Volume 38, Number 13 · July 18, 1991
Dreams of E.A. Poe
By Diane Johnson
When Henry James made his famous remark that 'an enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of an extremely primitive stage of reflection,' he meant of course to denigrate. Yet now we might think that James had hit upon Poe's particular genius, his gift of getting beneath the social surface of things to explore in his writing the primitive apparatus of the unconscious. Like other Europeans, Nietzsche understood Poe better than anyone did on these shores:
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