Ed Folsom

Walt Whitman’s Invention of a Democratic Poetry

Poetic literacy was at a peak in mid-nineteenth century, and Edgar Allan Poe was fully immersed in the social networks that produced and disseminated poetry to a wide readership. Poes poetry repeatedly dramatizes the ways that certain human values, capacities, and energies are not only threatened but actually extinguished. Poe explains that death is a transformation from particle to unparticled matter. For Poe, the properties of poetry that stir desires for impossible beauty are the elements of language that are irrelevant, or at least secondary, to its signifying capabilities. Poes theory of death and the afterlife might seem somewhat idiosyncratic, particularly his understanding of an immaterial material, unparticled matter, as God, creativity, action, and spirit. Many of Poes poems fall into two categories: there are the apocalyptic landscapes, like Dream-Land, and more familiarly, there are the meditations on lost love, like The Raven and Annabel Lee.