"It was night, and the rain fell; and falling, it was rain, but, having fallen, it was blood."
- from "Silence - A Fable"
Edgar Allan Poe is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature. His tales and poems convey with passionate intensity the mysterious, dreamlike, and often macabre forces that pervaded his sensibility. Poe is considered one the greatest and unhappiest of American poets. Indeed, his painful life, neurotic attraction to intense beauty, violent horror, and death, and his sense of the world of dreams contributed to his greatness as a writer.
Around his name has accumulated a mass of rumor, conjecture, psycho-analysis, and interpretation based upon imagination rather than fact. And the fact is that Poe’s life was marred by tragedy (he became an orphan at his early age, married his thirteen-year old cousin Virginia who died soon, experienced financial difficulties and intense drinking bouts).
Edgar's life and reputation won him a few labels: neurotic, paranoid, oversexed, addicted to various substances, an unstable man sitting in a dim room, with a raven over his door, a bottle at his table, a pipe full of opium, scribbling insane verses.
Poe is a very complicated author. His literary works are perplexed, disturbing, and even grotesque. They reveal his darkly passionate sensibilities—a tormented and sometimes neurotic obsession with death and violence and overall appreciation for the beautiful yet tragic mysteries of life.
During his lifetime, Poe published four collections of his poetry. Among his poems there are "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", "A Dream Within a Dream", "The Conqueror Worm".
Walt Whitman, in his essay titled “Edgar Poe’s Significance” wrote: Poe’s verses illustrate an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty, with the rhyming art to excess, an incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes, a demoniac undertone behind every page. … There is an indescribable magnetism about the poet’s life and reminiscences, as well as the poems.
Edgar Allan Poe is a master of the horror tale and fiction. He was one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in the United States.
Poe’s thrilling tales examining the depths of the human psyche earned him much fame during his lifetime and after his death. Poe's best known fiction works are Gothic, a genre he followed to appease the public taste. His most recurring themes deal with questions of death, including its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, the reanimation of the dead, and mourning. "There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction."
Poe is often called the patron saint of the detective story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle said, "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? " Beyond horror, Poe also wrote satires, humor tales, and hoaxes. For comic effect, he used irony and ludicrous extravagance, often in an attempt to liberate the reader from cultural conformity. Poe's writing reflects his literary theories, which he presented in his criticism and also in essays such as "The Poetic Principle". He disliked didacticism and allegory, though he believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface. Works with obvious meanings, he wrote, cease to be art. He believed that quality work should be brief and focus on a specific single effect, the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea. Fellow critic James Russell Lowell called him "the most discriminating, philosophical, and fearless critic upon imaginative works who has written in America" "I found comfort in such pessimists and decadents as Baudelaire, Verlaine, Edgar Allan Poe , and Strindberg .... The pessimism of the creative person is not decadence but a mighty passion for redemption of man. While the poet entertains he continues to search for eternal truths, for the essence of being. In his own fashion he tries to solve the riddle of time and change, to find an answer to suffering, to reveal love in the very abyss of cruelty and injustice."
"There are moments when, even to the sober eye of Reason, the world of our sad Humanity may assume the semblance of a Hell."
"No pictorial or sculptural combinations of points of human loveliness, do more than approach the living and breathing human beauty as it gladdens our daily path."
Edgar Allan Poe was one of the pioneers of the sterling group of American writers who dignified the literature during the period before the Civil War. He is best understood in contrast but not in conflict with his environment. Many of his works are generally considered part of the dark romanticism genre, a literary reaction to transcendentalism, which Poe strongly disliked. Poe has received not only praise, but criticism as well. This is partly because of the negative perception of his personal character and its influence upon his reputation. William Butler Yeats was occasionally critical of Poe and once called him "vulgar". Transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted to "The Raven" by saying, "I see nothing in it" and derisively referred to Poe as "the jingle man". Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "falls into vulgarity" by being "too poetical"—the equivalent of wearing a diamond ring on every finger.
"It is more than probable that I am not understood; but I fear, indeed, that it is in no manner possible to convey to the mind of the merely general reader, an adequate idea of that nervous intensity of interest with which, in my case, the powers of meditation (not to speak technically) busied and buried themselves, in the contemplation of even the most ordinary objects of the universe."
"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence– whether much that is glorious– whether all that is profound– does not spring from disease of thought– from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."
Poe’s image can be depicted through Whitman’s dream - the vessel on the sea, at midnight, in a storm, “flying uncontroll’d with torn sails…apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim.”
There have been numerous collections of his works published and many of them have been inspiration for popular television and film adaptations including “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Black Cat”, and “The Raven”. He has been the subject of numerous biographers and has significantly influenced many other authors even into the 21st Century.
Poe's influence may be measured by his many admirers among creative writers, from Hawthorne, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Lowell, among Poe's American contemporaries, to his followers in France--Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne, Paul Valery, Andre Gide, and many others; to Fyodor Dostoyevski, August Strindberg, Walt Whitman (the poems), Henry James (the fiction), Robert Louis Stevenson, William Butler Yeats (the poems), Edmund Gosse, Thomas Hardy, Ambrose Bierce, George Bernard Shaw, D. H. Lawrence, Joseph Conrad, Theodore Dreiser, Arthur Conan Doyle, Vladimir Nabokov, Konstantin Balmont. Poeian echoes can be heard in Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl” – the leading figure of the Beat Generation deemed Poe as a source of inspiration for “the best minds of my generation”. Poe has also influenced Claude Debussy, Maurice Ravel, Sergey Rachmaninoff, Sergey Prokofiev, Jean Sibelius, and the painter Rene Magritte, among others.
There are conflicting accounts surrounding the last days of Edgar Allan Poe and the cause of his death. Some say he died from alcoholism, some claim he was murdered, and various diseases have also been attributed. Poe was buried unceremoniously in an unmarked grave in the Old Westminster Burying Ground of Baltimore. On this original site now stands a stone with a carving of a raven and the inscription:
Quoth the Raven, Nevermore
The inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty—the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself—the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like—and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand—what bearings have they on current pathological study?
"There are two bodies — the rudimental and the complete ; corresponding with the two conditions of the worm and the butterfly. What we call "death," is but the painful metamorphosis. Our present incarnation is progressive, preparatory, temporary. Our future is perfected, ultimate, immortal. The ultimate life is the full design."
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"They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."
"But as in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of today, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been."
The inevitable tendency of poetic culture to morbidity, abnormal beauty—the sickliness of all technical thought or refinement in itself—the abnegation of the perennial and democratic concretes at first hand, the body, the earth and sea, sex and the like—and the substitution of something for them at second or third hand—what bearings have they on current pathological study?
