SOURCE: Leverenz, David. “Poe and Gentry Virginia.” In The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman, pp. 210-36. Baltimore: The John Hopkins University Press, 1995.

In the following essay, Leverenz situates Poe within the Southern literary tradition.

Allen Tate's remarkable 1949 essay, “Our Cousin, Mr. Poe,” defines Poe as southern not only for his high sense of a writer's calling but because Poe understood better than anyone else that the modern world was going straight to hell, or to the bourgeois, commodifying North. For Tate, a culture not controlled by leisured gentlemen means Dante's Inferno, which Poe rewrites: a disintegration from reason and community into machine-like, alienated egotisms of the will, vampiric women, and cravings for sensations. Tate mournfully concludes, however, that Poe lacked the stylistic and moral control to be a true southern gentleman. His “early classical education and a Christian upbringing” (49) simply...