While the enormous popularity of Edgar Allan
Poe''s famous short
stories and poems continues to highlight his creative brilliance, Poe''s
renown as the master of horror, the father of the detective story, and
the voice of "The Raven" is something of a mixed blessing. Today, Poe
is known, read, and appreciated on the basis of a comparatively narrow
body of work, roughly a dozen tales and half as many poems. For the
novice reader, these favored texts offer easy (but still challenging)
access to Poe''s most exemplary writing, entry into his uniquely
terrifying world, and intriguing connections to facets of their
author''s tragically disordered life. The total effect of all this is
compelling, and Poe himself would certainly approve. He wrote for the
masses, using his learned artistry to reach the common people of his
day and to then elevate their minds while intensifying their emotional
reactions. Poe was not averse to the commercial sensationalism either:
he wrote several "hoaxes" as news and later capitalized on his personal
notoriety for bookings on the lecture/recital circuit. Along with Mark
Twain and Ernest Hemingway, Poe ranks among the foremost literary stars
in the firmament of popular American culture. A century and half after
his death, Poe is instantly identifiable, stands without rival, and
remains (with effort) immensely enjoyable. In his normal frame of mind,
at least, Poe would have been deeply amused by the widespread adulation
and fame he has enjoyed in posterity.
The rub is that we may
be tempted to stop here and neglect the breadth and the depth of Poe''s
contributions to Western Literature. Poe, in fact, wrote nearly seventy
short works of fiction. He is duly credited with creating the detective
story genre and with transforming the Gothic mystery tale of the
Romantic Period into the modern horror or murder stories centered in
the outlying regions of human mind and experience. But he also wrote
several comic and satirical pieces, literary parodies, sketches, and
experimental stories, including "A Descent into the Maelstrom," and his
novella, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. His most famous
poems—"The Raven," "Ulalume," "The Bells," "The City in the Sea"—were
enormously influential. These famous verses were behind a powerful wave
of enthusiasm for Poe that arose among the leading writers of Europe
during his own lifetime, spread thereafter around the world, and was
sustained through the "discovery" of existential "human condition"
themes in his short stories generations later. But Poe also wrote three
volumes of poetry during the first period of his literary career
(1827-1831) that deserve our attention, as does his metaphysical Eureka: A Prose Poem and his verse drama, Politian.
In terms of the hidden breadth of his accomplishments, during most of
his career, Poe labored as an editor of literary journals and reviewer
of fiction, verse, and non-fiction books. Among the latter, Poe wrote
reviews on books of such diverse fields as medicine, natural history,
archeology, philology, and economics.
As for Poe''s criticism
of fiction and verse, there is an intersection with the
often-overlooked depth of his work. Poe developed a theory of
composition that he applied to both his short stories and his poems.
Its most basic principle was that insofar as short fiction and poetry
were concerned, the writer should aim at creating a single and total
psychological/spiritual effect upon the reader. The theme or plot of
the piece is always subordinate to the author''s calculated construction
of a single, intense mood in the reader''s or listener''s mind, be it
melancholy, suspense, or horror. There are no extra elements in Poe, no
subplots, no minor characters, and no digressions except those that
show the madness of deranged first-person ("I") narrators. Ultimately,
Poe took writing to be a moral task that worked not through teaching
lessons, bly stimulating his readers'' mental,
emotional, and spiritual faculties through texts of absolute integrity.
Poe, moreover, judged others by these same standards. By doing so, he
is establishing the rules and methods common to New Criticism, the
leading school of literary analysis in the twentieth century with its
insistence that the text must be interpreted as a self-contained unit
apart from the critic''s opinions of its author or the suitability of
its themes.
While you are encouraged to take this fuller
measure of Poe''s importance into account, the materials at this site
are geared toward his main works. Generally written in the 1840s, the
last decade of his life, they comprise an inescapable introduction to
Poe. Recognizing that there is more to Poe''s artistic and intellectual
legacy than they hold, the individual works considered here accurately
reflect the heights of his creative genius.
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