The German Face of Edgar Allan Poe

The issue of Poe's competence in the field of German language and literature is central to understanding his creative method. For over one hundred years readers have been intrigued by the spate of references to German literature in his works, by his scoffs at German scholarship, and by his extensive use of quotations in German to embellish his texts. Did Poe actually speak or read this language? Did he know Goethe and E. T. A. Hoffmann in the original? Could he read Schlegel and Kant in German well enough for these thinkers to have directly influenced his aesthetics? Definitive answers to such questions are long overdue and will lay to rest much speculation about Poe's relationship to German sources. This study sorts through Poe's Germanic references to understand his complex connection with German language, literature and culture. It examines his quotations and his statements about German writers, while viewing Poe within the discourse of Germanism that surrounded writers of the Gothic fantastic in the 1830s and 1840s. Although evidence is scattered and complex, the conclusions are straightforward: Poe's knowledge of the German language and its culture represented a second-hand familiarity of phrases and opinions that he found entirely in English-language sources. The conclusions of this study are significant, for they correct a tradition of time-worn assumptions within Poe scholarship.