As can be imagined, such negative criticism
did not sit well with Poe's contemporaries.
The predominant sense in the 1830s and 40s
was that American literature was vulnerable
and had to be protected.
And thus, the broad majority of American literary criticism
looking at American books fell into the habit
known as puffery, or puffing--
lauding books with superlative praise, regardless
of their quality.
Thus Poe's negative criticism was a marked departure
from this habit.
And though it rarely won him any friends,
he seemed to recognize that in order
to create a truly American fine literature,
the puffing had to stop.
As he remarks in one review, "We get up
a hue and cry about the necessity
of encouraging writers of merit--
we blindly fancy that we can accomplish this
by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent,
without taking the trouble to consider that what we choose
to denominate encouragement is thus,
by its general application, rendered precisely the reverse.
In a word, so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful
literary failures--" and he thinks there are a lot of them
"--to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied
patriotism have lately given birth,
and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities
are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously
to our originally blindly conceived idea,
and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox
of liking a stupid book the better, because, sure enough,
its stupidity is American."
[LAUGHTER]
In place of puffing, Poe adopted a bold new stance
that literary criticism should look
at the object scientifically and analytically,
judging it solely on what it is, not what it was intended to be,
or what value its ideas might have.
This is why Poe calls literary criticism an emerging
new science that will supersede the flippant opinion
of the older reviews and puffs.
In one manifesto, he rallies for, quote,
"an absolutely independent criticism, a criticism
self-sustained, guiding itself only by the purest rules
of art, analyzing and urging these rules as it applies them,
holding itself aloof from all personal bias,
yielding no point, either to the vanity of the author,
or to the assumptions of antique prejudice,
or to the arrogance of those organized cliques which,
hanging like nightmares upon American literature,
manufacture, at the nod of our principal booksellers,
a pseudo-public opinion by wholesale."
Lashing out at favoritism and publisher backed puffing,
Poe's critical point of view held instead
that aesthetics and beauty were not subjective.
They were not matters of opinion,
and the literary quality could be analyzed by close attention
to the book itself, to the words on the page.
"A book is written," he writes, "and it is only as the book
that we subject it to review."
This cutting out of the national character, the author's
intentions, the opinion or stance of the book
revolutionizes criticism and grounds
critical literary study, even to some degree, today.
For Poe, a true critic must possess above all, a, quote,
"talent for analysis."
Now, this may strike many as rather sterile.
If beauty is objective and informal,
it will have seem to have lost all of its soul.
But Poe extended his claim.
The forms of beauty are not empty,
but are rather the physical mechanics of the universe.
In one of his final books, Eureka,
he suggested that the motion of the cosmos, gravity
and repulsion, were one with the beauty of literary art.
That is, beauty may be just math.
But math is not just anything.
It is, for Poe, actually the fabric of the universe.
As he writes in Eureka, "The universe is a plot of God.
And the plots of God are perfect."
Thus the universe becomes a literary work,
a formal arrangement.
And when we analyze nature from crystals to stars,
we uncover the same patterns that we find when
we analyze poems and fiction.
My point in gesturing to outer space in this
is to show how for Poe, the stakes of literary criticism
were much higher than simply recommending a book.
And his approach-- formalist, mathematical, scientific--
demystified literature by turning it from spirit
into matter, and then remystified it
by turning matter into poetry.
If you are a critic with a skill for analysis,
then literature opens up to you, not in some supernal way
in which you become flooded with emotion,
but rather in a mechanistic way in which you
are able to see the springs, pulleys, and levers by which
it works.
And if you see the machinery, then you
could possibly do some pretty neat things,
like see the ending before the beginning was even finished,
or even before the ending was ever written.
Such is what Poe himself did when
he solved a Dickens novel while it was still in serialization.
It happened this way.
Charles Dickens, hugely popular in the US,
was publishing the serialized mystery novel Barnaby
Rudge periodically in Britain and the United States
simultaneously.
It was published in the spirit of the times.
And this was the cover page of the first installment.
So Poe undertakes to review Barnaby Rudge
after the initial installments are published.
Poe offhandedly predicts the murderer, the arrangement
of the murder, and explains the cause of many of the clues
before the later installments were published.
When the rest of the novel was published
and Poe turned out to be correct,
Poe wrote another review in which he reminded everyone
that he had predicted it all from the start.
Well, that's not quite true.
There is one thing that Poe doesn't get right.
OK, this is a little complicated, but bear with me.
The fact that one character has a birthmark that
looks like blood on his wrist leads
Poe to believe that the character's mother was gripped
by the wrist by the murderer while pregnant-- that
is, when the murderer grasped the pregnant woman's
wrist, the stain of that crime was literally
transferred onto the baby's wrist while in utero.
But when Dickens explains it much later in the novel,
it is rather the pregnant woman who grasps the murderer.
This leads Poe to say, "The differences
between our preconceived ideas as here stated
and the actual facts of the story will be found immaterial.
That Rudge's wife seized him by the wrist instead
of his seizing her has so much the air
of a mistake on the part of Mr. Dickens that we can scarcely
speak of our own version as erroneous.
We may therefore say that if we did not rightly prophecy,
yet at least our prophecy should have been right."
[LAUGHTER]
So Poe solves Barnaby Rudge and goes so far
to say where the two versions diverge, Dickens, and not
himself, was in the wrong.
I had earlier been talking about Poe's analytical criticism.
And here is where you start to see
that it becomes sensational.
Poe does not only innovate in analytical criticism--
and perhaps if his criticism were simply
negative and analytical, it wouldn't
have had such an effect--
but he sensationalizes it.
And, as I hope in this last section to show,
he turns it into an art all of its own.