witty, energetic, and alive to the undercurrents of his time.

In addition this volume includes a number of uncollected reviews from the same period, including discussions of H. L. Mencken, Edith Wharton, and Bernard Shaw.

Lewis M. Dabney , volume editor, is the author of Edmund Wilson: A Life in Literature and the editor of Wilson’s last journal, The Sixties , and of Edmund Wilson: Centennial Reflections . He is a professor of English at the University of Wyoming.

Project support for this volume was provided by The Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation.

Edmund Wilson: Literary Essays and Reviews of the 1920s & 30s is kept in print by a gift from teh Geoffrey C. Hughes Foundation to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

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Save $30 when you buy both volumes of Henry James’s literary criticism

Henry James, renowned as one of the world’s great novelists, was also one of the most illuminating, audacious, and masterly critics of modern times.

This Library of America volume is one of two volumes of the most extensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, with many pieces never before available in book form. It includes reviews of a great number of European writers, especially French writers, along with more general essays and the Prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works, published between 1907 and 1909.

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More than one hundred reviews and essays are gathered by author, so that readers can trace the development of James’s complex, meditative, and highly volatile attitudes toward a wide spectrum of literature. James reviews the formidable Honoré de Balzac (with his “huge, all compassing, all desiring, all devouring love of reality”), Gustave Flaubert (“a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word”), and Ivan Turgenev, the Russian visitor in Paris, with whom James felt great personal affinity, even though Tugenev “lacked the immense charm of absorbed inventiveness.”

James delivers his critical judgments with great elegance and point, especially when he discusses the performance of other critics like Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and, of course, he can be wonderfully acerbic. An early moralistic essay on Baudelaire finds Poe “vastly the greater charlatan of the two, and the greater genius.”

James brings his critical zest, exhilaration, and independence of judgment to bear on writers as diverse as Alphonse Daudet, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, J. W. von Goethe, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.

Readers will find, in the complete collection of the Prefaces, one of literature’s most revealing artistic autobiographies, a wholly absorbing account of how writing gets written, and a vision of the possibilities for fiction which critics and novelists of later times will find immensely instructive and liberating.

Leon Edel (1907-1997), volume editor, was emeritus professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa. His five-volume biography of Henry James received both a Pulitzer Prize and a National Book Award. Mark Wilson, associate editor of this volume, was professor of English at the University of Hawaii, Manoa.

Henry James: Literary Criticism: French & Other European Writers, Prefaces to the New York Edition is kept in print by a gift from Richard Poirier to the Guardians of American Letters Fund .

“Also, we realize, James possessed a point of view tailor-made for the vocation of literary criticism. The critic’s life, he wrote in one essay, ‘is heroic, for it is immensely vicarious. He has to understand for others.’”— The New York Times

“[A] great American novelist who wrote more superb criticism than any compatriot, before or since.”— Time

Richard Wilbur, a former Poet Laureate of the United States and one of the most admired poets and critics of his generation, revisits the poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, exploring the philosophical seriousness of verse often identified with its macabre and gothic surfaces.

“Our poetry, in Poe’s view, must specialize in aesthetic transcendence, eschewing the truth, morality, and passion which might entangle it with this present world. The whole movement of Poe’s poetry is away from the material here and now. . . . The poet’s strategy is to accomplish a mock-destruction of earthly things, estranging the reader from material reality and so, presumably, propelling his imagination toward the ideal.”— Richard Wilbur, from the introduction

Richard Wilbur (1921–2017), editor, was Poet Laureate of the United States, 1987–88. Over the course of a distinguished career he was awarded the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Translation Prize. Among his many books are New and Collected Poems (1989) and Mayflies (2000).

About the American Poets Project Elegantly designed in compact editions, printed on acid-free paper, and textually authoritative, the American Poets Project makes available the full range of the American poetic accomplishment, selected and introduced by today’s most discerning poets and critics.

“Poe is so frequently reprinted that another selection can’t possibly seem fresh. Reading him with the guidance of Wilbur, however, helps one think about him again. . . . [Wilbur] appends selections from Poe’s writings about poetics to help understanding of his cosmology and discusses some of Poe’s most intense stories to exemplify his symbolism. The poems, presented chronologically, show again what a young prodigy Poe was, formulating his poetic thought while still in his teens, and what a sonorous Romantic musician he became.”— Booklist

The Complete Poetical Works of Edgar Allan Poe by Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe : Essays and Reviews : Theory of Poetry / Reviews of British and Continental Authors / Reviews of American Authors and American Literature / Magazines and Criticism / The Literary & Social Scene / Articles and Marginalia (Library of America) Hardcover – August 15, 1984

• Print length 1544 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Library of America
• Publication date August 15, 1984
• Dimensions 5.14 x 1.8 x 8.13 inches
• ISBN-10 0940450194
• ISBN-13 978-0940450196
• See all details

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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Library of America (August 15, 1984)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 1544 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0940450194
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0940450196
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 2.1 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.14 x 1.8 x 8.13 inches
• #1,514 in American Fiction Anthologies
• #3,706 in Fiction Writing Reference (Books)
• #11,495 in Short Stories Anthologies

About the author

Edgar allan poe.

Author, poet, and literary critic, Edgar Allan Poe is credited with pioneering the short story genre, inventing detective fiction, and contributing to the development of science fiction. However, Poe is best known for his works of the macabre, including such infamous titles as The Raven, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, Lenore, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Part of the American Romantic Movement, Poe was one of the first writers to make his living exclusively through his writing, working for literary journals and becoming known as a literary critic. His works have been widely adapted in film. Edgar Allan Poe died of a mysterious illness in 1849 at the age of 40.

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Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 30, 2017 • ( 1 )

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as an object but as a series of effects. Hence, while his views are broadly Romantic like Emerson ’s, they differ deeply from Emerson ’s in that they present an affective and expressionist view of poetry. While he is usually considered a Romantic, Poe’s concern with technique and construction exhibit a formalist disposition and anticipate some of the more modern formalistic theories.

Poe’s genius has often been seen as pathological: he lost both his parents at an early age, was informally adopted and later broke with his adoptive parents; he abandoned his studies at the University of Virginia , which he had entered in 1826; he was expelled from West Point Military Academy in 1831; he led a controversial life as a contributor to, and editor of, journals; he indulged in bouts of drinking, suffered from depression and paranoia. Yet his image as an outcast, his emphasis on beauty rather than morality or truth, his view of poetry as affording us a glimpse of an ideal world, as well as his insistence on the close union of poetry and music, exerted a considerable fascination and impact on writers such as Baudelaire , who translated a number of his tales, and Mallarmé , who translated his poems, as well as Lacan , who published in 1966 his seminar on Poe’s story The Purloined Letter .

Poe’s most famous tales include The Black Cat , The Fall of the House of Usher  (1839), and The Cask of Amontillado   (1846), and among his notable poems are To Helen , Israfel, The City in the Sea ,  and The Haunted Palace . His poem The Raven  (1842) was widely popular. Some of Poe’s radical insights into poetry and criticism are expressed in his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), which purports to explain the origins of his own poem The Raven.  Other critical essays include The Poetic Principle  and The Rationale of Verse . In The Philosophy of Composition , Poe urges that a poet should begin with the “consideration of an effect,” i.e., the response that will be produced in the reader or listener.13 He also urges that the poet should keep “originality always in view” ( PC ,  178). This effect, he insists, must be produced as a “unity of impression.” Poe does not believe that such a unified impression can be achieved by a long poem; since poetry “intensely excites, by elevating, the soul,” and since intense excitement must by nature be brief, a long poem “is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects” ( PC, 180). A poem such as Paradise Lost , Poe argues, is at least one half composed of prose, with which the poetic passages are interspersed. Hence the first poetic requirement, unity of impression, cannot be satisfied in a long poem.

Poe’s second major claim for the nature of poetry is that it must be “universally appreciable,” and it is beauty that has the power universally to please. Hence, “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem . . . That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful” ( PC, 181). Poe points out that beauty is not, as is commonly supposed, “a quality, . . . but an effect,” an “intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart.” Truth, which is the aim of the intellect, or passion, which represents an excitement of the heart, says Poe, are both more easily attainable in prose than poetry. In fact, both of these are antagonistic to beauty, “which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem” ( PC, 182). Hence beauty – not truth, or emotion, or goodness – is the peculiar province of poetry. Moreover, beauty is reconceived by Poe not as a quality belonging to an object but as an effect in the subject; his views, perhaps influenced by Kant via Coleridge , stop short of Kant’s sophistication. Whereas, for Kant, beauty was a mode of apprehension on the part of the subject, for Poe it is a response caused in the reader or listener by the literary object or poem. These are the general points made in Poe’s essay, the remainder of which attempts to explain the stages of the composition of “The Raven.”

Poe’s subsequent essay, The Poetic Principle   (1850), offers a fuller account of his aesthetics. Here also, he urges that a long poem is a contradiction in terms since it cannot sustain the unity, the “totality of effect or impression,” that is the “vital requisite” in all works of art. Poe warns also that a poem may be “improperly brief ” such that it degenerates into epigrammatism. A poem that is very short cannot produce “a profound or enduring effect” ( PP,  890).

One of Poe’s chief endeavors in this essay is to identify and undermine what he calls “the heresy of The Didactic ,” which refers to the view that “the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth” and that every poem “should inculcate a moral.” As against this, Poe insists that the most dignified and noble work is the “poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake” ( PP, 892– 893). This is perhaps the first insistence on artistic or poetic autonomy by an American writer; it may be significant, as emerges later in his text, that Poe somewhat aligned himself with Southern values and resented the domination of American letters by Northern liberalism, as instanced by the influence of the North American Review ( PP , 899). Poe himself wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger , eventually rising to the editorship of this journal. In this context, Poe’s insistence on artistic autonomy may have been a call to consider the beauty of a poem regardless of its political, as well as its moral, content; given that his notion of beauty was somewhat Platonic , it may also have been an attempt to lift art out of and above the sphere of everyday life and its entanglement in bitter political and social struggles.

At any rate, Poe makes a sharp distinction between “the truthful and the poetical modes” of apprehension and inculcation. Truth, he says, demands a severity of language: “We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned.” Such a mood, says Poe, “is the exact converse of the poetical” (“PP,” 893). Such a seemingly Platonic distinction between the language and mode of philosophy as against those of poetry has of course been challenged by many modern writers. Poe locates his views in a broader model of the mind which somewhat recalls Kant’s location of aesthetic judgment as situated between the realm of understanding (which addresses the realm of phenomena) and the realm of practical reason (comprehending the realm of morality). Poe likewise divides the mind into three aspects: “Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense.” He places taste in the middle, acknowledging that it has “intimate relations” with the other two aspects; but he observes a distinction between these three offices: the intellect is concerned with truth; taste apprehends the beautiful; and moral sense disposes us toward duty (“PP,” 893). By situating his view of poetic autonomy within such a scheme, Poe is following a Kantian procedure of both identifying a subjective faculty specifically as aesthetic, and establishing boundaries between distinct human endeavors or attributes, boundaries which cannot be violated. Poe admits that the precepts of duty or even the lessons of truth can be introduced into a poem; but they must subserve the ultimate purpose of art, and must be placed “in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem” (“PP,” 895).

Hence poetry should not be realistic, merely copying or imitating the beauties that lie before us. Rather, poetry is “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above . . . to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone”; it is a “struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness” (“PP,” 894). Platonic passages such as these, urging the poet to rise above the transient world and to focus his gaze upon the eternal form of Beauty, must have attracted Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists such as Mallarmé. Poe uses the term poetry in a broad sense, to cover all of the arts; but he sees a very close connection between poetry and music; in fact he defines poetry as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste . . . In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the Heart” (“PP,” 895). What is not Platonic, however, is the isolated exaltation of Beauty over truth and goodness; the harmony that was possible, even in theory, in Plato’s system, between these forms or essences, between these multifold dimensions of human endeavor, has disintegrated into a desperate craving for a beauty that is not found in the actual world, and a retreat from the increasingly troubled realms of truth and morality.

Poe defines the “poetic principle” as “the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” a quest for an excitement of the soul that is distinct from the intoxication of the heart or the satisfaction of reason. Truth may be instrumental in this quest inasmuch as it leads us to “perceive a harmony where none was apparent before.” The experience of such a harmony is “the true poetical effect” (“PP,” 906). Once again, we glimpse here reflections of Kantian ideas, refracted perhaps through Coleridge. The poet, according to Poe, recognizes in many phenomena the ambrosia that nourishes his soul, especially in “all unworldly motives – in all holy impulses – in all chivalrous, generous, and selfsacrificing deeds” (“PP,” 906). What is interesting here is that all of these phenomena appear to pertain to morality: the very morality that is expelled from the poet’s quest for beauty returns as the very ground of this quest, resurrected in aesthetic form on the ground of its own beauty. In other words, morality becomes an integral part of the aesthetic endeavor, and becomes justified on aesthetic grounds. Once again, art is seen as salvific, displacing the function of religion in serving as our guide to the world beyond.

Source: A History of  Literary Criticism : From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib

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Tags: Edgar Allan Poe , Israfel , Literary Criticism , Literary Theory , Poetry , Romanticism , The Black Cat , The Cask of Amontillado , The City in the Sea , The Fall of the House of Usher , The Haunted Palace , the heresy of The Didactic , The Philosophy of Composition , The Purloined Letter , The Rationale of Verse , To Helen

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Edgar Allan Poe — “The Poetic Principle”

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Sections:  Reading and Ref. Texts Hist. Texts Comp. and Study Texts Misc. Texts Bibliography

Reading and Reference Texts:

Reading copy:.

• “The Poetic Principle” — reading copy

Historical Texts:

Manuscripts and authorized printings:.

• Text-01 — “The Poetic Principle” — written before December 20, 1848 — manuscript, apparently lost — (Poe first delivered the lecture on December 20, 1848 for the Franklin Lyceum at Howard's Hall in Providence, Rhode Island. This version was supposedly stolen from Poe's valise in Philadelphia sometime June 30 - July 7, 1849, along with the original manuscript of his lecture on “American Poetry.”)
• Text-02 — “The Poetic Principle” — written before August 17, 1849 — having apparently lost the original manuscript, Poe presumably rewrote it for his lectures in Virginia (This manuscript is also apparently lost, but presumably recorded in Text 03) — (Poe delivered this version of the lecture in Richmond on August 17, 1849 at the Exchange Concert Rooms in Richmond, Virginia; and September 14, 1849 in Norfolk, Virginia. The manuscript itself appears to have been among the few items found in his trunk after his death. In a letter of July 29, 1850, Bayard Taylor, acting for Griswold, offered to sell the article to George Graham for $50 for the benefit of Mrs. Clemm. Graham apparently declined, and it seems instead to have been purchased for publication by John Sartain. The manuscript itself was probably destroyed by Griswold's typesetters in preparing his text.) (Poe apparently refers to writing this lecture in the postscript of his letter of November 26, 1848 to Sarah Helen Whitman.)
• Text-03 — “ The Poetic Principle ” — September 1850 — Works (Although this judgement may be somewhat controversial, it appears that only Griswold had access to the manuscript, Text-02, and thus his is the only official printing of an authorized version.)
• “ The Poetic Principle ” — August 31, 1850 — Home Journal — (Although technically the earliest printing, this text acknowledges itself as being from advance sheets of Text-03, and is thus best regarded as a kind of reprint. In any case, it has no special authority from Poe, directly or implied.)
• “ The Poetic Principle ” — October 1850 — Sartain's Union Magazine   (issued about September 16, 1850.) (The text is noted as “from the unpublished manuscript,” but is more likely taken from proof-sheets of Text-03. Although Stuart and Susan Levine presume that Sartain purchased the manuscript from Taylor, and thus had direct access to Poe's original text, the relevant portion of Taylor's note reads: “Would you like to have for your October number, an unpublished article by Poe, on ‘The Poetic Principle?’ I can get it for you. It will make about 6 pages of the Magazine; $50 are asked for it, for the benefit of Mrs. Clemm. I have the proof-sheets of it (the book will appear about the middle of October) and will send them if you want the article and the terms suit you.” Thus, it seems clear that Taylor is selling proof-sheets rather than the manuscript.)
• “The Poetic Principle” — September 25, 1850 — North Carolina Star (Raleigh, NC) (Vol. I, no. 33, p. 4, cols. 1-5) (this entry was provided to the Poe Society in an e-mail from Ton Fafianie, dated April 11, 2017)
• “Lecture on the Poetic Principle” — October 8, 1850 — Semi-Weekly Examiner (Richmond, VA) (Printed on page 1, beginning near the top of column 1 and running to a small portion of column 7. The heading reads: “LECTURE ON THE POETIC PRICIPLE,” and the byline as “BY THE LATE EDGAR A. POE.” The only other note of attribution is the comment: “Delivered at the Exchange Concert Room, Richmond, and elsewhere.” The text appears to have been reprinted from Griswold's edition, and may have been placed, at Griswold's, request by John R. Thompson.)
• “ The Poetic Principle ” — 1875 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. J. H. Ingram, Edinburgh, Adam and Charles Black (3:197-219)
• “The Poetic Principle” — April 17, 1881 — The Bloomington Bulletin (Illinois) (Vol. I, no. 60, the Sunday Edition, quotes Poe's full essay on the full front page, continuing on page three, without any explanation other than “Lecture by Edgar A. Poe.” Presumably, the small paper needed a considerable amount of filler and Poe's article served this purpose admirably, while also lending a sense of literary class.)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1888 — The Complete Poetical Works and Essays on Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. John H. Ingram, London and New York: Frederick Warne & Co. (pp. 153-175)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1888 — Library of American Literature , New York: Charles L. Webster & Company  (reprinted from the 1850 Works )
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1900 — Modern Elegance , ed. Thomas B. Reed, Philadelphia: John D Morris & Company, vol. VI, pp. 869-892 (this set was reprinted many times, up until about 1923)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1904 — American Literary Criticism , ed. William Morton Payne, New York: Longmans, Green & Co. (pp. 103-126)

Scholarly and Noteworthy Reprints:

• “ The Poetic Principle ” — 1895 — The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, vol. 6: Literary Criticism , eds. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, Chicago: Stone and Kimball (6:3-30, and 6:323)
• “ The Poetic Principle ” — 1902 — The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. J. A. Harrison, New York: T. Y. Crowell (14:266-292)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1909 — Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Frederick C. Prescott, New York: Henry Holt (pp. 228-256 and 340-345)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 1984 — Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Reviews , ed. G. R. Thompson, New York: Library of America (pp. 71-94)  (reprinted from Sartain's Magazine )
• “, The Poetic Principle ” — 2009 — Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , Stuart and Susan F. Levine, eds., Chicago: University of Illinois Press (pp. 175-211)

Comparative and Study Texts:

Instream comparative and study texts:, associated material and special versions:, miscellaneous texts and related items:.

• “Du principe poétique” — 1887 — Edgar Poë: Derniers Contes , Paris: Albert Savine  (French translation by Félix Rabbe)
• “Le principe poétique” — 1908 — Bibliothèque des poètes fraçais et étrangers: Edgar-A. Poë , Paris: Louis-Michaud (French translation by Victor Orban)
• “Du principe poétique” — 1926 — Trois Manifestes , Paris: Simon Kra (French translation by René Lalou)
• Le principe de la Poésie — 1945 — Paris: Editions du Myrte (French translation and notes by Charles Bellanger)
• “The Poetic Principle” — 2007 — Audio book (unabridged), read by Chris Aruffo (part of a 5-CD set)
• A manuscript fragment listed as a fake by the famous forger Joseph Cosey in American Books Current (1968-1969): “MS forgery of a Poe portion of a lecture, ‘Poetic Principle,’ dated 9 Dec 1847. 2 pp (joined together), 5 by 14 inches. hn 33 (177) $40” (p. 1421)

Bibliography:

• Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943.
• Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009
• Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches ), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978.
• Rubin, Joseph J., “John Neal's Poetics as an Influence on Whitman and Poe,” New England Quarterly , June 1941, 14:359-362

[S:0 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Essays - The Poetic Principle