A few preliminary notes on Edgar A. Poe

"...art: an element in which Freud did not bathe without mishap."

Lacan, 1976

 

 

 

1. Poe was born into a nation where one world was dying [slavocracy, pre-capitalist economic formations], another being born [capitalism].
2. Poe: the son of itinerant actors.
3. Poe: stepson of slaveholders, but an outsider.
4. West Point: contempt and self-contempt manifest the contradiction.
5. Rationalizing idealism: Eureka: A Prose Poem,
6. In the antebellum period, lack of bourgeois national economic unity meant no ground for aesthetic unity: no ground for a national literary magazine, Poe's great project.
7. Poe & Antebellum United States:  forbidden, unwholesome topics outlawed from respectable conversation by the polite hypocrisies of bourgeois society.