Critical Essay | Critical Essay by John Middleton Murry

Critical Essay by John Middleton Murry

SOURCE: Murry, John Middleton. “Poe's Poetry.” In Discoveries: Essays in Literary Criticism, pp. 191-99. London: W. Collins Sons & Co., 1924.

In the following essay, originally published in 1922, Murry explores the extent to which Poe is less an American poet than an English one in the tradition of English Romanticism.

It has long since been admitted that the two greatest poets of America are Poe and Whitman. The poetry of both belongs to the literature of the world. But there is an essential difference between their positions. Whitman is almost “a hundred per cent. American”; Poe is not. Whitman is clean outside the English tradition; Poe belongs to it. As a poet he is the successor of the English romantics; he learned from Byron and Shelley and Keats, and he taught Swinburne: as a prose writer, he alone gave to the great romantic movement in fiction which swept over...
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