Edgar Allan Poe: A trip to Brazil with a stop by at Paris

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe’s reception in France, where he was almost universally acclaimed as the great literary talent in 19th Century American Literature, has been the occasion for a certain discomfort among Anglo-American writers and critics, who usually saw him as a minor star, especially when compared to contemporaries such as Whitman, Melville, and Hawthorne. In this context of negative evaluation, I want to call attention to the evaluation proposed by T. S. Eliot. Although he does not deny the presence of serious problems in the literary production of the author of “The Raven”, Eliot makes an effort to understand more precisely and systematically the logic that could account for the French evaluation of Poe, especially the one to be found in poets such as Baudelaire, Valéry and Mallarmé. Eliot’s balanced view also helps to understand certain aspects of Poe’s reception in Brazil, especially insofar as this reception relates to the avant-garde concrete poets.