SOURCE: Marchand, Ernest. “Poe as Social Critic.” In On Poe: The Best from ‘American Literature,’ edited by Louis J. Budd and Edwin H. Cady, pp. 24-39. Durham, N. C.: Duke University Press, 1993.

In the following essay, Marchand discusses Edgar Allan Poe's criticism of American society and politics in the nineteenth century.

As early as 1855 the notion was abroad that Poe moved about over the earth thickly wrapped in a luminous cloud, which effectually shut him off from mundane concerns; that his mind dwelt exclusively in “the misty mid region of Weir.” In that year Evert and George Duyckinck, who had known Poe in the flesh, wrote: “His rude contact with the world, which might have set up a novelist for life with materials of adventure, seems scarcely to have impinged upon his perceptions. His mind, walking in a vain show, was taught nothing by experience or suffering.”¹ How...