The Poe case …

… The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel by Jerome McGann Review | New Republic. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)

We demand of our poets, Romantic or not, more than watchmaking—more sublime messiness, more anarchic personality, more moral substance, more matter, than Poe was willing to allow, which is why his verse sounds so bloodless next to Whitman's, so inconsequential next to Dickinson's, and so mechanical next to almost anyone else's. Style for Poe was the almost negligible outcome of over-rationalized composition, and not the organic outcrop of substance. (For a hammered-home contrast, look again at any one of the sonnets of Gerard Manley Hopkins to see how the singing and the song are one.)