SOURCE: Foerster, Norman. “Poe.” In American Criticism: A Study in Literary Theory from Poe to the Present, pp. 1-51. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928.

In the following excerpt, Foerster discusses Poe's critical writing, which Foerster claims was devoted to resisting provincialism of two types: excessive respect for the literature of Europe, and excessive devotion to the literature of America.

1

With his usual critical acumen, Poe saw that a people's literature may be provincial in either of two opposite ways. At the beginning of his essay on Drake's overrated poem ‘The Culprit Fay,’ he wrote an analysis of the state of American criticism which to this day may be read with profit. First, there is the older type of provincialism: a servile respect for European opinion. ‘That an American book could, by any possibility, be worthy perusal, was an idea by no means extensively prevalent in the land; and if we...