Jerome McGann believes that Poe has been underrated as a poet. McGann teaches at the University of Virginia, where Poe briefly studied, and his appeal is not to the mob, the reading public, or the circus performers, the practitioners of verse. His jury is the clergy, not the laity, the imperial souls for whom reading is a “textual event.” It is as difficult a brief as defending Bob Dylan as a novelist, or John Lennon as a nice person.
