The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [267]
Your own Eddy.
Don’t forget to write immediately to Phila. so that your letter will be there when I arrive.
The papers here are praising me to death—and I have been received everywhere with enthusiasm. Be sure & preserve all the printed scraps I have sent you & keep up my file of the Lit. World.
Having obtained Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton’s acceptance of a marriage offer, Poe seemed in a position to launch his journal (thanks to a young Illinois publisher named Edward Patterson) and to secure domestic stability through remarriage. Poe had been lecturing successfully on American poetry in Richmond and Norfolk; and he took a pledge of temperance to convince Mrs. Shelton of his serious purpose. But his relapses into alcoholic excess were numerous that summer. He may have been planning to bring Mrs. Clemm to Virginia for the wedding, unless an earlier date could be agreed upon. His insistence that Mrs. Clemm address his mail to an alias may reflect mere prudence after his recent misadventures in Philadelphia or it may betray growing paranoia. Less than three weeks after writing this letter, he was dead.
CRITICAL PRINCIPLES
As a magazinist, Poe reviewed scores of new books and commented extensively on contemporary poetry, fiction, and nonfiction. Exacting and occasionally derisive, he became known as “the tomahawk man,” stirring controversy by attacking powerful literary figures. He lampooned a novel by an editor of the New-York Mirror and later accused the esteemed Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism. He deplored the shameless promotion of mediocre authors and in several fictional satires—as well as the final review in this section—indicted the practice of “puffery” then pervasive in the American publishing world. Poe believed that the literature of the United States could outgrow its provincialism only if literary critics applied rigorous standards rather than indulging in partisan favoritism. While he resented British condescension toward American writers, he himself did not hesitate to expose the “stupidity” of certain American books.
Driven by economics to write more fiction than poetry, Poe helped to shape the conventions of an emerging literary form, the short story. Yet he never used that term—which came into use only late in the nineteenth century—instead concerning himself with “the short prose tale.” And although Poe grasped the peculiar demands of the form, he wrote about its generic principles only briefly in reviews of works by individual authors. His most famous statement about short fiction appears in his 1842 review of Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales, where Poe devotes four extended paragraphs to a theory of the tale emphasizing “unity of effect.” This “totality” reveals itself, he asserts, only in narratives that can be read at a single sitting of at most “one or two hours.” Yet although this review figures as the starting point for modern short-story theory, Poe had been thinking about the importance of unifying effect at least since 1836, when he remarked in a review of Dickens that unity was more crucial in the “brief article” (or short narrative) than in the novel. An 1841 review of Lytton Bulwer’s fiction registers the same point by implication, insisting on the impossibility of achieving “unity or totality of effect” in a narrative as long as a novel. Here Poe suggests that plot is crucial to unity (though curiously not “essential” to storytelling). In “A Chapter of Suggestions” Poe returns briefly to the matter of plot and advances a theory of narrative construction that begins with the ending, the effect intended in the dénouement. In this view, plot becomes the unifying structure from which no individual element can be removed without destroying the totality of the tale.
Poe’s critical reflections on poetry represent a more concerted attempt to articulate basic principles. His “Letter to B—,” which introduced the 1831 volume of Poems, reveals much about Poe’s values as a