The Grand and the Fair: Poe's Landscape Aesthetics and Pictorial Techniques (PDF)

Chapter I The Grand and the Fair: Poe, the American Landscape, and the Aesthetics of Nature (p. 1)

Ever since the poet William Carlos Williams dubbed Edgar Allan Poe the spontaneous outgrowth of his local American milieu,a critics and scholars have tended to overlook or ignore Williams` worthwhile suggestion to place him on native grounds.

Scholars of Poe have pursued their somewhat narrowly focused specialist studies while in the great array of books on the general subject of American landscape and literature, treatment of him is scanty or superficial. While approaches to the literature of the American landscape range from the mythic to the ecological to the broadly interdisciplinary, rarely does Poe receive more than cursory mention.

Among the book-length studies, Edwin Fussell`s Frontier: American Literature and the American West, zealously reading frontier implications in Poe`s writings, represents an exception by giving extended treatment to him.

The short shrift given to Poe is surprising since he wrote at least a half-dozen landscape tales. Furthermore, The Journal of Julius Rodman is overtly a narrative of exploration into the Far West, and The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym receives frequent citation as a major source of Melville`s Moby-Dick, a work often studied by students of wilderness literature.

Poe also wrote a significant body of poetry that deals with landscapes, of which "Dream-Land" and "Ulalume" are prime examples. The lack of attention to Ppe`s position in the context of American landscape literature can probably be explained by addressing the cliche that he stands outside the mainstream of the national literary tradition.

With specific reference to wilderness literature, Poe`s review of James Fenimore Cooper`s Wyandotte, or the Hutted Knoll indicates detachment from the typical American novel of the frontier:

In saying that the interest depends, first, upon the nature of the theme, we mean to suggest that

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