I love him dearly and in fact did a master's thesis on him way back in the Cretaceous Era. I love even his less-well-crafted work because in them you can arguably see his personality and voice shine through. He adored purple prose because he often was unrestrained by any limits.
But even if we limit him to a dozen tales and another half-dozen poems it's still an amazing (genre busting and genre-defining) achievement. I think "The Man in the Crowd" defines a lot of what we think of as "modern uncanny" and is the ancestor of such things as Severance today. It's an immediate precursor to Melville's Bartleby and equivalent to the Russian 'alienists' like Gogol.
There's so much to say about his work - how he tended to double-up so for every Gothic horror piece there's a corresponding comic pastiche, how he got bored with conventions so already after creating detective mystery fiction by his third effort (The Purloined Letter) he's already gone full Columbo and isn't really bothered with a mystery but with a conflict that plays out without overt violence but with great menace.
Of course his reputation in France remains extremely high, not only for the Baudelaire/Mallarmé translations, but the psychoanalytical studies done by Princess Marie Bonaparte and Jacques Lacan.
The louche-decadent mystique of Poe is fully intact for the continentals, I believe, while the American trend in 'horror fiction' has become more proletarian and folk-Americana in flavour (not a condemnation, just an observation - but a wordsmith Poe devotee like Ligotti is generally not read today while King dominates the mass horror fiction market).
One way to think about Poe is that he is the non-dramatic writer most frequently adapted for the screen (according to IMDb—technically Dickens has 484 to Poe’s 481, but Poe has more upcoming, and Dickens’ count is inflated by one single work, A Christmas Carol). No other American writer comes close. Maybe he didn’t fully succeed as a prose fiction writer because his ideal medium hadn’t been invented yet.
Jack London just sobbing because it's impossible to adapt books to film when you need 50+ dogs, a bunch of dogfighting, AND not run afoul of animal laws!!!
You list ten banger short stories, I feel like that’s enough! If you’re a fan of the Gothic mode, cosmic horror, etc. I think he’s absolutely foundational.
Maybe he’s one of those authors whose influence dwarfs his slim output.
Folks have mentioned elsewhere in the comments his influence on HPL and other weird/scifi/horror writers. I think foundational is the right word - it’s about his influence
But you have to read twenty bad ones to find the ten that are good ;) If someone reads my post and just reads the ten good ones I'm sure they will think he's incredible.
No American in history ever wrote half as well about murderous "ourang-outangs" and Lovecraft called him his “God of Fiction.” But Lovecraft first read him when he was only 8, and at that age my fiction god was Edward Packard so you take it with a grain of salt.
I feel like I am more fond of HPL than Poe though. HPL had a more cohesive body of work and the drop-off wasn't so steep between his best and his average.
I’m a genuine Poe fanboy (I also read classics for fun, and I’m the guy who tried to sell everyone on Washington Irving’s later stuff), and I regret not hanging out on notes to stand up for him earlier.
It’s true that Poe is uneven, but when he’s good he’s so very good, and on most days “Cask of Amontillado” is my favorite short story (on other days it’s something by Borges). Several of the ratiocinatory stories hold up for me, including “Rue Morgue” and “Gold Bug.” (And “Pit & the Pendulum,” although honestly I would have put that with the gothic tales.)
“Berenice” is another great one—the teeth, how can you not love the teeth! And I think his prose style here is a good evocation of madness, and not so very different from (“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”) “Tell-Tale Heart.”
I find Poe’s poetry drops off faster than his prose, and outside his famous ones there’s little to love (perh. “Ulalume”? But perh. not). My impression from chatting with academics (I am not one, and have a higher tolerance for nineteenth-century doggerel than most) is that they think Poe, like Kipling, only has merit as a prose writer. I disagree, but I read the complete poetry once, and found a lot of it a slog.
Additionally, I’d say that his novel _Arthur Gordon Pym_ has merits, although it is…weird.
Anyway, I’m not here to persuade anyone to like Poe more than they already do; I’m just voting here as +1 for Poe. I read him earlier than most C19 writers, and I go back to him often. He’s so heavily anthologized that I find myself reading poe even when I’m not trying to! Additionally, I’ve found that many or most of my friends (largely in the realm of SF fandom) read and and have read a lot of Poe, much more than other C19 writers.
Poe has never I think had anything like the same status in the UK as in the US. Interestingly, though, he remains high profile in France -- mainly I think because he was translated by both Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
Ha! Good question. I'd say Henry James. Emily Dickinson is well respected as a poet but has nothing like the same status as she has in the US. All the rest -- Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Wharton, Poe and so on -- are I'd say all more or less the province of specialists / serious readers, rather than the ordinarily well-educated "general" reader. (I mean, the sort of person who *would* have read at least a couple of Henry James, even if he wasn't really their thing.) This may have or be changing with the ongoing Americanisation of international Anglophone literary culture, but I'd say this is probably a fair depiction of how many middle-aged and older UK readers feel.
That seems to make an intuitive sense. I imagine that the 20th century Americans have more influence in the UK, but maybe that intuition is wrong as well! Whenever I am in the UK I am always astonished that when I go into a bookstore, all the books are different. Even in YA, scifi, mystery, etc, it's mostly unfamiliar names.
I more or less agree with which Poe stories you say are good, and which Poe stories you say are bad. I think however, that Poe is my favorite writer. My personal favorite Poe story is Imp of the Perverse(also Berenice), because it captures an aspect of the human experience that writers just rarely address, which is fear of your own thought. This might be a somewhat niche experience, but as someone who suffers a bit from OCD, and who used to suffer a lot from being afraid of their thought, it's nice to see this experience sort of kind of represented(though of course, people who suffer from OCD don't act on their thoughts the way Poe's characters do). As a comparison, I enjoyed Middlemarch, but the most important theme from that book is about marriages, which I feel like is something addressed by a lot of fiction.
Poe isn't really a horror writer, but I feel like he captures a certain feeling of anxiety, where one thought just eats at you, where all attempts to look away from that thought are futile, better than most writers do.
Makes sense. What he does well he does really well. And I love that same thing! That feeling of being out of control, of being a slave to your impulses.
I mean if you read the philosophy, sure, but his defense speeches and his catiline orations are great. For most of the last two millennia he's been the most popular Latin author. He's also a very human figure, alternatively brave and cowardly. And his principles seem much more laudable precisely because he wasn't some otherworldly stoic hero like Cato. It's only in the last few hundred years that his popularity has declined
I haven’t read much of his orations, you bring a good point there. I may love them.
I have thought that his philosophical stuff was the most influential when rediscovered during the renaissance. But I googled a bit before typing this out and it seems that Petrarch found letters and maybe an oration or two first snd these are what Latin was rejuvenated with, so I guess I believed wrong.
Still, I’m not a fan of his philosophical writing.
Now, the metamorphoses, that’s a great book. I read it after finishing the Comedia where Dante states that Ovid has got nothing on his creations- it was a great follow up.
Why do you have to come after my boy Poe like that?
But seriously, I mostly agree with you. I think he's hit or miss. When he's good, he's really good, but there's a lot of mediocre stuff in there. To be honest, it kind of reminds me of my own writing. I try to write every day, but not everything I write is great. Some of it (a lot of it) is pretty mediocre when I go back to look at it.
I was pretty surprised to read through your post and see that you hadn't really mentioned The Raven (which I memorized by reciting to my kid when she was a newborn) until the end. I think his poetry, similar to his prose, is hit or miss. Some are very good, such as The Raven and Annabel Lee, but a lot of them are mediocre.
I think his success comes down to a few factors. He had the means to self-publish a lot of his work, and magazines eventually would have accepted his work for his name alone. The same can be said for popular authors today. There were also simply fewer writers at the time, especially American ones, so you could stand out with lower quality.
Let's be honest: his continued popularity is due largely to the book goth aesthetic he imparts.
Also, there's something to be said here about judging work based on modern sensibilities. A lot of what Poe wrote would have seemed fresher to those reading it at the time, while we have the baggage of having consumed fiction that is influenced by Poe, and therefore will seem less polished and innovative to us.
I've had Poe on the brain lately and mean to do a deep-dive into all of his works eventually.
Poe is an interesting one, I’ve always enjoyed some of his famous tales but never gone very far into his whole works. As a figure though he seems to really capture people’s imaginations. No one really talks about books at my local pub but just the other week a few guys were just handing around a book of Poe and chatting about it. These weren’t ‘literary’ guys but they were quoting bits from him. Not sure how many other authors are like that - no one reads him but everyone knows him.
This isn’t what the article is about, but I’m so glad you mentioned Georgette Heyer - she’s one of my favorite authors, and it always seems like she should have more acclaim than it seems she does
She is very hard to read, because she writes in that Regency slang. But once you get the hang of it, she's very entertaining. And extremely influential. The regency that we know and write about in popular fiction and movies today--it's just as much her creation as it is Jane Austen's
I like Heyer immensely. Fell in love with her work as a teenager -- as a teenaged boy I was vulnerable to teasing for reading her. She did a ton of research to get that slang and other stuff right (though some is still invented) and I understand she also got stuff from a popular writer just a bit older than her -- Jeffery Farnol, who is actually pretty fun to read too, though not at Heyer's level.
This isn't the precise passage you're referring to (the sentiment is pretty widespread), but Harold Bloom wrote about Poe (with specific reference to the first paragraph of "William Wilson"): Poe’s awful diction, whether here or in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Purloined Letter,” seems to demand the decent masking of a competent French translation." Bloom goes on to state "Poe is an inescapable writer, but not a good one... I cannot think of any other author who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical"
I love this, and might recommend it to my 12th graders English class. A lot of them say they’re “into” Poe, but I think what they mean is that they love the ~12 stories you mentioned. It’s ok to feel that way, as other commenters have said, but people should be honest. I loved Hemingway in high school, and then I read his longer novels and thought, nope, I love his short stories and The Sun Also Rises, but these aren’t that great.
I got my initial love of writing and the English language from Poe. He and Ray Bradbury probably have more to do with me taking up writing as a career than any other influences. Also probably responsible in some measure for the fact that I can't seem to stick to a single genre. :)
I love his non-fiction treatises as much as I love his fiction. The first real piece of short fiction I ever wrote in my junior year of high school was a direct result of my fascination with the way he handled language and the elements of suspense, revelation and release in his work. He is considered to be the father of the mystery genre, but you could easily give him props for his influence on fantasy, horror, science fiction and suspense.
My youngest daughter chose to do one of her college term papers on the Fall of the House of Usher and, frankly, I found her commentary on his work much more solid than the book length critique of folks like Marie Bonaparte who insisted on putting a Freudian-freak spin on everything.
Whatever anyone says, Edgar Allen Poe will always be in my top five most-loved authors along with Ray Bradbury, WP Kinsella, Charles Dickens (that Marley soliloquy on mankind being his business still gives me chills) and Tim Powers.
I love him dearly and in fact did a master's thesis on him way back in the Cretaceous Era. I love even his less-well-crafted work because in them you can arguably see his personality and voice shine through. He adored purple prose because he often was unrestrained by any limits.
But even if we limit him to a dozen tales and another half-dozen poems it's still an amazing (genre busting and genre-defining) achievement. I think "The Man in the Crowd" defines a lot of what we think of as "modern uncanny" and is the ancestor of such things as Severance today. It's an immediate precursor to Melville's Bartleby and equivalent to the Russian 'alienists' like Gogol.
There's so much to say about his work - how he tended to double-up so for every Gothic horror piece there's a corresponding comic pastiche, how he got bored with conventions so already after creating detective mystery fiction by his third effort (The Purloined Letter) he's already gone full Columbo and isn't really bothered with a mystery but with a conflict that plays out without overt violence but with great menace.
Of course his reputation in France remains extremely high, not only for the Baudelaire/Mallarmé translations, but the psychoanalytical studies done by Princess Marie Bonaparte and Jacques Lacan.
The louche-decadent mystique of Poe is fully intact for the continentals, I believe, while the American trend in 'horror fiction' has become more proletarian and folk-Americana in flavour (not a condemnation, just an observation - but a wordsmith Poe devotee like Ligotti is generally not read today while King dominates the mass horror fiction market).
I admire his career. It's not lost on me that what I do in my fiction is quite similar to what he did, right down to my frequent hoaxes and tricks.
I with I could remember which American critic said of the popularity of Poe’s work in France, “Maybe it gains something in translation.”
I love this quote
Baudelaire's translations were certainly loose. Borderline adaptations.
Similar to Jerry Lewis! Sometimes one nation can see the true beauty in a neglected product of another nation.
One way to think about Poe is that he is the non-dramatic writer most frequently adapted for the screen (according to IMDb—technically Dickens has 484 to Poe’s 481, but Poe has more upcoming, and Dickens’ count is inflated by one single work, A Christmas Carol). No other American writer comes close. Maybe he didn’t fully succeed as a prose fiction writer because his ideal medium hadn’t been invented yet.
That is impressive. I am learning many Poe facts
Jack London just sobbing because it's impossible to adapt books to film when you need 50+ dogs, a bunch of dogfighting, AND not run afoul of animal laws!!!
You list ten banger short stories, I feel like that’s enough! If you’re a fan of the Gothic mode, cosmic horror, etc. I think he’s absolutely foundational.
Maybe he’s one of those authors whose influence dwarfs his slim output.
Folks have mentioned elsewhere in the comments his influence on HPL and other weird/scifi/horror writers. I think foundational is the right word - it’s about his influence
Definitely influential. I can see that
But you have to read twenty bad ones to find the ten that are good ;) If someone reads my post and just reads the ten good ones I'm sure they will think he's incredible.
No American in history ever wrote half as well about murderous "ourang-outangs" and Lovecraft called him his “God of Fiction.” But Lovecraft first read him when he was only 8, and at that age my fiction god was Edward Packard so you take it with a grain of salt.
I feel like I am more fond of HPL than Poe though. HPL had a more cohesive body of work and the drop-off wasn't so steep between his best and his average.
Much like HPL, he was more influential than anything else.
I’m a genuine Poe fanboy (I also read classics for fun, and I’m the guy who tried to sell everyone on Washington Irving’s later stuff), and I regret not hanging out on notes to stand up for him earlier.
It’s true that Poe is uneven, but when he’s good he’s so very good, and on most days “Cask of Amontillado” is my favorite short story (on other days it’s something by Borges). Several of the ratiocinatory stories hold up for me, including “Rue Morgue” and “Gold Bug.” (And “Pit & the Pendulum,” although honestly I would have put that with the gothic tales.)
“Berenice” is another great one—the teeth, how can you not love the teeth! And I think his prose style here is a good evocation of madness, and not so very different from (“True!—nervous—very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?”) “Tell-Tale Heart.”
I find Poe’s poetry drops off faster than his prose, and outside his famous ones there’s little to love (perh. “Ulalume”? But perh. not). My impression from chatting with academics (I am not one, and have a higher tolerance for nineteenth-century doggerel than most) is that they think Poe, like Kipling, only has merit as a prose writer. I disagree, but I read the complete poetry once, and found a lot of it a slog.
Additionally, I’d say that his novel _Arthur Gordon Pym_ has merits, although it is…weird.
Anyway, I’m not here to persuade anyone to like Poe more than they already do; I’m just voting here as +1 for Poe. I read him earlier than most C19 writers, and I go back to him often. He’s so heavily anthologized that I find myself reading poe even when I’m not trying to! Additionally, I’ve found that many or most of my friends (largely in the realm of SF fandom) read and and have read a lot of Poe, much more than other C19 writers.
But the final word on how good Poe is must come from the Simpsons: https://frinkiac.com/meme/S03E09/125057/m/T25lIG9mIG91ciBiZXN0IHdyaXRlcnMK
Good that he has some genuine fans!
Poe has never I think had anything like the same status in the UK as in the US. Interestingly, though, he remains high profile in France -- mainly I think because he was translated by both Baudelaire and Mallarmé.
I have heard that! What 19th century Americans _do_ have a high reputation in the UK?
Ha! Good question. I'd say Henry James. Emily Dickinson is well respected as a poet but has nothing like the same status as she has in the US. All the rest -- Whitman, Melville, Emerson, Thoreau, Wharton, Poe and so on -- are I'd say all more or less the province of specialists / serious readers, rather than the ordinarily well-educated "general" reader. (I mean, the sort of person who *would* have read at least a couple of Henry James, even if he wasn't really their thing.) This may have or be changing with the ongoing Americanisation of international Anglophone literary culture, but I'd say this is probably a fair depiction of how many middle-aged and older UK readers feel.
That seems to make an intuitive sense. I imagine that the 20th century Americans have more influence in the UK, but maybe that intuition is wrong as well! Whenever I am in the UK I am always astonished that when I go into a bookstore, all the books are different. Even in YA, scifi, mystery, etc, it's mostly unfamiliar names.
Just curious, who are some pre-20th century American authors do have that highest tier reputation in the UK?
I more or less agree with which Poe stories you say are good, and which Poe stories you say are bad. I think however, that Poe is my favorite writer. My personal favorite Poe story is Imp of the Perverse(also Berenice), because it captures an aspect of the human experience that writers just rarely address, which is fear of your own thought. This might be a somewhat niche experience, but as someone who suffers a bit from OCD, and who used to suffer a lot from being afraid of their thought, it's nice to see this experience sort of kind of represented(though of course, people who suffer from OCD don't act on their thoughts the way Poe's characters do). As a comparison, I enjoyed Middlemarch, but the most important theme from that book is about marriages, which I feel like is something addressed by a lot of fiction.
Poe isn't really a horror writer, but I feel like he captures a certain feeling of anxiety, where one thought just eats at you, where all attempts to look away from that thought are futile, better than most writers do.
Makes sense. What he does well he does really well. And I love that same thing! That feeling of being out of control, of being a slave to your impulses.
Ovid and Virgil are awesome and Cicero is mid- it’s just Aristotle-lite.
I mean if you read the philosophy, sure, but his defense speeches and his catiline orations are great. For most of the last two millennia he's been the most popular Latin author. He's also a very human figure, alternatively brave and cowardly. And his principles seem much more laudable precisely because he wasn't some otherworldly stoic hero like Cato. It's only in the last few hundred years that his popularity has declined
I haven’t read much of his orations, you bring a good point there. I may love them.
I have thought that his philosophical stuff was the most influential when rediscovered during the renaissance. But I googled a bit before typing this out and it seems that Petrarch found letters and maybe an oration or two first snd these are what Latin was rejuvenated with, so I guess I believed wrong.
Still, I’m not a fan of his philosophical writing.
Now, the metamorphoses, that’s a great book. I read it after finishing the Comedia where Dante states that Ovid has got nothing on his creations- it was a great follow up.
If I knew French one of the first writers I'd want to experience is not Flaubert or Hugo but Baudelaire's Poe -- in the original Klingon, as it were.
love it
LOL
Why do you have to come after my boy Poe like that?
But seriously, I mostly agree with you. I think he's hit or miss. When he's good, he's really good, but there's a lot of mediocre stuff in there. To be honest, it kind of reminds me of my own writing. I try to write every day, but not everything I write is great. Some of it (a lot of it) is pretty mediocre when I go back to look at it.
I was pretty surprised to read through your post and see that you hadn't really mentioned The Raven (which I memorized by reciting to my kid when she was a newborn) until the end. I think his poetry, similar to his prose, is hit or miss. Some are very good, such as The Raven and Annabel Lee, but a lot of them are mediocre.
I think his success comes down to a few factors. He had the means to self-publish a lot of his work, and magazines eventually would have accepted his work for his name alone. The same can be said for popular authors today. There were also simply fewer writers at the time, especially American ones, so you could stand out with lower quality.
Let's be honest: his continued popularity is due largely to the book goth aesthetic he imparts.
Also, there's something to be said here about judging work based on modern sensibilities. A lot of what Poe wrote would have seemed fresher to those reading it at the time, while we have the baggage of having consumed fiction that is influenced by Poe, and therefore will seem less polished and innovative to us.
I've had Poe on the brain lately and mean to do a deep-dive into all of his works eventually.
I am fond of the Raven, but I feel unable to make judgments on lyric poetry with any confidence. With poetry I can only appreciate, I can't assess
Poe is an interesting one, I’ve always enjoyed some of his famous tales but never gone very far into his whole works. As a figure though he seems to really capture people’s imaginations. No one really talks about books at my local pub but just the other week a few guys were just handing around a book of Poe and chatting about it. These weren’t ‘literary’ guys but they were quoting bits from him. Not sure how many other authors are like that - no one reads him but everyone knows him.
Wow, I wonder how much of the book they had read!
This isn’t what the article is about, but I’m so glad you mentioned Georgette Heyer - she’s one of my favorite authors, and it always seems like she should have more acclaim than it seems she does
She is very hard to read, because she writes in that Regency slang. But once you get the hang of it, she's very entertaining. And extremely influential. The regency that we know and write about in popular fiction and movies today--it's just as much her creation as it is Jane Austen's
I like Heyer immensely. Fell in love with her work as a teenager -- as a teenaged boy I was vulnerable to teasing for reading her. She did a ton of research to get that slang and other stuff right (though some is still invented) and I understand she also got stuff from a popular writer just a bit older than her -- Jeffery Farnol, who is actually pretty fun to read too, though not at Heyer's level.
I was so perplexed when I first cracked her! I couldn't make heads or tails of it. But I learn d eventually
This isn't the precise passage you're referring to (the sentiment is pretty widespread), but Harold Bloom wrote about Poe (with specific reference to the first paragraph of "William Wilson"): Poe’s awful diction, whether here or in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “The Purloined Letter,” seems to demand the decent masking of a competent French translation." Bloom goes on to state "Poe is an inescapable writer, but not a good one... I cannot think of any other author who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical"
Lol these Poe facts
I love this, and might recommend it to my 12th graders English class. A lot of them say they’re “into” Poe, but I think what they mean is that they love the ~12 stories you mentioned. It’s ok to feel that way, as other commenters have said, but people should be honest. I loved Hemingway in high school, and then I read his longer novels and thought, nope, I love his short stories and The Sun Also Rises, but these aren’t that great.
I also have taught Poe and my first reaction on reading this post was that it’s all my fault 🫣! Glad your students are “into” Poe!!
I got my initial love of writing and the English language from Poe. He and Ray Bradbury probably have more to do with me taking up writing as a career than any other influences. Also probably responsible in some measure for the fact that I can't seem to stick to a single genre. :)
I love his non-fiction treatises as much as I love his fiction. The first real piece of short fiction I ever wrote in my junior year of high school was a direct result of my fascination with the way he handled language and the elements of suspense, revelation and release in his work. He is considered to be the father of the mystery genre, but you could easily give him props for his influence on fantasy, horror, science fiction and suspense.
My youngest daughter chose to do one of her college term papers on the Fall of the House of Usher and, frankly, I found her commentary on his work much more solid than the book length critique of folks like Marie Bonaparte who insisted on putting a Freudian-freak spin on everything.
Whatever anyone says, Edgar Allen Poe will always be in my top five most-loved authors along with Ray Bradbury, WP Kinsella, Charles Dickens (that Marley soliloquy on mankind being his business still gives me chills) and Tim Powers.
Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff