The United States, in the 1830s and 1840s,
were in a period of tremendous industrial and urban change.
Railroads, gas streetlights, fire departments,
and the raucous world of municipal and national politics
was coming into its own.
One change in particular was important to Poe.
This was the explosion of print periodicals
and the rapid rise of a popular reading public.
Between 1825 and 1850, roughly the span
of Poe's adult life, the number of magazines in the United
States grew from less than 100 to over 500.
Newspapers also proliferated, generating
a vital new urban world marked by reading,
from signage on the buildings, to newspapers in the streets,
to magazines in weekly, monthly, or quarterly installments,
Poe's world was one dominated by print periodicals.
As one commentator in 1828 noticed,
"These United States are fertile in most things,
but in periodicals they are extremely luxuriant.
They spring up as fast as mushrooms in every corner,
and like all rapid vegetation, bear the seeds of early decay
within them.
This is the fate of hundreds.
But hundreds more are found to supply their place,
to tread in their steps, and share their destiny."
For many of the people in this room, probably all of us,
we ourselves have seen analogous shifts in popular media,
as we move, sometimes clumsily, into the digital age.
And just as revolutionary as the internet
has been in changing our culture,
our politics, even our daily life, the periodical explosion
in the 1830s and '40s in America was equally,
even more revolutionary.
Social theorist Walter Benjamin has
identified the 18th and 19th century periodical culture
as one of the main drivers in creating
what he calls the public sphere, a new place of social power
composed of people who are united not only by geography
and history, but rather by the fact
that they were reading together.
Drawing from this, Michael Warner
has shown how important periodicals
were to the formation of the United States and democracy.
When people read these periodicals,
they were not just reading as a single person,
but were all the time conscious of a reading
public, all those other people reading the same thing.
Like reading a tweet today, the power of this act of reading
comes not just from the content of the message,
but also from its publicity, from our awareness
that the same tweet is being read by thousands,
millions of other people.
The periodical explosion didn't simply
provide people with more things to read,
it fundamentally changed how they read
and how they imagine their relationships with one another.
The print revolution entirely changed the social structure
of American society, and Poe was right in the middle
of the charge.
Poe served as an editor for several journals,
and published his poetry, fiction, essays,
and reviews and many more.
This is just a sample of some of the journals
that published Poe, and some of the journals
that he was associated with as editor and writer.
These periodicals were an eclectic stew
of art, politics, philosophy, and science,
as might be demonstrated by the title of one
journal of the period--
this is just taken at random--
Holden's Dollar Magazine of Criticisms, Biographies,
Sketches, Essays, Tales, Reviews, Poetry, Et
Cetera, Et Cetera.
Those are in there.
Poe began his work as a reviews editor,
writing many of the reviews himself, and it was in this way
that he began to realize the power of the periodical press.
As he continued to build a reputation,
he developed plans and schemes to launch his own journal.
He even drew up by hand his vision for the cover of it,
which you see here.
This is Poe.
I like just imagining Poe spending
time-- this is what the cover will look like on my journal.
You know.
But as Poe mentions in the prospectus for his proposed
journal, he had, by that time, become known for--
and Poe is aware of this-- a, quote,
"somewhat overdone causticity in its department
of critical notices of new books."
And he promises "to retain this trait of severity in so much
only as the calmest yet sternest sense of justice will permit."
This reputation for negative reviewing, which he himself
acknowledges and wants to sustain, earns him the nickname
The Tomahawk Man.
So recognizable was Poe as a critic,
that in 1849, just months before his death,
The Tomahawk Man was caricatured in a poem called
A Mirror For Authors.
"With Tomahawk upraised for deadly blow,
behold our literary Mohawk, Poe.
Sworn tyrant he o'er all who sin in verse, his own standard
damns he all that's worse.
And surely not for this shall he be
blamed, for worse than his deserves that it be damned."
I'll skip ahead.
"Poe's not the worst of bards, though bad he is.
Poor man, his worst of sins is synthesis.
Nor is he by great odds the worst of critics,
only he runs stark mad on analytics."
It goes on.
But I want to point out two things in this caricature.
First, of course, is the tomahawk, the symbol
of the violence of his reviews.
Playing on the racist stereotypes
of the Native American as bloodthirsty and cruel,
the tomahawk aligns Poe's criticism locally.
Unlike the polite barbs and pointed innuendos
of British criticism, Poe's American criticism
is native and unrestrained by convention or manners.
And second, the poem ends by noting that his criticism runs
stark mad on analytics.
In what follows I want to touch on both
of these, his condemnatory criticism
and his analytical criticism.
To begin though, let's take a look
at some of his negative reviews, beginning
with his skewering of Laughton Osborn's Confessions Of a Poet.
These are the first two pages of this book.
Let me point out a few things that Poe will mention.
First, there's not a lot of words on the page.
That first page is two and a half sentences.
And second, the title of this is Confessions
Of a Poet, and the phrase--
and it's in the second paragraph there--
"I call myself a poet, yet I never
wrote a line that was meant for publication."
And third, I want to just call out the footnote.
It's the first of many in this book.
There's lots of footnotes in this book.
And so, here's how Poe begins his review of Osborn's book,
Confessions Of a Poet, in 1835.
"The most remarkable feature in this production
is the bad paper on which it is printed,
and the typographical ingenuity with which
matter, barely enough for one volume,
has been spread over the pages of two.
The author has very few claims to the sacred name he
has thought proper to assume.
And indeed his own idea on the subject
seems not to satisfy himself.
"He is in doubt, poor man, of his own qualifications,
and having proclaimed himself a poet in the title page,
commences his book by disavowing all pretensions
to that character.
We can enlighten him on this head.
There is nothing of the vates about him.
He is no poet-- and most positively he is no prophet.
He is a writer of notes."
He ends the review--
not everything is bad, and there's something good here.
So he ends it with something good about the book.
"There is however some merit in this book, and not
a little satisfaction.
The author avers upon his word of honor
that in commencing this work he loads a pistol
and places it upon the table.
He further states that, upon coming to a conclusion,
it is his intention to blow out what
he supposes to be his brains.
Now this is excellent.
"But, even with so rapid a writer as the poet
must undoubtedly be, there would be some little difficulty
in completing the book under 30 days or thereabouts.
The best of powder is apt to sustain injury by lying so long
'in the load.'
We sincerely hope the gentleman took the precaution
to examine his priming before attempting the rash act.
A flash in the pan--
and in such a case--
were a thing to be lamented.
Indeed, there would be no answering for the consequences.
We might even have a second series of the Confessions."
Now, even for Poe this is a bit uncharacteristically harsh.
But it is a very good example of the cleverness and irony
of his critical wit.
He attacks the book and the author,
but uses the book's own words in fashioning its destruction.
He doesn't say this author should kill himself,
but rather that the author says that he intends
to kill himself, and we hope, for our sake,
that he does not fail.
So I'm going to go through three other examples here.
The first is Theodore Fay's Norman Leslie.
And I'll just read to you what he writes about Norman Leslie.
"As regards Mr. Fay's style, it is unworthy of a schoolboy.
The editor of The New York Mirror
has either never seen an edition of Murray's Grammar,
or he's been a-Willising so long as
to have forgotten his vernacular language.
Let us examine one or two of his sentences at random.
Page 28, volume one."
I hope I can say--
OK.
"He was doomed--" This is Fay.
"He was doomed to wander through the fartherest climbs, alone
and branded."
Poe says, "Why not say at once fartherer-therest?"
Page 150, volume one.
"Yon kindling orb should be hers,
and that faint spark close to its side
should teach her how dim, and yet how near,
my soul was to her own."
Poe says, "What is the meaning of all this?
Is Mr. Leslie's soul dim to her own as well as near to her own?
For the sentence implies as much.
Suppose we say, quote, 'should teach her how dim was my soul
and yet how near to her own.'" All right.
Next example, Rufus Dawes writes a poem called Geraldine.
And Poe's often fond of rewriting sentences or poetry
in his criticism, in order to point out
absurdity in the original.
For instance, here are the lines from Rufus Dawes
that are selected by Poe.
"He laid her gently down, of sense bereft,
and sunk his picture on her bosom snow.
And close beside these lines in blood
he left, farewell forever!
I go, another woman's victim.
Dare I tell?
'Tis Alice!
Curse us, Geraldine.
Farewell."
Poe says, "This is a droll piece of business!
The lover brings forth a miniature.
Mr. Dawes has a passion for miniatures.
He sinks it in the bosom of the lady, cuts his finger,
and writes with the blood an epistle.
Where is not specified, but we presume
he indicts it upon the bosom, as it is close beside the picture.
In which epistle he announces that he is another woman's
victim, giving us to understand that he
himself is a woman after all, and concluding
with the delicious bit of billingsgate, 'Dare I tell?
'Tis Alice!
Curse us, Geraldine.
Farewell.' We suppose, however, that 'curse us' is a misprint,
for why should Geraldine curse both herself and her lover?
It should have been 'curse it,' no doubt.
"The whole passage perhaps would have been
read better thus, 'Oh, my eye!
'Tis Alice!
Damn it, Geraldine!
Goodbye!'"
[LAUGHTER]
And because I can't help myself, he
has good fun at the expense of George
Jones, the American histrion.
Let's look briefly at the title pages of the first volume,
which Poe says ought to be, quote, "cut out
and deposited in the British Museum."
So that is the first title page, the one with the image.
And then there is this title page.
And then this one, and then this one, and then this one,
and then this one, and then, finally, we
reach the beginning of the book.
If you're counting, that's seven title pages,
three illustrations, one of which is of the author
himself in classical Greek garb, before we get to the work
itself.
But I've also omitted, and Poe actually
omits some of this too, a dedication
to the Archbishop of Canterbury, a biblical verse,
an inscription to the King of Prussia,
a preface in which the author explains
that the lack of the table of contents
is to preserve the secrets of history--
he doesn't want to give anything away by putting it
in the table of contents-- and a warning
to booksellers not to steal his work.
In all, there are 19 pages of preparatory fluff
before the first word of the book itself.
These are the title pages that Poe wishes to cut out--
be cut out and deposited in the British Museum.
To make his point, in Poe's review
he writes every single word off of those title pages, every one
verbatim, and then he comments.
"By the blessing of God, this is all!
We give them verbatim, first, because we like a neat thing
and enough of it.
"And secondly, because here we have discovered
Milton's allusion in his, quote, 'many winding bout of linked
sweetness long drawn out.'
Here it is.
This is it.
He had reference to the title pages of George Jones."
But this isn't all.
Poe then turns to the illustrations
and tries to picture them forth in words for his reader.
And we're helped out here because we
can look at the images.
His reader wouldn't have them.
"Let him, the reader, conceive the inconceivable.
Let him picture to himself a--
what is it?
A person with a chin?
A gentleman with a simper?
A something with a scarf over its right shoulder?
The throat bare, the hair well off the temples,
the eyebrows up.
The whole thing looking satisfied with the existing
condition of matters so far as regards merely itself,
but consumed with pity for the universe upon the whole,
and exceedingly hurt and vexed, not to say mortified,
that its advice was not taken in the first instance when
that sad botch of an affair, that is to say the universe,
was originally manufactured.
This curious thing is the great American histrion,
that is to say, it is George Jones
and the author of this book."
Now let's look at the next image.
"The reader is entreated to imagine a building not
altogether unlike the infernal palace seen by Vathek or--"
I can't pronounce this.
"Nouronihar."
It's a character from a Gothic tale.
"We take this building to be intended either
for the New York City Hall or the Magdalene Asylum,
or the fountain in the Bowling Green.
We cannot be positive that it is meant for more than one
of these, but it is ugly enough to be all three.
"It is in the background, floating upon the sea,
if we rightly comprehend the idea.
And in the foreground is Moses, the prophet,
standing guard over an assortment of kettles and pans,
and holding in each hand one of the 10 commandment tables
of stone, the hardness of which he
seems anxious to test upon the skull of a high priest
in full pontifical, who is clearly bent on-- upon stealing
a kettle at least.
"And with this view brandishes an oyster knife,
with which he is watching his opportunity
to cut Moses' throat.
And the sooner the better, beyond doubt."
[LAUGHTER]
"Will the reader just oblige us by picturing to himself Neptune
sitting comfortably, although a little stiffly,
on a large oyster shell, with something
that looks like a roll of manuscript for a footboard,
and drawn by four horses with the tails of catfish
or possibly gudgeons.
One of the horses turning his head aside
to take a bite or a kiss at a young lady, who really should
be ashamed of herself for swimming so high out
of the water.
"Above all this, let there be fancied a little cupid
with knock-knees fluttering himself into a fit.
And the picture is complete, that is,
it would be complete if there were only a few words
printed beneath it in the way of a hint as to what it is all
about."
[LAUGHTER]
I had to choose these three examples carefully,
as there are many, many, many more.
I want to point out three things though.
First, Poe uses the words of the book against the book itself.
He always does this.
He doesn't come in from the outside.
He likes to analyze the book and attack
it using its own language.
And Poe is very particular regarding
style, mechanics, grammar.
If you put the wrong word in the wrong place,
Poe can go to town for the entire review on one sentence
that you wrote wrong.
And his attention to the form of the work, not
just in its style, but in its actual material, in its pose
and posture, all those title pages,
the ostentatiousness of it Poe really wanted to attack.
For Poe, content could not be separated neatly from form.
And this is what leads to his main achievement
in literary criticism, a renewed attention, a rigorous focus,
on analyzing the work itself.