The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [290]
Much like Emerson, Poe describes the crucial process by which the soul, in moments of heightened awareness, transcends its human particularity to apprehend its relationship to the universe. The imagination likewise offers occasional glimpses of “things supernal and eternal.” The first installment of “Marginalia” includes a meditation on the “mutuality of adaptation” inherent in the created universe and reflective of divine perfection. In a revealing commentary from 1846 he describes his own “psychal impressions” between waking and sleep, visions of “the spirit’s outer world” that he means yet to communicate with through “the power of words.” Though not a fragment of “Marginalia,” the last selection (from the conclusion of Eureka), represents the transcendental culmination of this line of speculation, the counterpart, in effect, of his dread.
The subject of genius fascinated Poe, and in one of his “Fifty Suggestions” he distinguishes between genius in the popular sense, which arises from the abnormal development of one “predominant faculty,” and that highest, most irresistible form of genius, which derives from a huge intelligence whose faculties are all in “absolute proportion.” In his “Marginalia” Poe argues that genius may be “far more abundant than is supposed,” but most people lack the moral and analytical powers to create works of genius, which depend crucially upon patience, concentration, and energy. Reversing his assumption about the prevalence of genius, though, he muses elsewhere about the strange fate of an individual “accursed” with an intellect far superior to the rest of the human race, whose unconventional opinions would be taken for signs of madness. The greatest test of radical originality would be, he later conjectures, to reveal truthfully the inmost secrets of one’s heart; the generality of humankind would not dare make the attempt for “the paper would shrivel and blaze at every touch of the fiery pen.”
Alongside Poe’s meditations on mind, soul, and imagination, his comments on the situation of the American writer and the project to create a national literature offer a revealing contrast, illuminating the obstacles to authorship and the cultural politics that circumscribed his literary career. One of his most basic convictions, expressed repeatedly in letters, informs his “Marginalia” comment on magazine literature in America: the “rush of the [modern] age” was creating a reading public that demanded “the curt, the condensed, the pointed, the readily diffused.” Poe believed that the “whole tendency of the age is Magazine-ward” and anticipated a “geometrical” increase in the cultural importance of monthly journals. Yet in “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” one of his most trenchant critiques, Poe reveals the dark side of this publishing trend. Drawn into magazine work by the absence of an international copyright law, American writers found themselves victimized on two fronts by the pressures of literary capitalism. While book publishers spurned their work, preferring to profit from pirated works by British authors, magazine publishers likewise exploited them by delaying payment for original articles, virtually starving to death “poor devil” contributors.
Poe toiled in the magazine world at a time when, as he wrote in an 1842 “Exordium to Critical Notices,” the “watchword” in American popular culture was “a national literature.” The imperative to infuse literature with nationalism struck Poe as a formula for provincialism, and he mocked the tendency to praise “a stupid book” because its “stupidity” was home-grown. Again in 1845 in an editorial comment Poe questioned the value of “American themes,” yet he also resented American “subserviency” to British critical opinion