title: The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel
author: Jerome McGann
description: <b>McGann</b> [wants] to set the record straight, right an imbalance and show why Poe deserves a place beside Whitman and Emily Dickinson, the venerated father and mother of American poetry. His marvelous short book combines old-fashioned close reading with a capacious historical and theoretical sense of Poes place in American literature and mid-19th-century American cultureMcGanns basic thesis about Poes poems (he calls them Poe-try) and his remarks about individual gestures, lines, sounds and rhythms are constantly engaging. Readers who believe that God is in the details will find plenty to astonish themBy moving away from poetrys expository and thematic features to its aesthetic and rhetorical ones, McGann has performed an important cultural and intellectual service. (Willard Spiegelman <i>Wall Street Journal</i>)<br /><br /><i style="mso-bidi-font-style:normal">The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel</i> promises to save Poes poetry from [a] dire critical fate[<b>McGann</b>s] aim is ambitious: to give Poes poetry academic significance, to establish both its aesthetic appeal and its political relevance. As Edmund Wilson does in his appreciative essay Poe at Home and Abroad, McGann figures Poes work as the suspension bridge across the chasm separating romanticism and modernism. He situates Poes work alongside and against the romantic poetry of Keats, Byron, Shelley, Wordsworth; evaluates Poes sonic influence on the writing of Rimbaud, Mallarm, Baudelaire; and, expands upon Eliots essay From Poe to Valry to trace the influence of Poes critique of the romantic I through symbolism into high modern elasticism, and then, into language poetry and the latest work of Charles Bernstein. He demonstrates Poes unquestionable impact on the way Americans thought about poetry and the way poetry thought about itself. (Ava Kofman <i>Los Angeles Review of Books</i>)<br /><br />ElegantOne of <b>McGann</b>s greatest services is to introduce lay readers to Poes critical writings. He excerpts several longish selections from Poes correspondence and reviews as well as the <i style="mso-bidi-font-style: normal">Marginalia</i>, sundry magazine pieces he authored between 1845 and 1849. What emerges is an Edgar Allan Poe who thought profoundly about poetry and literature and who was able, mostly, to express his ideas and theories in clear prose. (John S. Sledge <i>Virginia Quarterly Review</i>)<br /><br /><b>McGann</b> has set out to address and correct the problem of Poes poetry, and the result is a necessary volume not only for those compelled and beguiled by Poe but for anyone who understands the importance of poetic tradition and its umbilical to American imagination. This book is McGanns deep-seeing riposte to those criticsEmerson, Yvor Winters, D.H. Lawrence, Harold Bloom, et al.who have dismissed Poes aesthetics as by turns decadent and preposterous Part of the large pleasure of McGanns book is his contra-academic gift of phrase, his parsed insights into Poes legend-laden life and the angel of the odd suspended over his writing desk. (William Giraldi <i>New Republic</i>)<br /><br />From a close reading of Poes rhetorical tropes and careful reconstructions of context, <b>McGann</b> draws out a much richer understanding of Poes perspective on art and life. (Scott McLemee <i>Inside Higher Ed</i>)<br /><br />[Shows] Poe as a consummate craftsman who daringly reimagined how poems invent meaning. (<i>Kirkus Reviews</i>)<br /><br /><b>McGann</b> persuasively defends Poes poetry against its many detractors, who have criticized the work as all jingle (Ralph Waldo Emerson) and lacking in intellectual content (Yvor Winters). Through close readings of Poes marginalia, reviews, and letters, as well as his essays on poetic composition, notably The Poetic Principle, McGann shows how Poe worked out a sophisticated theory of poeticsIt will certainly provide readers with a deeper appreciation of the writers achievements as a poet. (<i>Publishers Weekly</i>)<br /><br /><b>McGann</b> restores Poe to his foundational role for American, and 19th century, poetics. McGanns breathtaking scholarship makes Poes work thrillingly present and hauntingly prescient. Only this and nothing more. (Charles Bernstein, University of Pennsylvania)<br /><br /><i>The Poet Edgar Allan Poe </i>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 <i>The Portable Edgar Allan Poe</i>)<br /><br /><b>McGann</b> succeeds in forcing us to rethink Poes poetryPoes sound experiments, especially his strange variations on meter, deserve, as McGann shows by citing numerous rhythmic anomalies, to be taken seriouslyIn an age of predominantly, and purposely, flat and prosaic free verse, mnemonic patterning is perhaps re-emerging as the emblem of poetic power. In this sense, Poe is once again Our ContemporaryIn making the case for the close link between the poetry and the aesthetic theory, [McGann] succeeds admirably: Poes reputation as <i>poete maudit</i> belies the fact that here was a poet who knew exactly what he was doing. (Marjorie Perloff <i>Times Literary Supplement</i>)
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  ![](index-1_1.jpg)
  
  
  The Poet Edgar Allan Poe
  
  
  
  
  
  The Poet
  
  
  Edgar Allan Poe
  
  
  l Alien Angel L
  
  
  _Jerome McGann_
  
  
  Cambridge, Massachusetts
  
  
  London, England
  
  
  2014
  
  
  Copyright © 2014 by Jerome McGann All rights reserved
  
  
  Printed in the United States of America
  
  
  First Printing
  
  
  Chapter 4 is a composite of two previously published articles:
  
  
  “Poe. Th
  
  
  e Politics of a Poetry without Politics,” _Literature Compass_ 10, 11
  
  
  (November 2013): 871–884, copyright © 2013 by Jerome McGann; and
  
  
  “ ‘Th
  
  
  e Bells,’ Performance, and the Politics of Poetry,” _Th_ _e Edgar Allan Poe_
  
  
  _Review_ 15, no. 1 (Spring 2014): 47–58, copyright © 2014 by Jerome McGann.
  
  
  _Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data_ McGann, Jerome J.,
  author.
  
  
  Th
  
  
  e Poet Edgar Allan Poe : Alien Angel / Jerome McGann.
  
  
  pages cm
  
  
  Includes bibliographical references and index.
  
  
  ISBN 978- 0- 674- 41666- 6
  
  
  1\. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809– 1849—Poetic works. 2. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–
  1849—Critic