The Literati: Some Honest Opinions about Autorial Merits and Demerits, with Occasional Works of Personality. Together with Marginalia, Suggestions, and Essays

For much of his professional life, Edgar Allan Poe worked as a journalist for various magazines. The Literati is a collection of Poe's journalistic writings, which gives readers a chance to explore these lesser known and seldom reprinted works of Poe. The book contains Rufus Griswold's notorious "Memoir" of Poe, giving readers a first-hand look at the slurs that darkened Poe's reputation for generations. Then Poe himself speaks in several kinds of journalistic writings: The Literati, which are short biographical sketches of his contemporaries in the New York literary scene; book reviews; "Marginalia," which are epigrams or short essays used to fill blank space on magazine pages; essays on the art of poetry and literature in general; and his "fifty Suggestions," in which Poe gives his somewhat whimsical opinions on various subjects. Scholars and serious devotees of Poe should check out this volume. These writings frequently tell us more about Poe and how his mind worked than they do about their ostensible subjects. The book also gives us a first-hand look into the world Poe lived and worked in, and into the state of literature in early Victorian America. The book has one inevitable downside: Since the pieces were originally published in magazines, they deal with people and events that may be obscure at best to modern readers. For example, Poe may refer to a certain writer without naming him, though his contemporaries would probably have known who he was talking about. He also tends to sprinkle non-English words and phrases throughout his writings without translating them. (In those days, knowing foreign languages was almost expected of well-educated people.) This second downside may not have been inevitable, but it wrecked some of the articles for me. All in all, I recommend this book to all Poe fans. If you want to know how Poe really reviewed books (sarcastic humor if he didn't like them), what he really thought of his fellow authors, or just how fastidious he could be about grammar and poetic structure, you need to read The Literati. It will reward your patience.