The Post-Kantian Poe: Introduction and TOC

Forthcoming in late Fall 2012:

From the Guest Editors 

“Theory Mad Beyond Redemption”: The Post-Kantian Poe 

Sean Moreland, Jonathan Murphy and Devin Zane Shaw

Early in “The Poetic Principle” (1850), Poe warns his readers that, despite his attempt to articulate the principle of poetry, he has no “design to be either thorough or profound.”  He mocks both those who overestimate the power of epic poetry (that “epic mania” cherished by German Romanticism) and those Bostonian didacts who would confuse “Poetic dignity and force” with the severity of Truth, writing that one “must be theory-mad beyond redemption who […] shall still persist in attempting to reconcile the obstinate oils and waters of Poetry and Truth.”  Yet, as the essays in this collection attest, Poe himself was, in his various engagements with Kantian and post-Kantian philosophy, as “theory-mad ” as those writers he sought to distance himself from.

This special issue of the Edgar Allan Poe Review is primarily intended to address these multifaceted engagements. A secondary impetus behind this collection has been to reconcile two competing tendencies in Poe scholarship:  the antagonism between materially- and theoretically-oriented approaches to the author and his work.  While the pitfalls of historically disengaged theoretical criticism are widely acknowledged, the dangers of totally abandoning a philosophically informed approach are as great, especially in the case of a writer as metaphysically invested as Edgar Allan Poe.

As guest editors, we have sought to gather together a collection of essays that bridge the disciplinary divide between historiography and philosophy with the underlying belief that informed Poe criticism needs to address the author and his works in their entirety.  Our aim in this volume is, therefore, not so much to pit “The Purloined Poe” against his “American Face” as it is to emphasize the transatlantic influences that indelibly shaped Poe’s writing and to do so in a manner that responds to the rich body of historicist scholarship that has dominated the field as of late.    The organization of the essays in this issue roughly reflects the chronology of the texts they treat, providing for the reader a historical cross-section of Poe’s adoptions and perversions of Kantian and post-Kantian thought throughout his career.  

In “The American Dream Elucidated by Edgar Allan Poe,” Jonathan Murphy addresses the author’s contentious relations with the nationalist politics of his day.  By offering an overview of the evolution of Poe’s career and by drawing a historical link between the political thought of Kant, Coleridge, Lacan, Derrida, and Žižek, Murphy demonstrates that Poe’s metaphysics amount to a romantic profession of faith in America grounded in a universalist poetics of desire.  

Stephanie Sommerfeld’s contribution, “Post-Kantian Sublimity and Mediacy in Poe’s Blackwood Tales,” explores the ways in which Poe’s investment in the discourse of the sublime, particularly in its Kantian conception, is played out in his parodic Blackwood tales of the 1830s.  She argues that Poe’s narratives undermine the Emersonian appropriation of Kant, which remained largely silent on the negative moments of the Kantian sublime.  

In “‘As Urged by Schelling’: Coleridge, Poe, and the Schellingian Refrain,” Sean Moreland and Devin Zane Shaw consider Poe’s adaptation of Schelling’s philosophy of art and his interpretation of mythology, which Poe assimilated primarily by way of Coleridge.  Shaw and Moreland show that Poe, in his critical and literary practice, adapted Schelling’s and Coleridge’s critiques of allegory while deflating what he considered to be their metaphysical pretensions. They conclude with a brief consideration of the role these critiques play in both Poe’s critical writings and his composition of “The Raven” (1845).  

Sean Kelly, in “Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’,” offers a Kantian analysis of Poe’s theory of perversion as it is evidenced in his late fiction and especially in “The Black Cat” (1843).  He contends that the narrator of this story is representative of the onanistic madman that was the subject of much medical controversy in mid-nineteenth century discourses on the etiological linkage between masculinity, masturbation, and madness.  

Courtney Fugate brings our special issue to a close with his contribution of “From the German Cosmological Tradition to Poe’s Eureka.”  He argues for the importance of Poe’s Eureka (1848) not merely as a literary hoax or aesthetic manifesto but as a vital contribution to the genre of cosmological speculation.  Fugate provides a useful introduction to this fascinating intellectual tradition, in which Kant and Schelling were also deeply invested.

We owe Barbara Cantalupo a debt of gratitude for inviting us to guest-edit this special issue of her journal and for continuing to make The Edgar Allan Poe Review a welcome home for historically-grounded and theoretically-engaged scholarship.  We would also like to thank our contributors for their hard work and cooperation in meeting our pressing deadlines.  To all of those scholars who submitted abstracts for our consideration, please know that the plenitude and interest of your submissions made our editorial decisions difficult.  Finally, we are very grateful to the editorial board of this journal for their insightful comments and selection suggestions. 

Table of Contents 

Jonathan Murphy, “The American Dream Elucidated by Edgar Allan Poe” 

Stephanie Sommerfeld, “Post-Kantian Sublimity and Mediacy in Poe’s Blackwood Tales”

Sean Moreland and Devin Zane Shaw, “‘As Urged by Schelling’: Coleridge, Poe, and the Schellingian Refrain” 

Sean Kelly, “Penning Perversion in Poe’s ‘The Black Cat’”  

Courtney Fugate, From the German Cosmological Tradition to Poe’s Eureka”

The original call for papers is available here.

Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800

Thanks to insistence of occasional contributor Sean Moreland, I've lately taken some interest in British romanticism. The impetus is a co-authored paper that we are writing on Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe. I've already mentioned the fun I've had reading Poe, but my research on Coleridge has increased my interest in the aesthetics and politics of the British romantics, not only STC, but also Wordsworth, and the now lesser-known John Thelwall.

After reading volume one of Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, acquiring a copy of Lyrical Ballads seemed to be the next obvious step. But which edition to acquire was not so obvious, since they are numerous. I did some browsing and settled on Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, edited by Michael Gamer and Dahlia Porter, and published by Broadview Press. This edition was slightly more expensive than those of Penguin or Oxford, but it is more useful for the academic who finds himself (or herself) a novice in a new field.

The Lyrical Ballads 1798 and 1800, reproduces not just the first two editions, but also  an excerpt of Wordsworth's 1802 preface, contemporary reviews of both editions, and numerous appendices including: poems by Coleridge that were originally intended to be published in the LB, correspondence and commentary on the volumes, excerpts from contemporary prose and poetry, and a short section on mapping the locations of the poems. 

It's a lot of material, but very useful. For my purposes, I was interested in how Wordsworth's contemporaries received the poems. For I was initially hesitant to make the jump from German to British romanticism because I had understood Wordsworth to be, as he is now often presented, a nature-poet. Reading Rancière in advance of the Lyrical Ballads had challenged that characterization, and the contemporary reviews, reproduced in this volume, confirm that his contemporaries did not miss the political aspect of Wordsworth's concept of nature, from the hints of Rousseau, to the way that his experiments in ascertaining "how far the language of conversation in the middle and lower classes of society is adapted to the purposes of poetic pleasure" undermined the accepted hierarchies of aesthetic, moral, and political attitudes of the time.

I found the 1798 edition to be more compelling, but this could be due to reading the 1800 edition soon after. Nevertheless, I do appreciate the playful aspect of beginning the later edition with Wordsworth's "Expostulation and Reply" and "The Tables Turned," which introduce the Lyrical Ballads by asking the reader not to read it. And I couldn't complete this short review without noting the apt characterization (in the 1800 edition's 'Argument' prefacing The Ancient Mariner) of the mariner's act as a demonstration of "contempt of the laws of hospitality."

Poe as Critic: The Drake-Halleck Review

I've spent the last few weeks reading a variety of works by Edgar Allan Poe (and Coleridge, for that matter), preparing for a paper that I am co-authoring with Sean Moreland on the connections between Schelling, Coleridge, and Poe. Sean is in Seattle, whittling the material down to a twenty minute presentation, to be given on Sunday morning at the MLA conference (see here). If you're in the area, I'd recommend checking it out. At least I've learned a few things from this unlikely line of research.

I've also learned that Poe could be a devastating critic. It's one thing to engage in polemics--something I'm sure we're all familiar with. But Poe takes literary criticism to another level, given that he's unafraid to use his talents to mischievous effect. As in laugh out loud funny, although if I build it up too much you will not laugh, and thus not embarrass yourself by punctuating the silence of a library or the murmur of a café.

In the Drake-Halleck review (in fact, go read it rather than what follows here), Poe attacks the tendency of American critics to inflate the literary value of American authors, noting that we "find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American." There are, Poe argues, cases in which American literature measures up to other national literatures (he's thinking particularly of  the British), but overestimating sub-par work by authors such as Joseph Rodman Drake and Fitz Greene Halleck undermines "the health and prosperity of out literature."

In what follows, Poe argues that Drake's poetry only requires a "moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparision"--the fancy-- rather than a facility with imagination and ideality. After summarizing the plot of the poem the Culprit Fay, he writes (all that follows is from Poe):

It will be there seen that what is so frequently termed the imaginative power of this story, lies especially- we should have rather said is thought to lie- in the passages we have quoted, or in others of a precisely similar nature. These passages embody, principally, mere specifications of qualities, of habiliments, of punishments, of occupations, of circumstances, &c., which the poet has believed in unison with the size, firstly, and secondly with the nature of his Fairies. To all which may be added specifications of other animal existences (such as the toad, the beetle, the lance-fly, the fire-fly and the like) supposed also to be in accordance. An example will best illustrate our meaning upon this point-

He put his acorn helmet on;
It was plumed of the silk of the thistle down:
The corslet plate that guarded his breast
Was once the wild bee's golden vest;
His cloak of a thousand mingled dyes,
Was formed of the wings of butterflies;
His shield was the shell of a lady-bug queen,
Studs of gold on a ground of green;
And the quivering lance which he brandished bright
Was the sting of a wasp he had slain in fight.

We shall now be understood. Were any of the admirers of the Culprit Fay asked their opinion of these lines, they would most probably speak in high terms of the imagination they display. Yet let the most stolid and the most confessedly unpoetical of these admirers only try the experiment, and he will find, possibly to his extreme surprise, that he himself will have no difficulty whatever in substituting for the equipments of the Fairy, as assigned by the poet, other equipments equally comfortable, no doubt, and equally in unison with the preconceived size, character, and other qualities of the equipped. Why we could accoutre him as well ourselves- let us see.

His blue-bell helmet, we have heard
Was plumed with the down of the hummingbird,
The corslet on his bosom bold
Was once the locust's coat of gold,
His cloak, of a thousand mingled hues,
Was the velvet violet, wet with dews,
His target was, the crescent shell
Of the small sea Sidrophel,
And a glittering beam from a maiden's eye
Was the lance which he proudly wav'd on high.

The truth is, that the only requisite for writing verses of this nature, ad libitum is a tolerable acquaintance with the qualities of the objects to be detailed, and a very moderate endowment of the faculty of Comparison- which is the chief constituent of Fancy or the powers of combination. A thousand such lines may be composed without exercising in the least degree the Poetic Sentiment, which is Ideality, Imagination, or the creative ability. And, as we have before said, the greater portion of the Culprit Fay is occupied with these, or similiar things, and upon such, depends very nearly, if not altogether, its reputation.