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Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe
A critical examination of Poe, taking a more liberal view of his work.
353 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1972
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214 people want to read
About the author
Daniel Hoffman
66 books7 followersDaniel Hoffman served as Poet Laureate in 1973-74 (when the post was known as Consultant in Poetry of The Library of Congress). His first book, An Armada of Thirty Whales, was W. H. Auden's choice for the 1954 Yale Series of Younger Poets. Among its dozen successor volumes are Brotherly Love (1981), a nominee for both the National Book Award and National Book Critics Circle Award; Beyond Silence: Selected Shorter Poems 1948-2003; and The Whole Nine Yards: Longer Poems (2009).
Best known of his critical studies is another National Book Award nominee, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972).
Among his distinctions, Hoffman received the Arthur Rense prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005, and, in 2003 from The Sewanee Review, the Aiken-Taylor Award for Contemporary American Poetry. He was given the Memorial medal of the Magyar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poets.
Born in 1923 in New York City, Daniel Hoffman in 1948 married the poet and editor Elizabeth McFarland (d. 2005). They had two children. He took three degrees from Columbia, and taught there, at Swarthmore College, and at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1993 as the Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. From 1988-99 he was Poet in Residence, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and administered the American Poets' Corner. He lives in Swarthmore, PA, and on Cape Rosier in Maine.
Best known of his critical studies is another National Book Award nominee, Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972).
Among his distinctions, Hoffman received the Arthur Rense prize for poetry from the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2005, and, in 2003 from The Sewanee Review, the Aiken-Taylor Award for Contemporary American Poetry. He was given the Memorial medal of the Magyar P.E.N. for his translations of contemporary Hungarian poets.
Born in 1923 in New York City, Daniel Hoffman in 1948 married the poet and editor Elizabeth McFarland (d. 2005). They had two children. He took three degrees from Columbia, and taught there, at Swarthmore College, and at the University of Pennsylvania, from which he retired in 1993 as the Felix E. Schelling Professor of English Emeritus. From 1988-99 he was Poet in Residence, Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and administered the American Poets' Corner. He lives in Swarthmore, PA, and on Cape Rosier in Maine.
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March 24, 2025
“Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe.” Why why why why why why why? Why would a poet and critic of Daniel Hoffman’s stature give his book-length examination of the life and work of Edgar Allan Poe such a strange and off-putting title? The reasons for his doing so are actually quite good – and have much to do with his intention of writing a work that would break old rules and tread new literary ground as surely as Poe himself did during a short but eventful literary career. In Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe (1972), Hoffman crafts what must be one of the most fun, entertaining, and bracing works of belles lettres ever written.
Like Poe, Hoffman made his mark as both poet and critic – author of nine highly regarded volumes of poetry, and of scholarly work on writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Stephen Crane, William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves, and John Muir. By the time he wrote Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, Hoffman was already an emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania – another striking parallel with the life of Poe, who called Philadelphia home for a number of years and wrote some of his greatest work whilst living in the City of Brotherly Love. It seems clear to me, therefore, that by that point in his life, Hoffman had more than earned the right to write about Poe and his work in a manner that might have seemed somewhat risky back when he was an assistant professor.
And indeed, part of the fun of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is its iconoclastic, tightrope-without-a-net quality. One has to like a Poe book that begins with a preface that states, “What, another book on Poe! Who needs it?” The answer, as it turns out, is that we all do – or, more specifically, we need a book about Poe that is personal and associative, exploring one writer’s life-long fascination with Poe in a manner that may remind the reader of how they came to find the work of Edgar Allan Poe so compelling.
Hoffman begins with a recollection of how, as a high school student in New Rochelle, he wrote the words “I hate Poe” in his copy of Poe’s collected works. He recalls how the author’s very surname echoed in his brain: “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, the name resounded, soon becoming not a name at all but now a note, a tone struck upon some inner anvil of my being, one syllable in a chord I strained to hear, an ineffable harmony plucked from some sphere beyond the meshes of out common feelings” (p. 2).
So! There’s a reason for the book’s repetitive title (though there will be others, I promise). And there, also, is a sense of the playfulness that makes this particular work of literary criticism so much fun. Lit-crit works, after all, are so often associated with lead-heavy seriousness, reams of footnotes, and a general air of humourless gravity. And yet Hoffman has the sense to realize that a work of literary criticism should actually – oh, I don’t know – illuminate literary work, make it more fun and interesting to read. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe fulfills that mandate, and then some.
Whether the subject is Poe’s poetic aesthetic or Poe’s critical theory, Hoffman situates his insights squarely in what Poe actually wrote and what Poe’s writings can be said to do. I found Hoffman’s perspectives regarding Poe’s work to be well-grounded and persuasive, as when he comments on the three C. Auguste Dupin stories – “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) – through which Poe virtually invented the mystery genre as we have it today.
We are all used to hearing these three stories referred to as “tales of ratiocination,” and yet I think that Hoffman provides a finer and more nuanced explanation of Poe’s concept of ratiocination than anything else that I have read. Hoffman writes that “Dupin’s mind works by association. His method is a finer thing, a seemingly more supersensual mechanism, than the ordinary processes of rational reckoning. It partakes of the irrational, and is therefore the highest kind of ratiocination, since it is not the captive of its own premises” (p. 107). It is for this reason that Dupin “is that much more sophisticated than we, in his conundrum-disentangling, because he is just so much closer to the origins of our being. His mind, working by metaphoric analogies, combines poetic intuition with mathematical exactitude” (p. 108). And thus it is that Dupin, investigating the brutal killings of a mother and daughter in an isolated apartment in the Rue Morgue in Paris, can reason beyond the assumption of human causation itself, and can establish that the women were not “murdered” by a fellow human being at all, but rather were killed by an angry and frightened orangutan.
Fans of Poe’s work often know that the most famous edition of Poe stories published in the author’s lifetime bore the title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Here, as elsewhere, Hoffman offers helpful insights into the deeper meanings behind terms that Poe’s readers and critics may have come to take for granted. Hoffman proceeds from an observation that terms like “grotesque” and “arabesque” are “more properly applied” to visual arts like painting and architecture, as they “have nothing to do with plots or actions, they are concerned with the arrangement of elements in space. Such arts are essentially static, devoid (usually) of human content, and constitute expressions by a shaping aesthetic sense of its chosen materials” (p. 204).
It is within this odd context that Hoffman suggests that, “Roughly stated, a grotesque is a satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem” (p. 203). And, if one accepts Poe’s tendency to place his fictions in these two categories, then for Hoffman, “What characterizes the Arabesques is their exploration of extreme psychological states – the narrators or chief characters are often madmen, or persons who undergo some excruciating suffering of the soul” (p. 206). By contrast, “in the Grotesques the ratiocinative power leads not to the perception of ecstasy, as in the tales of detection and exploration, but rather to the exposure of the idiocy of the monstrous world” (p. 206). One may or may not agree with Poe’s deployment of these terms, or with Hoffman’s explication of their meaning; but these passages from Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe certainly give the reader much to think about.
Toward the end of the book, Hoffman focuses on three major works that have elicited much critical commentary and attention from Poe scholars: the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the metaphysical work Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), and the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). As “House of Usher” has always been my favourite among Poe’s stories, I enjoyed reading Hoffman’s perceptive and original ideas regarding the tale.
Hoffman focuses strongly on the presence and the perspectives of the unnamed narrator who relates the story to the reader, writing that in the story’s introduction, the narrator “feels an overwhelming apprehension as he sees the House. Which is the House of Usher, the domain of his soul, into which he will be ushered” (p. 301). “Ushered” indeed. Here, as elsewhere, Hoffman displays a highly Poe-esque fondness for the same sort of exercises in punning that Poe himself so often enjoyed.
Hoffman relates the structure of “The Fall of the House of Usher” to elements at work in Poe’s tales generally. The narrator is summoned to the Usher estate by an urgent letter from boyhood friend Roderick Usher, and “Everywhere else in Poe’s tales, as we have seen, the sending of a letter is a report or summons from the soul” (p. 300). And this story of a brother’s live burial of his own sister, of said sister’s return from her live inhumation, of a man killed by his own fears, of the collapse of both a mansion and the family it once represented, is aptly described by Hoffman as a story in which “so little happens”:
[A]ll is described rather than dramatized…all is reported by the narrator….For what is this tale but the dream which Narrator, at Roderick’s behest, has travelled so far into the intricacy of the dreary darkness to dream? And what he reports has the fixated, tableau-like rigidity, the inexorability, of a dream. It has also a dream’s unremarked surprises and omissions. Unexplained events follow one another as though in the control of an unseen hand, those to whom they happen being as blind to their consequences as they are unaware of their causes. (p. 302)
I promised, earlier in this review, that I would provide another reason why Hoffman may have given this book the odd title of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. The bell-like repetition of Poe’s surname made me think of Poe’s poem “The Bells,” with its ringing, pealing repetition of the word “bells”; in that connection, Hoffman writes that there are times in life when “one is ready, one needs, to be swept away by the sheer tintinnabulation of a poetry of sound, of incantatory spells, a poetry of hypnagogic trance which will possess one’s whole consciousness with a tom-tom and a chime” (p. 48). So, there’s that.
But there’s something else as well – something that has to do with Poe’s own protean, multivocal identity. It isn’t just that Hoffman goes back and forth between “Edgar Allan Poe” (the name by which we know him nowadays) and “Edgar A. Poe” (the name he almost invariably used to sign his own work). At various points in the work, Hoffman refers to Poe as “Penniless Edgar” (all too true), “Hoaxiepoe” (for Poe’s penchant for perpetrating hoaxes against his own readers), “Funny Edgar” (for Poe’s often strained attempts at humour), “Editor A. Poe,” “Poe the Pundit,” “Poe the Metaphysician,” and – my personal favourite – “Idgar,” for Poe’s pioneering, pre-Freudian explorations of the id, and of all the grimmer sides of human consciousness. That’s seven different versions of Poe right there. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!
Hoffman concludes by asking why so many people were willing to believe the lies that Poe’s enemy Rufus W. Griswold wrote about him after Poe’s mysterious death in 1849. Having posed this question, Hoffman then suggests that “In his life…Edgar Allan Poe tried to be a good man. It was in his art that he released the demonic energies which in life he, like all civil beings, had to repress” (p. 319). He wrote with honesty about human drives that all people have and most people aren’t willing to recognize. Small wonder, I suppose, that there were so many people in the grimly proper and strait-laced American society of 1849 whose response to the passing of Edgar Allan Poe was to give a sniff of offended respectability and say something on the order of, "I could never be like that."
Poe was, in short, a writer, an artist, and a thinker who was a long way ahead of his time – and Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is one of the most original and thought-provoking studies of this wildly original author.
Like Poe, Hoffman made his mark as both poet and critic – author of nine highly regarded volumes of poetry, and of scholarly work on writers as diverse as William Faulkner, Stephen Crane, William Butler Yeats, Robert Graves, and John Muir. By the time he wrote Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, Hoffman was already an emeritus professor of English at the University of Pennsylvania – another striking parallel with the life of Poe, who called Philadelphia home for a number of years and wrote some of his greatest work whilst living in the City of Brotherly Love. It seems clear to me, therefore, that by that point in his life, Hoffman had more than earned the right to write about Poe and his work in a manner that might have seemed somewhat risky back when he was an assistant professor.
And indeed, part of the fun of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is its iconoclastic, tightrope-without-a-net quality. One has to like a Poe book that begins with a preface that states, “What, another book on Poe! Who needs it?” The answer, as it turns out, is that we all do – or, more specifically, we need a book about Poe that is personal and associative, exploring one writer’s life-long fascination with Poe in a manner that may remind the reader of how they came to find the work of Edgar Allan Poe so compelling.
Hoffman begins with a recollection of how, as a high school student in New Rochelle, he wrote the words “I hate Poe” in his copy of Poe’s collected works. He recalls how the author’s very surname echoed in his brain: “Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe, the name resounded, soon becoming not a name at all but now a note, a tone struck upon some inner anvil of my being, one syllable in a chord I strained to hear, an ineffable harmony plucked from some sphere beyond the meshes of out common feelings” (p. 2).
So! There’s a reason for the book’s repetitive title (though there will be others, I promise). And there, also, is a sense of the playfulness that makes this particular work of literary criticism so much fun. Lit-crit works, after all, are so often associated with lead-heavy seriousness, reams of footnotes, and a general air of humourless gravity. And yet Hoffman has the sense to realize that a work of literary criticism should actually – oh, I don’t know – illuminate literary work, make it more fun and interesting to read. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe fulfills that mandate, and then some.
Whether the subject is Poe’s poetic aesthetic or Poe’s critical theory, Hoffman situates his insights squarely in what Poe actually wrote and what Poe’s writings can be said to do. I found Hoffman’s perspectives regarding Poe’s work to be well-grounded and persuasive, as when he comments on the three C. Auguste Dupin stories – “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (1842), and “The Purloined Letter” (1844) – through which Poe virtually invented the mystery genre as we have it today.
We are all used to hearing these three stories referred to as “tales of ratiocination,” and yet I think that Hoffman provides a finer and more nuanced explanation of Poe’s concept of ratiocination than anything else that I have read. Hoffman writes that “Dupin’s mind works by association. His method is a finer thing, a seemingly more supersensual mechanism, than the ordinary processes of rational reckoning. It partakes of the irrational, and is therefore the highest kind of ratiocination, since it is not the captive of its own premises” (p. 107). It is for this reason that Dupin “is that much more sophisticated than we, in his conundrum-disentangling, because he is just so much closer to the origins of our being. His mind, working by metaphoric analogies, combines poetic intuition with mathematical exactitude” (p. 108). And thus it is that Dupin, investigating the brutal killings of a mother and daughter in an isolated apartment in the Rue Morgue in Paris, can reason beyond the assumption of human causation itself, and can establish that the women were not “murdered” by a fellow human being at all, but rather were killed by an angry and frightened orangutan.
Fans of Poe’s work often know that the most famous edition of Poe stories published in the author’s lifetime bore the title Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Here, as elsewhere, Hoffman offers helpful insights into the deeper meanings behind terms that Poe’s readers and critics may have come to take for granted. Hoffman proceeds from an observation that terms like “grotesque” and “arabesque” are “more properly applied” to visual arts like painting and architecture, as they “have nothing to do with plots or actions, they are concerned with the arrangement of elements in space. Such arts are essentially static, devoid (usually) of human content, and constitute expressions by a shaping aesthetic sense of its chosen materials” (p. 204).
It is within this odd context that Hoffman suggests that, “Roughly stated, a grotesque is a satire, an arabesque a prose equivalent of a poem” (p. 203). And, if one accepts Poe’s tendency to place his fictions in these two categories, then for Hoffman, “What characterizes the Arabesques is their exploration of extreme psychological states – the narrators or chief characters are often madmen, or persons who undergo some excruciating suffering of the soul” (p. 206). By contrast, “in the Grotesques the ratiocinative power leads not to the perception of ecstasy, as in the tales of detection and exploration, but rather to the exposure of the idiocy of the monstrous world” (p. 206). One may or may not agree with Poe’s deployment of these terms, or with Hoffman’s explication of their meaning; but these passages from Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe certainly give the reader much to think about.
Toward the end of the book, Hoffman focuses on three major works that have elicited much critical commentary and attention from Poe scholars: the novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the metaphysical work Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848), and the short story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839). As “House of Usher” has always been my favourite among Poe’s stories, I enjoyed reading Hoffman’s perceptive and original ideas regarding the tale.
Hoffman focuses strongly on the presence and the perspectives of the unnamed narrator who relates the story to the reader, writing that in the story’s introduction, the narrator “feels an overwhelming apprehension as he sees the House. Which is the House of Usher, the domain of his soul, into which he will be ushered” (p. 301). “Ushered” indeed. Here, as elsewhere, Hoffman displays a highly Poe-esque fondness for the same sort of exercises in punning that Poe himself so often enjoyed.
Hoffman relates the structure of “The Fall of the House of Usher” to elements at work in Poe’s tales generally. The narrator is summoned to the Usher estate by an urgent letter from boyhood friend Roderick Usher, and “Everywhere else in Poe’s tales, as we have seen, the sending of a letter is a report or summons from the soul” (p. 300). And this story of a brother’s live burial of his own sister, of said sister’s return from her live inhumation, of a man killed by his own fears, of the collapse of both a mansion and the family it once represented, is aptly described by Hoffman as a story in which “so little happens”:
[A]ll is described rather than dramatized…all is reported by the narrator….For what is this tale but the dream which Narrator, at Roderick’s behest, has travelled so far into the intricacy of the dreary darkness to dream? And what he reports has the fixated, tableau-like rigidity, the inexorability, of a dream. It has also a dream’s unremarked surprises and omissions. Unexplained events follow one another as though in the control of an unseen hand, those to whom they happen being as blind to their consequences as they are unaware of their causes. (p. 302)
I promised, earlier in this review, that I would provide another reason why Hoffman may have given this book the odd title of Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. The bell-like repetition of Poe’s surname made me think of Poe’s poem “The Bells,” with its ringing, pealing repetition of the word “bells”; in that connection, Hoffman writes that there are times in life when “one is ready, one needs, to be swept away by the sheer tintinnabulation of a poetry of sound, of incantatory spells, a poetry of hypnagogic trance which will possess one’s whole consciousness with a tom-tom and a chime” (p. 48). So, there’s that.
But there’s something else as well – something that has to do with Poe’s own protean, multivocal identity. It isn’t just that Hoffman goes back and forth between “Edgar Allan Poe” (the name by which we know him nowadays) and “Edgar A. Poe” (the name he almost invariably used to sign his own work). At various points in the work, Hoffman refers to Poe as “Penniless Edgar” (all too true), “Hoaxiepoe” (for Poe’s penchant for perpetrating hoaxes against his own readers), “Funny Edgar” (for Poe’s often strained attempts at humour), “Editor A. Poe,” “Poe the Pundit,” “Poe the Metaphysician,” and – my personal favourite – “Idgar,” for Poe’s pioneering, pre-Freudian explorations of the id, and of all the grimmer sides of human consciousness. That’s seven different versions of Poe right there. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe!
Hoffman concludes by asking why so many people were willing to believe the lies that Poe’s enemy Rufus W. Griswold wrote about him after Poe’s mysterious death in 1849. Having posed this question, Hoffman then suggests that “In his life…Edgar Allan Poe tried to be a good man. It was in his art that he released the demonic energies which in life he, like all civil beings, had to repress” (p. 319). He wrote with honesty about human drives that all people have and most people aren’t willing to recognize. Small wonder, I suppose, that there were so many people in the grimly proper and strait-laced American society of 1849 whose response to the passing of Edgar Allan Poe was to give a sniff of offended respectability and say something on the order of, "I could never be like that."
Poe was, in short, a writer, an artist, and a thinker who was a long way ahead of his time – and Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe is one of the most original and thought-provoking studies of this wildly original author.
February 17, 2021
I enjoyed reading some of Mr. Hoffman's thoughts on Poe's stories, poems, and other work. But when he starts taking Freudian analysis too seriously I just want to scream: No No No No No No No!
October 16, 2020
Poe was a genius.
We think we "know" Poe, but we don't. Critical bios
and just plain bios offer only the dumdum obvious. A complex man, w many inner devils and layers of the unstated, Poe - we know - 'founded' the modern detective story -- and then? His life is a short, dark tragedy while his stories shimmer w astonishing, shocking, imaginative brilliance.
The "New England" writers, fr Emerson to H James, disdained him. But he wowwwed Europe: Baudelaire, Mallarme, Swinburne, Kafka, Nietzsche, Valery, Claudel -- and so on. Euros are always
smarter than (fuked) Puritan Americans. Poe had to deal with US Evangels who believed in 1839 that the world was ending Soon. As Poe wrote, "The range of the Imagination is unlimited." This line was enough to offend Puritan Americans.
Poe would not validate any religion or any resurrection. As Daniel Hoffman says, "His crime was to tell us that the desire to do such things [murder, etc] lurks, perhaps, in the soul of
each of us. It was in his art that he released the demonic energies which, in life, he had to repress."
I give this crit analysis 3-stars as Hoffman, who offers some fine insights about the "double" in Poe (see: Patricia Highsm) and the blindness of love, resorts to blog-writing: he tells us about growing up in New Rochelle, NY, his views on Nixon, his wife and their 2 babies, and John Foster Dulles. HELP! ~It's almost as bad as reading a GR review in which we learn Nothing of the book but all about some pay-attn-to-me GR and the thrift shop where the item was found for one dollar.
That said, Hoffman makes us, despite his own moralizing, apprech that Poe was the first literary critic in US to insist that lit work be measured by literary standards alone. And he opens the way to seeing Poe's "kinky way, to human experience," along w seeing death "as a metaphor of sexuality."
We think we "know" Poe, but we don't. Critical bios
and just plain bios offer only the dumdum obvious. A complex man, w many inner devils and layers of the unstated, Poe - we know - 'founded' the modern detective story -- and then? His life is a short, dark tragedy while his stories shimmer w astonishing, shocking, imaginative brilliance.
The "New England" writers, fr Emerson to H James, disdained him. But he wowwwed Europe: Baudelaire, Mallarme, Swinburne, Kafka, Nietzsche, Valery, Claudel -- and so on. Euros are always
smarter than (fuked) Puritan Americans. Poe had to deal with US Evangels who believed in 1839 that the world was ending Soon. As Poe wrote, "The range of the Imagination is unlimited." This line was enough to offend Puritan Americans.
Poe would not validate any religion or any resurrection. As Daniel Hoffman says, "His crime was to tell us that the desire to do such things [murder, etc] lurks, perhaps, in the soul of
each of us. It was in his art that he released the demonic energies which, in life, he had to repress."
I give this crit analysis 3-stars as Hoffman, who offers some fine insights about the "double" in Poe (see: Patricia Highsm) and the blindness of love, resorts to blog-writing: he tells us about growing up in New Rochelle, NY, his views on Nixon, his wife and their 2 babies, and John Foster Dulles. HELP! ~It's almost as bad as reading a GR review in which we learn Nothing of the book but all about some pay-attn-to-me GR and the thrift shop where the item was found for one dollar.
That said, Hoffman makes us, despite his own moralizing, apprech that Poe was the first literary critic in US to insist that lit work be measured by literary standards alone. And he opens the way to seeing Poe's "kinky way, to human experience," along w seeing death "as a metaphor of sexuality."
February 19, 2022
I. Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe, Poe - 3.5 Stars
II. ‘O! Nothing Earthly . . . ’ The Poems - 3.5 Stars
III. The Rationale of Verse, The Critical Theory - 3.25 Stars
IV. Disentanglements, Tales of Ratiocination and Detection - 4 Stars
V. Voyages:
Going Down -MS Found in a Bottle; Decent in a Maelstrom - 3.5 Stars
Sent Up - The Balloon Hoax; Hans Pfaall - 3.75 Stars
Counterclockwise -Tale of the Ragged Mountains; Monsieur Valdemar; Mesmeric Revelations - 4 Stars
Beyond Apocalypse - Monos and Una; Eiros and Charmion; The Power of Words - 3.25 Stars
VI. Dull Realities:
Money - Diddling; Von Kemplens; The Domain of Arnheim - 4 Stars
Politics - Mellonta Tauta; Some Words with a Mummy; The Man That was Used Up - 4 Stars
The Social Order - The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether - 4.25 Stars
VII. Grotesques and Arabesques:
Poe's Theory of Fiction - 3.5 Stars
Seeing Double - The Imp of the Perverse; The Angel of the Odd; William Wilson - 3.5 Stars
Murder! - The Premature Burial; The Cask of Amontillado; - 4 Stars
Madness! - The Tell-Tale Heart - 4.5 Stars
VIII. The Marriage Group:
'A Series of Mere Household Events' - The Black Cat; Berenice - 3.25 Stars
Aversions - The Spectacles; Lack of Breath - 3.25 Stars
'I Have Been Faithful to You in My Fashion' - Ligeia 3.25 Stars
IX. Body of the World: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym - 4.25 Stars
X. The Mind of God: 'What I Here Propound Is True' [Eureka] - 4.25 Stars
XI. The Fall of the House of Usher: 'My Heart Laid Bear' - 4.5 Stars
XII. The Haunted Palace - 3.5 Stars
II. ‘O! Nothing Earthly . . . ’ The Poems - 3.5 Stars
III. The Rationale of Verse, The Critical Theory - 3.25 Stars
IV. Disentanglements, Tales of Ratiocination and Detection - 4 Stars
V. Voyages:
Going Down -MS Found in a Bottle; Decent in a Maelstrom - 3.5 Stars
Sent Up - The Balloon Hoax; Hans Pfaall - 3.75 Stars
Counterclockwise -Tale of the Ragged Mountains; Monsieur Valdemar; Mesmeric Revelations - 4 Stars
Beyond Apocalypse - Monos and Una; Eiros and Charmion; The Power of Words - 3.25 Stars
VI. Dull Realities:
Money - Diddling; Von Kemplens; The Domain of Arnheim - 4 Stars
Politics - Mellonta Tauta; Some Words with a Mummy; The Man That was Used Up - 4 Stars
The Social Order - The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether - 4.25 Stars
VII. Grotesques and Arabesques:
Poe's Theory of Fiction - 3.5 Stars
Seeing Double - The Imp of the Perverse; The Angel of the Odd; William Wilson - 3.5 Stars
Murder! - The Premature Burial; The Cask of Amontillado; - 4 Stars
Madness! - The Tell-Tale Heart - 4.5 Stars
VIII. The Marriage Group:
'A Series of Mere Household Events' - The Black Cat; Berenice - 3.25 Stars
Aversions - The Spectacles; Lack of Breath - 3.25 Stars
'I Have Been Faithful to You in My Fashion' - Ligeia 3.25 Stars
IX. Body of the World: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym - 4.25 Stars
X. The Mind of God: 'What I Here Propound Is True' [Eureka] - 4.25 Stars
XI. The Fall of the House of Usher: 'My Heart Laid Bear' - 4.5 Stars
XII. The Haunted Palace - 3.5 Stars
November 24, 2007
yes, the book is titled Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe. it's got a lot of great material on Poe, especially on some of the more obscure works, but it's marred by a self-consciously quirky style which may have been a refreshing alternative to stodgy donnish monographs once but hasn't aged well. still, guy knows what he's talking about.
November 28, 2017
When I started reading Poe at the beginning of this month, one of my early thoughts was that I had first read Poe in early adolescence and that, in coming back to him now he seems to have remained in adolescence while I matured. Reading more and more tales and articles largely changed my mind about this, but I was somewhat gratified to see in Daniel Hoffman’s Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe that T. S. Eliot had a very similar take on EAP.
Daniel Hoffman on Poe’s poem “Israfel” (he has an idiosyncratic habit of referring to the writer as ‘Edgarpoe’):
Hoffman did convince me to read “Eureka”, a work by Poe I had been inclined to pass over. I’m very glad I chose to read it. I was afraid that it would be impenetrable, but Poe lays out his theories in clear prose, taking his assumptions step-by-step, careful to bring the reader along with him in sharing his incredible revelatory insights into the nature of the universe. I cannot say how his physics and astronomy have held up, but I found his presentation at least internally consistent, both within itself and with the physical laws as he understood them.
I have never read anything quite like it; Hoffman compares it to De Rerum Natura by Lucretius and Yeats’ A Vision, neither of which I’ve read. The closest things in my experience are Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon; unlike these authors, Poe writes directly of his insights and refuses to embed his vision within a fiction or parable or poem, a surprising choice for a writer so well known for his imaginative writings and lyrical skill. He does, however, open the work with a satirical account of modern epistemology, allegedly from 1000 years in the future; this was lifted from, or perhaps later inserted into his story “Mellonta Tauta”.
On the whole, however, Hoffman admired the Poe works that I did and I found his analyses and meditations on them unnecessary to my own appreciation, or, on occasion, rather off-the-mark (a little too much Freud in some of his critiques). I did however appreciate Hoffman, a poet himself, expressing skepticism about Poe’s account of how he came to write “The Raven” (in “The Philosophy of Composition”); it helped confirm my own reaction to the piece.
Daniel Hoffman on Poe’s poem “Israfel” (he has an idiosyncratic habit of referring to the writer as ‘Edgarpoe’):
Ideality, that perfect beauty on which Poe gazed with such longing, that perfect beauty he attempted to imitate and enshrine in his verses, is for him attainable, if at all, through the effects of musicality of sound and indefiniteness of meaning. The nearest Edgarpoe gets to that heavenly music in ‘Israfel’ is in the first and last stanzas. When Edgarpoe has really set his lyre within the sky he is capable of a lovely music, a lyrical movement, a fortuitous lilt of chiming sounds.Here is the first stanza of ‘Israfel’:
In Heaven a spirit doth dwellHoffman says the penultimate stanza is “sustained banality”. I rather like that stanza: the repetition of the word “flowers” the idea of the shadow of the heavenly realm being the sunshine of our world, and, especially, in its contrast of Israfel’s and Poe’s realms, the way it sets up the final stanza.
“Whose heart-strings are a lute”;
None sing so wildly well
As the angel Israfel,
And the giddy stars (so legends tell),
Ceasing their hymns, attend the spell
Of his voice, all mute.
And the last two:
Yes, Heaven is thine; but this
Is a world of sweets and sours;
Our flowers are merely—flowers,
And the shadow of thy perfect bliss
Is the sunshine of ours.
If I could dwell
Where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He might not sing so wildly well
A mortal melody,
While a bolder note than this might swell
From my lyre within the sky.
Hoffman did convince me to read “Eureka”, a work by Poe I had been inclined to pass over. I’m very glad I chose to read it. I was afraid that it would be impenetrable, but Poe lays out his theories in clear prose, taking his assumptions step-by-step, careful to bring the reader along with him in sharing his incredible revelatory insights into the nature of the universe. I cannot say how his physics and astronomy have held up, but I found his presentation at least internally consistent, both within itself and with the physical laws as he understood them.
I have never read anything quite like it; Hoffman compares it to De Rerum Natura by Lucretius and Yeats’ A Vision, neither of which I’ve read. The closest things in my experience are Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Star Maker by Olaf Stapledon; unlike these authors, Poe writes directly of his insights and refuses to embed his vision within a fiction or parable or poem, a surprising choice for a writer so well known for his imaginative writings and lyrical skill. He does, however, open the work with a satirical account of modern epistemology, allegedly from 1000 years in the future; this was lifted from, or perhaps later inserted into his story “Mellonta Tauta”.
On the whole, however, Hoffman admired the Poe works that I did and I found his analyses and meditations on them unnecessary to my own appreciation, or, on occasion, rather off-the-mark (a little too much Freud in some of his critiques). I did however appreciate Hoffman, a poet himself, expressing skepticism about Poe’s account of how he came to write “The Raven” (in “The Philosophy of Composition”); it helped confirm my own reaction to the piece.
June 27, 2021
Would probably give it a 4.5. Overall, an entertaining unusual look at Poe, but sometimes a bit far-fetched and heavy on the Freudian sauce; cut those passages, and some others, lose about 100 pages, would be a 5.
December 18, 2025
Perhaps the most unusual study of Poe you'll find out there. Hoffman's deeply personal extended essay pays tribute to the author while at the same time acknowledging all of his flaws and faults. It's rare for an academic text to feature its author so significantly as this oddly-titled work does, but somehow it works, reading as both tribute and thoughtful analytical analysis at the same time. Hoffman's is a thorough approch, tackling all of the poetry, stories and some of the non-fiction, and leans towards the psychoanalytical too, although not as obviously as Madame Bonaparte. His writing is unusual at times, but also entertaining, and there's a surprising amount of humour and wordplay waiting to be discovered here. It's certainly a one-of-a-kind read.
July 31, 2014
No No No No No No No
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