Prosody, Media, and the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe's poetry and poetic theory maintain an awkward standing in anglophone literary criticism but offer a valuable resource to scholars of historical poetics and, more specifically, historical prosody. In poems such as “The Raven” and “The Bells” and essays such as “The Rationale of Verse,” Poe pre sents prosodic structure as a kind of palimpsest of jostling sound media (e.g., phonetic script, meter, scansion, musical form, nonhuman voices), which obey different prosodic logics when engaged by different readers, both within and across periods. In this way, Poe's poetics challenges both historicist and formalist approaches to prosody, delyricizing poetic voice by demonstrating its embeddedness in media while insisting on the multiplicity of prosodic options available when individual readers verbalize the same poetical text. Rehabilitating Poe's prosodic project helps us see poems as products of both media history and real- time performance. (PM)