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A high forehead topped
by disheveled black hair,
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a sickly pallor,
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and a look of deep intelligence
and deeper exhaustion
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in his dark, sunken eyes.
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Edgar Allan Poe’s image
is not just instantly recognizable –
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it’s perfectly suited to his reputation.
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From the prisoner strapped
under a descending pendulum blade,
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to a raven who refuses
to leave the narrator’s chamber,
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Poe’s macabre and innovative stories
of gothic horror
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have left a timeless mark on literature.
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But just what is it that makes
Edgar Allan Poe
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one of the greatest American authors?
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After all, horror was a popular
genre of the period,
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with many practitioners.
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Yet Poe stood out thanks to his
careful attention to form and style.
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As a literary critic,
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he identified two cardinal rules
for the short story form:
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it must be short enough
to read in one sitting,
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and every word
must contribute to its purpose.
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By mastering these rules,
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Poe commands the reader’s attention
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and rewards them with an intense
and singular experience –
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what Poe called the unity of effect.
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Though often frightening,
this effect goes far beyond fear.
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Poe’s stories use violence and horror
to explore the paradoxes and mysteries
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of love,
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grief,
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and guilt,
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while resisting simple interpretations
or clear moral messages.
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And while they often hint
at supernatural elements,
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the true darkness they explore
is the human mind
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and its propensity for self-destruction.
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In “The Tell-Tale Heart,”
a ghastly murder
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is juxtaposed with the killer’s
tender empathy towards the victim –
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a connection that soon
returns to haunt him.
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The title character of "Ligeia"
returns from the dead
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through the corpse
of her husband’s second wife –
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or at least the opium-addicted
narrator thinks she does.
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And when the protagonist
of “William Wilson”
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violently confronts a man
he believes has been following him,
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he might just be staring
at his own image in a mirror.
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Through his pioneering use
of unreliable narrators,
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Poe turns readers into active participants
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who must decide when a storyteller
might be misinterpreting
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or even lying about the events
they’re relating.
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Although he’s best known
for his short horror stories,
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Poe was actually one of the most versatile
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and experimental writers
of the nineteenth century.
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He invented the detective story
as we know it,
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with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,”
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followed by “The Mystery of Marie Roget”
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and “The Purloined Letter.”
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All three feature
the original armchair detective,
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C. Auguste Dupin,
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who uses his genius and unusual powers
of observation and deduction
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to solve crimes that baffle the police.
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Poe also wrote satires of social
and literary trends,
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and hoaxes that in some cases
anticipated science fiction.
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Those included an account of
a balloon voyage to the moon,
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and a report of a dying patient
put into a hypnotic trance
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so he could speak from the other side.
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Poe even wrote an adventure novel
about a voyage to the South Pole
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and a treatise on astrophysics,
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all while he worked as an editor,
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producing hundreds of pages
of book reviews and literary theory.
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An appreciation of Poe’s career
wouldn’t be complete without his poetry:
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haunting and hypnotic.
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His best-known poems are songs of grief,
or in his words,
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“mournful and never-ending remembrance.”
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“The Raven,” in which the speaker
projects his grief onto a bird
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who merely repeats a single sound,
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made Poe famous.
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But despite his literary success,
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Poe lived in poverty
throughout his career,
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and his personal life was often
as dark as his writing.
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He was haunted by the loss of his mother
and his wife,
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who both died of tuberculosis
at the age of 24.
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Poe struggled with alcoholism
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and frequently antagonized
other popular writers.
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Much of his fame came from posthumous –
and very loose – adaptations of his work.
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And yet, if he could’ve known
how much pleasure and inspiration
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his writing would bring to generations
of readers and writers alike,
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perhaps it may have brought
a smile to that famously brooding visage.