The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [291]
Because Poe worried about the future of the nation and (as we see in his satires) about the fate of democracy itself, his modest proposal of 1846, inspired by Irving, to name the United States “Appalachia”—and thereby resist appropriating the general name of the Western hemisphere—shows an underappreciated aspect of his thinking about the nation. He argued that Appalachia would associate the country with its unique topography and honor those who named it—the original Native inhabitants who had been “at all points unmercifully despoiled, assassinated, and dishonored.” If Poe sometimes conjured in fiction and poetry a fantastic place “out of space—out of time,” he was nevertheless attuned to cultural politics and concerned that rabid nationalism was distorting American literature and criticism.
LITERARY NATIONALISM
(from “Exordium to Critical Notices”)
That the public attention, in America, has, of late days, been more than usually directed to the matter of literary criticism, is plainly apparent. Our periodicals are beginning to acknowledge the importance of the science (shall we so term it?) and to disdain the flippant opinion which so long has been made its substitute.
Time was when we imported our critical decisions from the mother country. For many years we enacted a perfect farce of subserviency to the dicta of Great Britain. At last a revulsion of feeling, with self-disgust, necessarily ensued. Urged by these, we plunged into the opposite extreme. In throwing totally off that “authority,” whose voice had so long been so sacred, we even surpassed, and by much, our original folly. But the watchword now was, “a national literature!”—as if any true literature could be “national”—as if the world at large were not the only proper stage for the literary histrio. We became, suddenly, the merest and maddest partizans in letters. Our papers spoke of “tariffs” and “protection.” Our Magazines had habitual passages about that “truly native novelist, Mr. Cooper,” or that “staunch American genius, Mr. Paulding.” Unmindful of the spirit of the axioms that “a prophet has no honor in his own land” and that “a hero is never a hero to his valet-de-chambre”—axioms founded in reason and in truth—our reviews urged the propriety—our booksellers the necessity, of strictly “American” themes. A foreign subject, at this epoch, was a weight more than enough to drag down into the very depths of critical damnation the finest writer owning nativity in the States; while, on the reverse, we found ourselves daily in the paradoxical dilemma of liking, or pretending to like, a stupid book the better because (sure enough) its stupidity was of our own growth, and discussed our own affairs.
It is, in fact, but very lately that this anomalous state of feeling has shown any signs of subsidence. Still it is subsiding. Our views of literature in general having expanded, we begin to demand the use—to inquire into the offices and provinces of criticism—to regard it more as an art based immoveably in nature, less as a mere system of fluctuating and conventional dogmas. And, with the prevalence of these ideas, has arrived a distaste even to the home-dictation of the bookseller-coteries. If our editors are not as yet all independent of the will of a publisher, a majority of them scruple, at least, to confess a subservience, and enter into no positive combinations against the minority who despise and discard it. And this is a very great improvement