Volume 9, Number 1 · July 13, 1967
The Poe Mystery Case
By Richard Wilbur
The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by Eric W. Carlson
Michigan, 320 pp., $7.50
Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays
edited by Robert Regan
Prentice-Hall, 192 pp., $1.95 (paper)
Poe's is the shakiest of all large American reputations, and yet, if I remember rightly a statement of Malcolm Cowley's, there have been more studies of him than of any other native writer. There is, as Whitman said, an 'indescribable magnetism' about Poe's much romanticized life, and that would be part of the explanation. It is also true that Poe is an important point in any brief for Southern letters, that his supposed morbidity has attracted many diagnosticians of psychic and cultural sickness, and that some critics have been annoyed into writing about Poe by a desire to comprehend or explain away his high standing abroad. Finally, and on the whole recently, a number of people have attempted direct literary analysis of Poe, moved by a sense that there is more to him than obsession, mystification, and—as Yeats put it of 'The Pit and the Pendulum'—'an appeal to the nerves by tawdry physical affrightments.'
Review, 4284 words
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