Originally published by Doubleday in 1972, Daniel Hoffmanâs Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poeâopening with the indelibly cheeky quip âWhat, another book on Poe! Who needs it?ââredefined scholarly approaches to Poeâs seemingly anomalous character and the widely mixed reception of his poetry, fiction, and criticism (ix).1 Written in a deeply self-conscious and refreshingly personal critical voice, Poe Poe Poe . . . was inspired by the authorâs dissatisfaction with what he felt to be the state of Poe scholarship in the mid-1960s. At the heart of Hoffmanâs discontentedness was his observation that despite the cultural upheavals of that decade academic investigation and, more specifically, literary criticism âstill reflected the efforts at scientific objectivity once deemed necessary for literary study to be worthy of inclusion in Ph.D. programs.â2 Instead of tailoring analysis to one method or to a single genre or mode of writing, Hoffmanâs enterprise involved a comprehensive, multimethod exploration of Poeâs oeuvre as being arranged around a central theme which Poe modulated through his poems, tales, essays, and reviews. The product of a tragically divided man, Poeâs theme, Hoffman argued, is that this known life is âan unmitigated disaster, a spell of suffering, loss, horror, and sorrow, [a] longing almost unbearableâ for the primal unity of cosmic oneness from which we come and whence we shall return (327). In his efforts to capture Poeâs oeuvre in all its variety and to âbolt the whole shebang together into one unitary wholeâ (169), Hoffman boldly suggested that the literary critic, as Henry Golemba put it, âmust plunge into Poeâs psyche and partake of his complex imagination, becoming Poeâs semblable, the alter ego of this man.â3 Trying to âthink as he thought and to hear with his ear,â Hoffman developed the seminal claim that there are at least seven facets to Poeâs personality which he sought to integrate and unify through his analogously multifaceted body of work (243).Hoffmanâs peculiar method of eclectic impressionism called attention to the adequacy of critical methods that emphasize intellectual distancing and objective analysis. According to Hoffman, previous scholars aiming for âscientific objectivityâ pursued one of two predominating lines of investigation: the âfactualâ and the âpsychiatricâ (ix). Following the more fact-based and magazine-oriented path of inquiry, scholars ranging from Margaret Alterton to Michael Allen focused on tracing Poeâs references, styles, and motifs to their primary sources; scholars like Harvey Allen and A. H. Quinn emphasized, moreover, the importance of explicating biographical details in the context of the literary marketplace in which Poe labored.4 On the other hand, following the more psychoanalytic approach to Poeâs works and eccentric character, scholars like Joseph Wood Krutch and Marie Bonaparte sought to pathologize Poe (and, by association, his admirers) by âtreatingâ Poeâs works as cases of necrophilia, impotence, compensatory aggression, or prenatal consciousness of sexuality.5 While Hoffmanâs interpretation of Poeâs oeuvre draws heavily on both of these methods, one of the primary goals of Poe Poe Poe . . . is to âoverturn with factâ the notion in conventional criticism that there is âonly one permissible and authoritative âmeaningâ in a work of literature,â that there is only one way to approach and be affected by Poe (xiiâxiii). To capture not only the richness and variety but also the coherence and consistency of Poe and his body of work, Hoffman frames his close readings and holistic analysis within an autobiographical narrative of his own struggles and intellectual discoveries while reading Poe again and again over half a lifetime. As he explained to Barbara Cantalupo in her 2002 interview, âI tried to make reading Poe not an occasion to prove where something in his work had come from but a deeply-felt personal experience that would help me explain why his work grips us with such intensity.â6 Tying his own identity as a poet-scholar to Poeâs identity as a poet-critic, Hoffman was a pioneer of reader-response criticism on Poe, as few critics have measured up to the pleasure, profundity, and intimacy of Hoffmanâs critical sendups and painstaking analyses.In the preface of his groundbreaking book, Hoffman defines his intervention on the perennial problem of how to unify and contain the contradictoriness of Poeâs career, what Poe scholars would later call, following James Russell Lowellâs famous jest, the genius-fudge dilemma. Contrary to his predecessorsâ highbrow assumption that scholars should narrow their focus to works of âsheer genius,â Hoffman challenges both Poeâs harshest critics (from Henry James to T. S. Eliot) and his greatest admirers (from Charles Baudelaire to Paul ValĂ©ry) by arguing that âwe canât get [Poeâs] genius without his fudge, or his fudge without his genius. Nor is it a forgone conclusion which is whichâ (x). Instead of assessing Poeâs incongruities either as reflecting Poeâs lack of coherence and seriousness or as owing to his circumstances of poverty and vicissitude, Hoffman lays the foundation for a middle ground between these two critical veins, the one overly didactic and the other overly artistic. Hoffman, performing the role of a poet-scholar âwishing to do justice to the actual experience of reading Poe,â sees in Poeâs body of work âa view thatâs quite coherent; only trouble is, itâs only about three-fifths trueâ (xi). In other words, not only are the genius and the fudge consistent aspects of Poeâs divided spirit, but also each aspect informs and countervails the other. To understand Poeâs slipperiness as a hoaxer and satirist, as well as the frequent shifts and transitions in his poems and tales, Hoffman, drawing on Poeâs (Schlegellian) theory of unity of effect, establishes the perceptive claim that it is a function of Poeâs aesthetics âthat so many mannerisms be interposed between reality and the readerâ in order to âtouch some deep, responsive nerve hidden in ourselvesâ (xiii). As conveyed in his bookâs playfully haunting title, the Janus-faced multiplicity of Poeâs career is a vital aspect of Poeâs artistic aims and consequently his haunting presence in both criticism and popular cultureâhence, âmany books, many Poesâ (ix). Ultimately, Hoffmanâs solution to the genius-fudge dilemma extricated Poe scholars from reductive interpretive paradigms that pathologize or ignore the heterogeneity of Poe and his writing.7While the preface establishes Hoffmanâs interventions and aims in writing the book, chapter 1 is on the pervasive ghosts of Poe, on Poeâs haunting presence both in the authorâs psyche and in the literary tradition. As T. S. Eliot confessed, âOne cannot be sure that oneâs own writing has not been influenced by Poe.â8 In critical response to Eliotâs translation of a line from StĂ©phane MallarmĂ©âs famous tribute to Poe (âTo purify the dialect of the tribeâ), Hoffman concludes the first chapter with a cross-question of MallarmĂ©âs sentiment: âBut did Poe really give a purer meaning to the words of the tribe?â (17). The longest and most free-spirited chapter of Poe Poe Poe . . . , chapter 2 sets out to answer this query with an extended reassessment of Poeâs poetry as it relates to the personal and paradigmatic tribulations that informed his philosophy of composition. Arguing that Poeâs recurring themes and motifs originate with the aesthetic universe created in âAl Aaraaf,â Hoffman interprets what he calls, much to his admirersâ chagrin, âPoeâs most ambitious failureâ as his romantic rebellion against the stifling, spiritless confines of âthe antipoetic materialism of the modern scientific age, the utilitarian logic which drives imagination âTo seek a shelter in some happier starââ (47). While the poetic quest to overcome and escape from this material world is the highest common denominator of the poetry, this prevailing archetype establishes other motifs that are modulated further in the tales to come, the tales which Hoffman believes âsucceeded in creating what his poems failed to createâ (60). Hoffmanâs frank judgment, regardless of its veracity, has continued to inspire other readers to reexamine the literary merits and faults of the poetry of Poe.9Bridging the poetry and the prose, chapter 3 proposes a rereading of âThe Philosophy of Compositionâ to determine the merit of Poeâs professed method for shocking and discombobulating readers. To both confront and make more bearable âthe human thirst for self-tortureâ and âthe luxury of sorrowâ (the major themes of âThe Raven,â according to Hoffman), Poe adopts the romantic artistâs âunassuageable need . . . to project upon the rest of mankind the terrors and the losses, the sorrows and the insatiate longings of his own soulâ (91). Read in this light, âThe Philosophy of Compositionâ is Poeâs analytic description of how to transfer from himself to his reader âthose symptoms, those sufferings, those haunted joysâ of poetically controlling âthe uncontrollable obsessions which haunt himâ (91). Whimsically shifting to the tales of ratiocination and detection, chapter 4 frames Poeâs detectives, William Legrand of âThe Gold-Bugâ and the seminal C. Auguste Dupin, as poet-mathematicians who combine poetic intuition with analytic intelligence in their Poe-ietic efforts to crack seemingly impossible codes and uncanny mysteries. Finding the same theme but different tones between poems like âLenore,â âThe Raven,â and âAnnabel Leeâ on the one hand and âThe Murders in the Rue Morgueâ on the other, Hoffman argues that what âthe poems render with pathos, longing, the music of despair and a dreamy vagueness, is dramatized in the tale with circumstantial horror and terrifying precision.â (110). The detectives embody, in short, Poeâs version of the Romantic genius of the age, as they both exhibit âthe passion of an intuitive intelligence comprehending truth in a world of violent actionâ (112). Ironically, contrary to Hoffmanâs effort to free Poeâs work from a single interpretation, chapter 4 concludes with one of the most convincing interpretations of the open-ended question of who wrote the incriminating letter in âThe Purloined Letter,â an interpretation that has been largely ignored by later critics, with the notable exception of Russell Reisingâs more recent meta-critical extrapolation of Hoffmanâs reading.10Opening with Hoffmanâs two-part axiom that the âhappy characters in Poe are those who use their headsâ and âthe tormented, those who lose them,â chapter 5 turns to Poeâs four variations of the tormented voyage (135): the vortical descents (âA Descent into the Maelstrom,â âMS. Found in a Bottleâ), the puckish sendups (âThe Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaall,â âThe Balloon Hoaxâ), the out-of-body experiments (âMesmeric Revelations,â âA Tale of the Ragged Mountains,â âThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemarâ), and the apocalyptic revelations (âThe Conversation of Eiros and Charmion,â âThe Colloquy of Monos and Una,â âThe Power of Wordsâ). From his analysis of these different âvoyages,â Hoffman ends the chapter with the familiar anachronistic projection (Ă la Allen Tate and Richard Wilbur) that they demonstrate Poeâs ascription to the âsymbolist religion of [autonomous] art,â which is meant to offset the modern nihilistic sense that âwe are all runaways and orphans, inheriting a sterile life without spiritâ (176). Shifting from Poeâs faith in Art to his scorn for the sociopolitical realities of the States, chapter 6 shows how in his satires âEdgarpoe, symbolist seeker of Beauty, merges into Hoaxiepoe in buckskins and endeavors to make us laughâ (180). Though Hoffman provides excellent context in his historicist readings of Poeâs satiric ventures into money (âDiddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences,â âVon Kempelen and His Discoveryâ), politics (âMellonta Tauta,â Some Words with a Mummy,â âThe Man That Was Used Upâ), and the social order (âThe System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fetherâ), I was expecting more from Hoffmanâs segue into the humorous and satirical aspects of Hoaxiepoe and âFunny Edgarâ (240).11 A potential consequence of Hoffmanâs larger aims to free Poe from any one standard meaning, to maintain the grand themes of loss and suffering, or to adhere to Poeâs ânihilism as a metaphysics,â the chapter does not address the corrective potential of Poeâs satiresâthat is, their power to disgust, delight, and instruct (172). Just one year after Poe Poe Poe . . . was published, G. R. Thompsonâs Poeâs Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales (1973) filled this discursive gap by presenting Poe as an occasionally sophisticated satirist informed largely by Friedreich Schlegelâs philosophy of Romantic irony and A. W. Schlegelâs dramatic theory of unity of effect. In Robert Tally Jr.âs more recent study Poe and the Subversion of American Literature: Satire, Fantasy, Critique (2014), the âflawedâ aspects Thompson saw in Poeâs satire are reinterpreted as a deliberate subversion of U.S. American literature and, ultimately, as a sign of Poeâs âcritical rejection of the national literary tradition itself.â12At the start of chapter 7, âGrotesques and Arabesques,â Hoffman lays the groundwork for identifying the formal distinctions and dialectic relations between the grotesques and the arabesques. Highlighting the termsâ roots in the visual arts, Hoffman argues that in Poeâs fiction âa grotesque is a satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem,â and that the two modes are not mutually exclusive (203). Unifying the two modes, Poe mocks the achievements of his own arabesques (âThe Masque of the Red Death,â âLigeia,â âThe Cask of Amontilladoâ) through his grotesques (âKing Pest,â âThe Spectacles,â âThe Premature Burialâ), so that âecstatic transcendence may be lodged in the heart of a hoaxâ (206). Fine-tuning the dialectics of this distinction, David Ketterer in The Rationale of Deception in Poe (1979) defines the arabesque mode as âthe ideal as perceived from mundane realityâ and the grotesque mode as âthe mundane as perceived through the projected ideal of reality.â13 While Hoffmanâs theoretical distinctions are innovative, his separate readings in the remainder of chapter 6 and in chapter 7 (âThe Marriage Groupâ) are, as Kermit Vanderbilt indicates, âcuriously uneventful,â as they largely recapitulate Marie Bonaparteâs Freudian analysis of Poe.14 But honestly, who am I to judge this aspect of Hoffmanâs Poe, the Poe of an eccentric poet-scholar who was known to bear witness to social injustice and to reckon with âprivate sufferings and public sorrowsâ?15 Unlike Hoffmanâs terrifying initiation into Poe, my first encounter with Poeâthat is, with The Simpsonsâ legendary adaptation of âThe Ravenâ (which first aired the same year I was born)âwas marked, as one may expect, by a strange sense of humorous and pleasurable wonder (hence, my desire for more on Funny Edgar in chapter 6). I did not feel haunted by Poe in the same way as did young Horror-Haunted Hoffman, who would later, as Poefessor Hoffman, find Bonaparteâs pathological analysis as a necessary framework for unpacking and reordering his initial resentment of Poe.Playing on the tripartite division of faculty psychology, chapters 9, 10, and 11 focus on what Hoffman describes as the âthree compendia of [Poeâs] themes,â each edging âinexorably toward apocalypse, the unavoidable condition of wisdom, by a different routeâ (i.e., by body, mind, and soul) (259): The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pymâs exploration of the body of the world through the eponymous characterâs own body (260), Eurekaâs âdepersonalized and mechanical characterization of the psychic rhythm of existenceâ (274), and lastly the metaphor of the self, the fable of the soul of âThe Fall of the House of Usherâ (296). While the ninth and eleventh chapters strategically reiterate Freudian concepts of split consciousness, the death drive, the Oedipus complex, and the fantasy of rebirth, the tenth chapter, on Eureka, is a brilliant synthesis of Poeâs conflicting aspects into his cosmological vision. In this view, Poeâs dualistic themes and agonistic moods become features of the âperfect plot of God that all being, inorganic and organic alike, desires its own destruction,â desires that solipsistically reflect and inflect the hidden rhythms of the machinations of Poeâs Universe (286). In response to Hoffmanâs conjecture that what Eureka âpropounds as physical laws are really psychal lawsâ (286), John Tresch has more recently posited that Poeâs syncretic multiplicity is not limited to Poeâs character and styles but also âapplies to his pluralist view of reality.â16 Defining this pluralist view and arabesque mode as a âkaleidoscopic realism,â Tresch discovers in this viewpoint an approximation of the methodological critique embedded in Hoffmanâs eclectic impressionism of Poeâs aesthetic principles: âNew configurations of reality arise according to the domains on which we focus and the tools that shape our answers.â17While most readers of Poe Poe Poe . . . praise Hoffmanâs sustained effort to explicate and unify the contradictions and dualities of Poeâs oeuvre, Hoffmanâs offbeat, confessional voice proved to be the bookâs most controversial intervention in Poe studies.18 âConventionalâ Poe scholars, Hoffman reflected during Cantalupoâs interview, âwere outraged by my informality, indignant at the liberties I had taken with literary discourse, like inventing nicknamesâOedgar, Hoaxiepoe, Edgarpoe (to suggest French responses), Horror-Haunted Edgarâand injecting myself into scholarly analyses.â19 However unorthodox Hoffmanâs critical-autobiographical approach may be in the context of academic circles, a careful, Hoffman-esque reading of chapter 1âs opening paragraphâthat is, as an internal âcomment upon and extension of the rest of his [book]ââmay help reveal the deeper implications of his confessional devices (xii).A playful homage to the opening paragraph of Allen Tateâs essay âOur Cousin, Mr. Poe,â the first chapter of Poe Poe Poe . . . begins with the authorâs childhood memory of himself gazing at a facsimile of a daguerreotype portrait of Poe. But whereas Tate briefly notes his adolescent wish to one day resemble Poeâs image, Hoffman starts chapter 1 with an ingenious introspection on his adolescent hatred toward that image that âhaunted [his] dreams and waking dreamsâ (2):As the second sentenceâs past tense and fronted clause indicate, the hand that wrote âI hate Poeâ and signed Hoffmanâs name is not that which composed Poe Poe Poe . . . , the one that flipped through more than just Poeâs poetry. By critically distancing himself from the compulsive actions of a former self (i.e., the Poefessor from the Horror-Haunted boy), Hoffman initiates readers into his eclectic method of reader-response criticism, a method through which readers may discover that their personal reactions and preferred methods contribute to the aesthetic effects the author had all along intended. Admittedly, I did laugh the first time reading this paragraph; but when I returned to it for subsequent readings and recalled my initial response, I found myself smiling, pleasurably realizing the effectiveness of Hoffmanâs Poe-esque ruse. Though I cannot identify with Hoffmanâs initial reaction to Poe (nor with Tateâs for that matter), his introspective process of discovery, which elicits more discovery, made me confront the underlying assumptions and perceived incongruities that triggered my initial burst of mirth. Still under the spell of Hoffmanâs style and design, I now look at all the cheeky annotations penciled within my Doubleday edition as âa hieroglyph in secret code.â Less a sign of egoism than a testament to the revelatory power of Hoffmanâs unique style of reader-response criticism, this opening confession encapsulates Hoffmanâs claim that to crack the code of cryptic Poe, readers must face the âcomplexity of implication, [the] plumbing of the abyss of human nature, and [the] strange webwork of consistencyâ among the various literary forms that constitute Poeâs kaleidoscopic body of work (xi). As indicated in the concluding chapter, Hoffmanâs book catalyzes readers to return to Poe with more open eyes and to be honest and more careful about how their methodological tools and reading experiences with Poe actively participate in the creative process powered by a strange rhythmic volition to know the unknown of oneself in the images of Poe.20