  Letters Archive
Placing Poe
—Vernon Parrington
In a recent episode of the "Simpsons," an odd
reference to Poe occurs. Homer Simpson is caught in
traffic behind a large truck towing the house of Poe.
On the house is a sign that states: "birthplace of
Edgar Allan Poe." I bring up this moment of
television trivia not only to underscore Poe's
location in popular culture, but, more importantly,
to mark his lack of place. His is a home in constant
transit-a haunted house on wheels if you will.
Indeed, if you desire to visit the house of Poe (as I
did on his birthday one year for the special
candlelight tour), you can do so in many places:
Philadelphia, New York, Richmond, Baltimore. Poe it
would seem exists at once everywhere and nowhere. He
is both, as Louis Rubin says, "a citizen of the
world" and, as Joseph Krutch claims, an "outcast in
any society." Born in Boston, raised in Richmond,
later working in New York and Philadelphia, Poe is
difficult to locate, both in terms of regional and
national identity. If Poe lies outside the mainstream
of American thought, he certainly does not fit
comfortably within the parameters of Southern
identity. However, despite his orphan status, both
the American and Southern literary establishments
have felt it necessary to adopt him in some fashion
into their traditions. It is Poe's problematic
position, both as a Southerner and as an American,
that I wish briefly to explore here.
Edgar Allan Poe has always presented a problem to
critics eager to codify a canon of American
literature. Five months after his death, The
Southern Literary Messenger, which he once
edited, captured the problem of Poe when they
memorialized him as follows: "Edgar Allan Poe . . .
the true head of American literature—it is the
verdict of other nations and after times that we
speak here—died of drink, friendless and alone, in
the common wards of a Baltimore hospital" (March
1850). Poe's position in the corpus of American
literature—let alone his status as its head—has, from
the beginning, been problematized by the mythography
of his own drunken corpse and by the diseased bodies
and living dead that haunt his stories. In both his
life and his work, Poe would seem to lie far outside
the American mainstream. If he represents anything at
all, it is not American literature's head, but its
irrational bodily impulses. The "after times" have
judged Poe harshly; he remains relegated to the
"common wards" and alienated from the community of
American literature's founding fathers: Emerson,
Thoreau, Hawthorne, Melville, Whitman. In The
American Renaissance (1941), a book which placed
these authors at the center of a newly conceived
American literature, F. O. Matthiessen buries Poe in
a footnote. He explains Poe's exclusion from his
"group" as follows: "The reason is more fundamental
than that his work fell mainly in the decade of
1835-45; for it relates at very few points to the
main assumptions about literature that were held
by any of my group. Poe was bitterly hostile to
democracy, and in that respect could serve as a
revelatory contrast" (emphasis added). As the
exception to the rule—the embodiment of everything
American literature was not—Poe reveals the
parameters of a more "authentic" American literature.
Acting as an absent presence who haunts the American
literary canon, Poe becomes a necessary—and
useful—evil. Harold Bloom sums up Poe's paradoxical
position when he writes, "I can think of no American
writer, down to this moment, at once so inevitable
and so dubious."
Poe's dubiousness is the very reason for his
inevitability. For, it is through Poe that a number
of "dubious" aspects of American literature get
demonized and then exorcised from the mainstream
American literary canon. As an easily excused
aberration, Poe becomes the representative for a
number of "problems" that the
American literary tradition recognizes but refuses to
claim. For instance, through Poe, popular literature
can enter the canon with out threatening the hard won
highbrow status of "our classic" American literature.
As Harold Bloom argues, "Poe's survival raises
perpetually the issue as to whether literary merit
and canonical status necessarily go together."
Through Poe, as well, a darker, more gothic vision of
America comes into view. In reading Poe's gothic
tales as the projections of Poe's own peculiar
psychology instead of as a comment on his wider
culture, critics easily contain his disturbing vision
of American society. Even when Poe's diseased vision
is read as a symptom of a larger cultural malaise, it
remains quarantined from "mainstream" America since
it comes to be identified with an other "problem"—the
South. Richard Gray, for instance, historicizes Poe's
horrifying hauntings specifically in terms of the
South's racial problems: "[w]hen Poe tries to
describe his vision of evil, the darkness at the
heart of things . . . it is noticeable that he
sometimes adopts the familiar Southern strategy
of associating that vision with black people"
(emphasis added). Through Poe, the terms "Southern"
and "gothic" be come solidified. If the South, as C.
Vann Woodward writes, opposes the national ideal
("The South's preoccupation was with guilt not
innocence, with the reality of evil, not with the
dream of perfection"), then Poe serves as its perfect
spokesperson. Moreover, once Poe is securely located
in the South, he can no longer infect the nation.
If Poe is easily adopted into the American literary
canon as the aberrant Southern writer, his case poses
a more difficult problem for those eager to define a
tradition of Southern literature. While Poe is
canonized as a Southerner in virtually all of the
major Southern analogies, his lack of specifiable
regional identification is constantly remarked upon.
In The Mind of the South, W. J. Cash calls Poe
"only half a Southerner;" Barrett Wendall claims that
he is Southern only by courtesy;" and Allen Tate
states that while he is "a gentleman and a
Southerner, he [is] not quite, perhaps, a Southern,
gentleman." In a literary tradition that claims
distinctiveness based on its unique social
conditions, Poe, spent much of his life outside
of the South and who set few of his stories in a
Southern locale, never quite fits the bill of the
Southern writer. As Montrose Moses's chapter heading
in The Literature of the South (1910) points
out—"A Southern Mystery: An Author With and Without a
Country—Poe"—Poe's Southerness remains a mystery.
However, despite his suspicious Southern roots, Poe
becomes the necessary cornerstone of a Southern
literary tradition due to his national status. Poe's
status as "one of the chief glories of the literature
of our nation and our race" makes him the "greatest
ornament of Southern literature" (Library of
Southern Literature. Louis Rubin explains Poe's
paradoxical position as follows: "We confront the
obvious fact that of all the antebellum Southern
authors it is Poe whose writings are least
grounded in the particularities, settings and issues
of the place he grew up in, and equally most
lastingly a part of world literature" (emphasis
added). Needing Poe's national and international
cachet, the Southern literary establishment
discovered that if they could not Southernize him
through history (Rubin, for instance, insists "Poe
wrote almost nothing about the South, or about
living there, or about Southern history and Southern
society, or for that matter about any kind of history
whatever") they could through form. As Ellen Glasgow
argues in A Certain Measure, Poe's literary
techniques are identifiably Southern: "Poe is, to a
large extent, a distillation of the Southerner," she
writes. "The formalism of his tone, the classical
element in his poetry and in many of his stories, the
drift toward rhetoric, the aloof and elusive
intensity,—all these qualities are Southern." Poe
could also be saved through his criticism, much of
which was published in an identifiable locale, the
Southern Literary Messenger. Edwin Mims and Bruce
Payne, for instance, state in their Southern Prose
and Poetry for Schools that "[i]t is in his
critical writing that Poe's Southern bent of mind was
most notably evinced." Moreover, Poe's gothic form
could make him a forerunner to the Southern
Renaissance (Faulkner, O'Connor, etc.), and, hence,
make him the ancestor of Southern literature's "true"
flowering. It is the ahistorial, symbolist Poe, then,
who is adopted into the Southern literary tradition.
However, even as such, Poe is adopted only as a
cousin, never a favorite son. Poe then poses a
problem for both the South and the nation. From the
national perspective, the problem of Poe can be
solved by defining him in oppositional terms and
identifying him with the South; from the Southern
perspective, Poe's peculiar place can be addressed by
claiming his art for Southern literature while
disowning him from Southern history. Instead of
trying to solve the problem of Poe or to locate him
any single place, I would argue that it is precisely
in Poe's (dis)location that he becomes significant.
As the spectre who haunts the highways of America's
literary landscape, Poe is never exorcised, but
constantly on the move. For more information, contact the Center's executive director, Mona C. Frederick. [ RPW Center for the Humanities | About the Center | Visiting Fellowship Information | Howard Lecture Series | Seminars and Programs | Programs since 1987 ] [ Vanderbilt University | Site Index | Search Vanderbilt | Help ]
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