Edgar Allan Poe often denounced and mocked other writers in harsh terms, leading James Russell Lowell to famously remark that Poe, when reviewing, “seems sometimes to mistake his phial of prussic-acid for his inkstand.”1 To explain Poe’s vitriol, many critics early in the twentieth century turned to psychoanalysis. For example, Lorine Pruette credited Poe’s acerbity to his will to power and suggested that his love of beauty was motivated by “the maximation of his ego-consciousness.”2 Joseph Wood Krutch similarly argued that Poe’s critical reasoning was “an elaborate rationalization whose real function is to support a predetermined taste” and that this taste sprung from Poe’s inborn psychological maladies.3
In his monograph Poe’s Literary Battles, Sidney P. Moss breaks with these psychological explanations. He insists that Poe’s criticisms were principled, courageous defenses of a distinctively American national literature. The book is a meticulous and detailed piece of literary...
