Poe was the most successful magazine editor of his day. His circulation numbers broke records. Poe broke records with dignity, too. No lingerie ads.
Longfellow was dignified, too. So was Hawthorne. Emerson was chaste in his writings. None of these authors writings would have appeared next to lingerie ads in their day. Come to think of it, I cant think of any canonical authors whose writings appeared next to lingerie ads.
This is sort of like saying Glamor magazine blew Henry James out the water. Which it did. Henry James sold very poorly in his day, and it caused him to have a nervous breakdown.
Would Henry James, on his 200th birthday, in The New Yorker, or anywhere else, in a piece by a distinguished scholar from Harvard, be belittled around the fact that he (Henry James) couldnt sell books, a point driven home for the entire length of the essay?
I cant imagine it, but if it did happen, all the better for Henry James. The backlash against the review would probably help his reputation immensely.
Poe is fortunate, however, to be sneered at in public by a distinguished scholar every 20 years, or so. Harold Bloom did it to Poe back in 1984 (October 11) in the New York Review of Books, T.S. Eliot did a hatchet job on Poe in his From Poe to Valery (1949). Aldous Huxley did it in the 1930s and The Nation did it at the turn of the century. All these Poe attacks said the same nutty thing, too; that Poes immense influence in France was merely an accident: Poe was lucky to sound better in French than English, which is the oddest sort of attempt to turn a writers positive into a negative Ive ever heard.
The bottom line here is this, and we can see it in Jill Lepores childish rant against Poe in The New Yorker, as she repeats lies against Poes character which have long since been refuted by Poe scholars. (Poe was not found drunk, in Baltimore, nor was he dragged around Baltimore to cast votes, nor was he deeply racist, nor was he a liar, nor was he ruined by the Panic of 1937. LePore clearly did not consult the latest Poe scholarship, or any Poe scholarship that I can see.)
Even though LePore is a respected and distinguished scholar, and not only a professor, but a Chair, at Harvard, she drops all decorum, all scholarly respectability and judgment in her attack, and does this blithely and sloppily, in completely open sneer mode, because she knows she will be applauded by her peers at Harvard and Yale and Stanford, where distinguished chairs, Vendler, Bloom, Yvor Winters have never felt anything but contempt for Poe.
Heres the bottom line: Lepore, from her perch at Harvard, is fighting an old Harvard war by proxy, a war which goes back to the bad blood between Poe and Harvard man Emerson, Harvard Divinity School hero William Ellery Channing, and their friend William Greenleaf Eliot, T.S. Eliots grandfather. (Theres a host of other historical figures involved who did not like Poe on Emersons side of the ledger, including Horace Greeley, Margaret Fuller, and Griswold, but I dont have the space to go into it all here.)
Poe destroyed (with a stabbing, comic review) the poetic reputation of Channings nephew, Channing the Younger, who was living off Emersons dollar while anticipating a career as the first great transcendalist poet. Whitman came much later, after Poe was dead.
After Poes death, they breathed much easier, these transcendalists like Waldo Emerson and his friend William Dean Howellsto whom Emerson made the jingle man remark in a fit of rage when just-in-from-the-West Howells made the mistake of telling Emerson he only knew Channings work from a review by Edgar Poe. Howells would later publish Henry James in his role as editor of The Atlantic, Henry James another important anglo-american literary bridge, through his super wealthy father, in his friendship of both Emerson and T.S. Eliot.
Lepore is intent on reminding everyone who reads Poe, that, hey, did you know this guy hates you?
The public that swallowed that bird and bug ['The Gold Bug'] Poe strenuously resented.
How does she know this?
She continues: You love Poe or you dont, but either way, Poe doesnt love you.
Wait a minute. Why must we love Poe or dont? Cant we be like, you know, a scholar, and not be soblack and white?
And Poe doesnt love you?? Where is this coming from??
A writer more condescending to more adoring readers would be hard to find. The nose of a mob is its imagination, he wrote. By this, at any time, it can be quietly led.
Yes, and so? Time out of mind, writers have condemend the mob. Emerson did; why, at one time, or another, they all did; even Karl Marx. Yet this mob quotation is how scholar Jill LePore tries to convince us that Poe doesnt like us.
What is interesting here is not what LePore says about Poe, but what Poe has done to poor professor LePore.
Its almost as if Poe isnt *allowed* to be popular. She calls The Philosophy of Composition a lovely little essay, but, [she continues] as Poe himself admitted, its a bit of jiggery-pokery, too. Poe didnt actually write The Raven backward.
How does she know Poe didnt actually write The Raven backward?
She doesnt.
This is Lepores spleen talking again, the same spleen that sneering calls The Philosophy of Composition a lovely little essay.
She doesnt bother to quote from this lovely little essay (shes far more interested in rumors of Poes character) but heres one passage I like:
And here I may as well say a few words of the versification. My first object (as usual) was originality. The extent to which this has been neglected, in versification, is one of the most unaccountable things in the world. Admitting that there is little possibility of variety in mere rhythm, it is still clear that the possible varieties of metre and stanza are absolutely infinite and yet, for centuries, no man, in verse, has ever done, or ever seemed to think of doing, an original thing.
The fact is, originality (unless in minds of very unusual force) is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought, and although a positive merit of the highest class, demands in its attainment less of invention than negation.
[This I find particularly interesting: 'originality is by no means a matter, as some suppose, of impulse or intuition. In general, to be found, it must be elaborately sought']
Of course, I pretend to no originality in either the rhythm or metre of the Raven. The former is trochaic the latter is octametre acatalectic, alternating with heptameter catalectic repeated in the refrain of the fifth verse, and terminating with tetrameter catalectic. Less pedantically the feet employed throughout (trochees) consist of a long syllable followed by a short: the first line of the stanza consists of eight of these feet the second of seven and a half (in effect two-thirds) the third of eight the fourth of seven and a half the fifth the same the sixth three and a half. Now, each of these lines, taken individually, has been employed before, and what originality the Raven has, is in their combination into stanza; nothing even remotely approaching this combination has ever been attempted. The effect of this originality of combination is aided by other unusual, and some altogether novel effects, arising from an extension of the application of the principles of rhyme and alliteration.
When you actually READ POE, and forget about the little character snipes, well, isnt itrefreshing?
I dont know if Poe, loves me as his reader, as much as Jill Lepore loves me, as her reader, and Im sure Poe was near starvation or something to that effect, when he wrote the above words, and was worried deeply about the Panic of 1837, or some other historical event on which Jill Lepore is expert, but, in any case, Im glad Poe wrote what he did, and I get the added attraction of this Harvard Hate Poe on the side.
