ABSTRACT
A crucial authorial task is to charm readers into believing they are uniquely and directly addressed by the author. If the writer succeeds in this mission, readers never realize that their own intercourse with the work may be limited not only by the author’s imaginative limitations but more importantly by a host of cultural and institutional factors. For one thing, authors’ and readers’ national, political, and commercial alliances have a great deal to do with what is published. By 1831, the year Poe published his initial critical essay, the name Wordsworth had risen from the list of poets considered avant-garde to the near side of respectability for even the most conservative British and American periodicals.2 As Poe puts it above, Wordsworth’s achievement of respectability renders him a literary “estate in possession” whose name has gone to work for his publisher and himself.3 As demonstrated by the prose writings of Hazlitt, DeQuincey, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, the modern print-media critic has displayed stylistic and creative powers analogous to those of the poet or writer of fiction. This function
had been greatly discounted by the anonymous reviews speaking for major periodicals prior to 1815 in Britain and the early 1830s in the United States. While the critic had been deemed a stylist and a rhetorician, his obligation to entertain and especially to advise and protect his reader had generally been seen as outweighing any inclination he might have to compose literature of lasting value.
