Is not Poe's anomalous combination of Romantic self-knowledge and rationalistic procedure somewhat the result of his anomalous Southern experience? Did not the curious time-lag created in the South by the belated strength of Jeffersonian rationalism produce a remarkable fusion of reason and romantic angst? In Europe that fusion never occurred in the same stark way because Rousseauistic attrition of the Enlightenment intervened. But in Edgar Poe one observes the unmediated union as it were of the attitudes of Voltaire and Novalis, of Shaftesbury and Lord Byron.