Page 16 - DENG202_ELECTIVE_ENGLISH_III

Unit 2: A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

and Aldous Huxley were a few of the renowned detractors of Poe, who scorned his works as Notes
artistically debased, juvenile and vulgar. On the contrary, literary figures like William Carlos
Williams and Bernard Shaw have called Poe’s works to be of the highest literary merit. Adding
to Poe’s erratic reputation among American and English critics is the more stable, and normally
higher opinion of critics somewhere else in the world, especially in France. Following the
widespread commentaries and translations of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, the French writers
received Poe’s works with a peculiar reverence and appreciation. It happened most profoundly
with those related with the Symbolism movement, who appreciated Poe’s transcendent ambitions
as a poet, the Surrealism movement, which valued Poe’s queer and seemingly unruled imagination
and figures like Paul Valery, who found an ideal of supreme rationalism in Poe’s theories.
In other countries, Poe’s works have received a similar appreciation, and several studies have
been written tracking the influence of the American author on the international literary scene,
particularly in Latin America, Japan, Russia and Scandinavia.

2.4 Discussion

Edgar Allan Poe has turned out to be known as the maestro of moody and horrifying works. His
works has been critiqued, redone, mocked, and copied by various people, especially a work that
has been turned into a spoof by the television show, The Simpsons. Poe had written over 100
poems, stories, criticisms, literary analysis and biographies. In his short lifespan, he had made
an impact with his writings and gave rise to popular genres.
Several writers and critics have argued about Poe’s writings. From John Neal of the Yankee and
Boston Literary Gazette (1829) to T.S. Eliot (1948) to and Lacan have expressed their thoughts on
Poe’s work. These bits of insights from the critical dominions of the world provide extreme
confusion and dislike to delight and appreciation. Although a normal sense of bewilderment
seems to run along the stream of discourse on Poe, everybody seems to agree to disagree about
him and his writings. Given below are a few pieces of criticism on Poe and his work by his
fellow writers.

John Neal of Yankee and Boston Literary Gazette (1829) said, “If E.A.P. of Baltimore—whose lines
about ‘Heaven’…are, though nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense—would but do himself justice
[he] might make a beautiful and perhaps magnificent poem” (qtd in Bits and Pieces II). That
quote is about Poe’s Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems, one of his earlier works, and though
not an excessively generous critique, one that at least permits for a little encouragement of Poe’s
work. Several critics completely beat Poe in the critical circles. According to Lambert A. Wilmer
in “Defamation of the Dead”,

Poe during his life-time, was feared and hated by many newspaper editors and other literary animalcules,
some of whom, or their friends, had been the subjects of his scorching critiques; and others disliked him,
naturally enough, because he was a man of superior intellect. While he lived, these resentful gentlemen
were discreetly silent, but they nursed their wrath to keep it warm, and the first intelligence of his death was
the signal for a general onslaught. (qtd in Bits and Pieces II)
Although after Poe passed away many scornful critiques and insulting remarks were written
about him professionally and personally, Poe’s has become one of the most popular American
authors in today. George Bernard Shaw states this in his 16 January 1909 remark,
[Poe] died…and was duly explained away as a drunkard and a failure, though it remains an open question
whether he really drank as much in his whole lifetime as a modern successful American drinks, without
comment, in six months . . . Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries
produced only beauty . . . Poe’s supremacy in this respect has cost him his reputation. . . . Above all, Poe is
great because he is independent of cheap attractions, independent of sex, of patriotism, of fighting, of
sentimentality, snobbery, gluttony, and all the rest of the vulgar stock-in-trade of his profession.

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