Poe: A Personal View

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) has been with me since my early teens. His short stories thrilled my imagination and for a period his suggestive style influenced my own evolution as a writer. Later I also discovered his essays and his poetry, all worth the while to read, also for a modern reader. My strongest experience of Poe, however, was the first time I laid my eyes on a poem called “Alone”. It struck me as a thunderbolt, because it was about me. That is to say, of course it was not about me, it was about Poe himself, but it could have been about me. It expressed exactly what I did feel myself. That first time, I found only the first lines, but it was enough...

From childhood's hour I have not been

As others were; I have not seen

As others saw; I could not bring

My passions from a common spring.

Later, after much searching (this was before internet, it was not always easy to find things), I found the rest. It continues:

From the same source I have not taken

My sorrow; I could not awaken

My heart to joy at the same tone;

And all I loved, I loved alone.

Then—in my childhood, in the dawn

Of a most stormy life—was drawn

From every depth of good and ill

The mystery which binds me still:

From the torrent or the fountain,

From the red cliff or the mountain,

From the sun that round me rolled

In its autumn tint of gold,

From the lightning in the sky

As it passed my flying by,

From the thunder and the storm,

And the cloud that took the form

(When the rest of Heaven was blue)

Of a demon in my view.

Another poem by Poe that inspired me, was “Al Aaraaf”, and especially these lines:

A sound of silence on the startled ear

Which dreamy poets name 'the music of the sphere.'

Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call

'Silence' - which is the merest word of all.

(Above: Illustration by Edouard Manet for Stéphane Mallarmé's translation of The Raven to French. The Raven is Poe's most famous poem. Public Domain.)

I will not quote all Poe's poem here, and quite frankly, I don't like all of them at all. Some of them are tedious, especially his love poetry. But of course we must mention “The Raven”, his most famous poem. It contains many suggestive lines with an almost musical quality, such as:

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing,

Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before.

Here we can also see example of Poe's advanced alliteration, which is even more pronounced in the following very beautiful line from “The Bells”:

"What a tale of terror now their turbulency tells."

Possibly, Edgar Allan Poe is the best known and most important author of horror fiction. But to see him merely as that is to miss many of his qualities. He is also attributed with the first detective story ever, “The Murders on the Rue Morgue”, which would make him the father, not only of horror, but also of the later so expanding genre of crime and murder mysteries. Moreover, he wrote science fiction before the genre was really invented and labelled. In addition to this, he wrote high quality essays and poetry. As an essayist, he influenced disciplines such as cosmology and cryptography.

To observe attentively is to remember distinctly.

("The Murders in the Rue Morgue", 1841.)

Edgar Allan Poe was a great literary critic and himself a great stylist. His control of literary technique and language was second to none, and by far superior to all his contemporaries. He even reformed literary criticism itself.

Poe had a high thought of writership. In a letter to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849), he wrote

“Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.”

Here about art, from “Marginalia” (November 1844):

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term 'Art', I should call it 'the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul.' The mere imitation, however accurate, of what is in Nature, entitles no man to the sacred name of 'Artist'.”

Or this, also from “Marginalia”:

“How many good books suffer neglect through the inefficiency of their beginnings!“

After his death, the only biography was written by his enemy, critic and editor Rufus Wilmot Griswold, known under the signature “Ludwig”, who made everything to destroy the reputation of Poe. He presented half-truths and pure lies, which became an established part of the literature about Poe, who was not the depraved drug addict he is often described as.

Most people know about Poe's “gothic” horror stories, of which the most prominent might very well be “The Fall of the House of Usher”, a true masterpiece of the genre - and his detective stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin, without whom there would have never been a Sherlock Holmes or Hercule Poirot. However, his essays and his poetry are often overlooked, at least in the non-English speaking world.

"Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed [...] Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"

(Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes, about Poe.)

Did you know that Edgar Allan Poe had humour? It is not often he shows it, but there are a few occasions. He obviously saw himself humorously.

In "Hop-Frog" (1850), he wrote:

“As for myself, I am simply Hop-Frog, the jester — and this is my last jest.”

Yet we must return to “Marginalia” to find his only one expression of sublime self-irony:

“I have great faith in fools — self-confidence my friends will call it.”

(Unsolved Mystery: The Death of Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) by @Shounenbat, inspired me to write this article.)

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