ABSTRACT
Allan Poe, Durham, North Carolina: Duke University Press, 1988 Few writers in American literary history have inspired such wildly antithetical critical
responses as Edgar Allan Poe. While it would be a generalisation to suggest that these opinions divide exclusively upon geographical lines, it is noticeable that Poe’s writing has been met with considerably more enthusiasm outside his homeland than within it. Many of Poe’s most ardent detractors have been American writers and academics. Henry James once famously declared that “an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection”. In a similar vein, T.S.Eliot’s judgement on Poe was that he possessed “the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty”. Influential voices within the American academic establishment have often concurred with these negative appraisals. In his American Renaissance (1941), F.O. Matthiessen excluded Poe from his canon of nineteenth-century American writing on the grounds that his writing was “factitious” and “hostile to democracy”. More recently, Harold Bloom has been unable to stifle his aversion to Poe’s stylistic deficiencies and intellectual underdevelopment, even while editing two major collections of essays on his work.
