This month, Edgar Allan Poe turns 200. What does academia have to say about that?
The esteem in which Poe is commonly held these days has to do partly with his ruinous life, which epitomizes the misery of poetic genius in crass America—a theme beloved of the cognoscenti; partly with the fashionable elevation of popular literary forms like horror tales, detective stories, and science fiction to an equality with high art; and partly with the no less fashionable elevation of mental disturbance into a superior form of insight.
Rather than optimistically assuming, as Mayo and others did, that identifying a universal force is equivalent to mastering it for the betterment of humanity, Poe concluded that an allencompassing cosmic energy inevitably troubles human-being by suspending the autonomy and interiority of individual humans; the disorientation of normal, corporeal functioning and the literal loss of self-possession attending mesmeric practice illustrated for Poe the fact that people are little more than occasions for the demonstration of an impersonal power.
Peter Coviello, "Poe In Love: Pedophilia, Morbidity, and the Logic of Slavery"
An enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection. —Henry James
That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty. —T. S. Eliot
Above all else, though, the story of the dysfunctions of intimacy in Poe is important to tell because it allows us a way to find real rapport between the now divided critical tendencies around Poe, between those attending, with largely psychoanalytic tools, to the works' sexual suggestions, and those attending, with largely historicist tools, to the works' racial significances.
David Blake, "The Man That Was Used Up": Edgar Allan Poe and the Ends of Captivity
The General's status as a cyborg also makes him an important antecedent to the many robotic warriors that have surfaced in twentieth-century fiction and film. Poe's cyborg differs from these figures in that he is less the ideal combatant than the ideal captive, a figure endowed with charm, handsome features, and hegemonic significance. Poe's story leads us to question whether the ultimate mission of redeemed captives is not so much to defeat an alien society as it is to conquer their own.
Also Kevin J. Hayes, Poe and the Printed Word and The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
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