Poe. The Politics of a Poetry without Politics (Part I)

Abstract Excerpted from parts of two chapters in a forthcoming book on Poe's poetry and poetics, this essay argues that Poe's poetry needs to be approached through the interpretive lines initially laid down by the French, especially Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and Valéry. While that reception history is well‐known and well‐documented, it has never been realized in a system of detailed analysis and explication such as is offered here. This approach involves reading the poetry as a radically formalist undertaking by which meaningful particulars are generated through the elementary acoustic and bibliographical character of the poems. Poe's musical theory of poetry leads to the creation of poetic compositions that require actual performance – a result that makes the reader the central focus and subject of the poetry. Anticipating Gertrude Stein's Modernist commitment to “Composition as Explanation”, Poe demonstrates that the “Explanation” can only be completed in a reciprocal process of “Performance as Explanation”. This approach leads Poe to set a deeply troubling question at the center of all his poetry: what ethical authority can poetry claim when it consciously locates itself in a field of ideological illusions?