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EDGAR ALLAN POEby Thomas Wright

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I N D E X

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At the beginning of the twenty-firstcentury, Edgar Allan Poe was more

popular than ever. "The Raven" anda number of his Gothic and detec-tive tales were among the most famouswritings in the English language, andthey were often some of the first worksof literature that young adults read.They had also entered the popularimagination—football teams and beerswere named after them, and they hadinspired episodes of the animated tele-vision show The Simpsons and a numberof rock songs.

Poe also continued to exercise a pro-found influence over writers and artists.Two of the most popular authors of thesecond half of the twentieth century, Stephen King andIsaac Asimov, acknowledged Poe as an important precur-sor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentiethcentury, such as Peter Ackroyd's The Plato Papers: A Proph-esy (1999) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves(2000), also bear definite traces of his influence. TheArgentinean author lorge Luis Borges, whose own worksare greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unac-knowledged father of twentieth-century literature, andPoe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despitehis enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonicalstatus is still challenged by certain commentators. HaroldBloom, for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar andstylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poedetractors, many of whom have been amazed by the factthat what T. S. Eliot called his "puerile" and "haphaz-ard" productions could have influenced "great" writerssuch as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and StephaneMallarme.

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (andfar more plentiful) over the last half of the twentiethcentury than previously. Poe is indeed something of aboom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists,

Edgar Allan Poe.

(Courtesy of the Library of Congress)

psychoanalysts, and poststructuralistsall find his works suggestive. Few of thesecritics are interested in making aestheticjudgements, however, and those whoconcern themselves with such thingscontinue to express doubts about Poe'sachievement.

As a result, Poe remains somethingof an enigma. To many he is a formativeinfluence, a genius, and an inspiration;to others he is a shoddy stylist and acharlatan. It would be more reasonable,perhaps, to regard Poe as all of thesethings and to accept James RussellLowell's famous judgment that he was"Three fifths... genius, and two fifthssheer fudge." Few of Poe's readers are

reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who iseither loved or hated.

POE'S PERSONA

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular andinfluential than writers who, according to some, haveproduced works of greater literary value is that he created,with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona.That persona was of an author at once bohemian andextremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largelythe creation of his "friend" Rufus Wilmot Griswold,who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depravedand demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for theintellectual element: he presented himself to the public inhis writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world;like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythicalor archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such asErnest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe anddressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemianpoete maudit (a tradition in which the poet exploresextremes of experience and emotional depth) and as thefirst self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed

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At the end of the nineteenth century, science fictionwriters such as Verne and Wells and authors of detectivestories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profounddebt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe'stales "have been so pregnant with suggestion . . . that eachis a root from which a whole literature has developed."In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less pro-found. His short stories were of immense importance toauthors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referredto his tales of horror as "Poe stories"), Vladimir Nabokov,and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect onevery other branch of the arts. Painters such as ReneMagritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, andfilm directors such as Roger Gorman and Alfred Hitchcockalso took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today.In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostilecriticism as he has in the past, but he will survive becausehe will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults andall of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, tothink of another American writer who has so drasticallyaltered the landscape of the popular imagination or whohas had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

[See also Detective Fiction; Popular Fiction; Romanticism inAmerica: The Emersonian Tradition; Science Fiction; and Short

Story in America, The.]

SELECTED WORKS

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)AlAaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ofNantucket (1838)Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)The Raven and Other Poems (1845)Tales (1845)Eureka (1848)Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969-1978)The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

FURTHER READING

Carlson, Eric W., ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe:Selected Criticism since 1829. Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966.Collection of all of the famous essays on Poe, includingthose by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Walt Whitman.

Carlson, Eric W., ed. A Companion to Poe Studies.Westport, Conn., 1996. A comprehensive collection ofmodern appraisals of every aspect of Poe's life and work.

Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar AllanPoe. Cambridge, 2002. Excellent and wide-rangingcollection of late-twentieth-century Poe scholarship.

Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bib-liography of Books and Articles in English, 1827-1973.Boston, 1974.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York, 1991. Its psycho-analytic explanations are sometimes unconvincing, butit is easily the best biography available.

Walker, I. M., ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage.New York, 1986. Anthology of contemporary reviewsof Poe's work.

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