In The Times Literary Supplement, Marjorie Perloff explores “the strange voice of Edgar Allan Poe,” invoking the criticism of Harold Bloom, T.S. Eliot, and Jerome McGann, whose new book, The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel, she has set out to review. Among other elements, she notes that Poe has now become popular among college students, after being “repressed” for so long, and why that might be the case:
The “repressed”, in this case, may well be the unique sound structure of Poe’s verse—a sound structure built on the very particular rhythms and rhyme that so enchanted French poets of the nineteenth century from Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé to Paul Valéry, but which early Modernists rejected almost en masse as superficial and histrionic.
