Poe and American Society

Abstract

His works bear no conceivable relation, either external or internal, to the life of any people, and it is impossible to account for them on the basis of any social or intellectual tendencies or as the expression of the spirit of any age. —Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genious We have for so long taken Edgar Allan Poe as a prime example of the alienated genius or the sensitive artist suffering in a materialistic environment, or-a favorite French literary fantasy—as a writer who should have lived in France, that I feel the need for a very general statement which points out a number of important ways in which the man and his work are unmistakably, unam- biguously of his time and place, which is to say, American, of the 1830's and '40's. Poe is the American author of greatest influence on world literature; his stories are immensely popular, and his poetry, whether or not we feel that it is important (Poe did not—he said that this poems were experiments, and that he had never had the leisure to make himself a better poet), has served several generations of youngsters well as introduction to the possibilities of sound and rhythm. He is, in short, in every way a big figure, and we should learn to be more comfortable with him by understanding his connections to his American environment.