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According to even his most forgiving biographers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was a difficult man. Arrested whilst touring Europe, and expelled from the United States Military Academy at West Point, he tended to lose both work and friends through drunkenness. Best known for his goriest stories, Poe is often presented to the modern reader as a writer of horror. However, this collection, published in 1852, offers a broader selection of his work. It includes one of his first pieces of detective fiction, 'The Gold-Beetle', resulting from his preoccupation with cryptography; 'A Descent into the Maelström', an early example of science fiction; the mesmeric verse of 'The Raven'; and some of his lesser-known love poetry. A pioneer of modern genre fiction, Poe remains important and influential in the American literary canon. This lavishly illustrated collection represents an excellent introduction to his work.… (more)
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How does one who has been touched by the influence of another properly, objectively, offer an opinion on this other’s work? She doesn’t—she responds with reaction, not the critical eye. To that end, the work of Poe which has most prefigured and cast its crimson shadow upon my own is his remarkable ‘Masque of the Red Death.’ An early example (perhaps the first example) of Decadent literature, the familiar comeuppance of ‘happy and dauntless and sagacious’ Prince Prospero at the hands of the dreadful plague he had sought to avoid through reclusion can be viewed as a sort of A Rebours in miniature. Those seeking an allegory or final moral in this profoundly symbolic piece will find none: it is a fable, but it owes very little to Aesop. In common with Poe’s other out-right horror-work (‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and the remarkably gruesome ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is more an examination of the limits of the psyche: and these limits, in ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ are examined, chiefly, through a reader’s inability to refrain from attaching any ultimate ‘meaning’ to the story presented. To this end, Poe demonstrates what is, perhaps, the totality of his vision: that ambiguity itself can become a theme in literature, particularly when this ambiguity mirrors its own content (as in ‘The Assignation,’ ‘Silence,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ or the mingled horror/humor of ‘King Pest,’ which Poe claims contains an ‘allegory,’ but which, of course, contains none at all). For Poe, symbolism can exist outside of allegory—this was what Baudelaire and the Decadents responded to most intensely: a scent can have a color, a sound a feeling. Poe invented this system of correspondences, even as he distanced himself from the idea of ‘correspondence.’
At the other end of the spectrum, Poe’s detective stories—he deemed them tales of ‘ratiocination’—remain among his most immediately influential: without Poe, as in so many other cases, there would be no Arthur Conan Doyle, and hence no Sherlock Holmes; nor would there be an Agatha Christie or Hercule Poirot. Poe initiated the movement, featuring his ingenious C. Auguste Dupin, with the widely-read ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ alongside its sequel, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Poe tried his hand at other tales of this nature, as in ‘The Gold Bug,’ but his creation of the central detective character—with all his justified arrogance, clarity of vision, and near-inhuman skill—was to have the greatest impact of all Poe’s literary inventions.
Poe was famously haunted by the recurring theme of ‘the death of the beautiful woman.’ His characters, though, so often taken to a particularly poisoned state of mourning, behave in dramatically different ways: the narrator of ‘Morella,’ with his near-hatred for the lost ‘love,’ stands in striking contrast to that of ‘Ligeia,’ whose intensely unhinged state (the product of both opium and sorrow) is responsible for an ending that can be viewed as either dream or reality, depending on the reader’s interpretation. In further contrast is the narrator of the horrifying ‘Berenice,’ whose obsession eventually centers upon one, solely physical, feature of his cataleptic lover, with gruesome results. Catalepsy is a recurring motif in Poe’s work, but premature burial itself was less a particular obsession of Poe’s than a general, widespread paranoia of Victorian audiences as a whole. Poe helped to crystallize the idea: our notion of premature burial is, today, less based on actual incident and more on the trappings of Poe’s fictional musings: chiefly, this is due to the fevered detail of ‘The Premature Burial,’ but the motif is also present in ‘Berenice,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and others. Alongside his theme of mourning, this preoccupation with the macabre remains one of the strongest links between the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the subject of Death as an abstraction.
Remarks on Poe’s poetry, essays, and only novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) will demand further entries in this journal. By way of conclusion, some personal reflection: Edgar Allan Poe was the first author I discovered as a child: a collection titled The Poe Reader was both my first exposure to his work and the first adult book I ever owned, purchased at the tender age of nine. My immediate obsessions centered on ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and his enchanting poem ‘Ulalume,’ and to this day they, more or less, remain there. As I grew older, I discovered the more famous pieces and some strange odds-and-ends, like his treatise on interior design, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture.’ Further exploration yielded the gorgeous, otherworldly pen-and-ink drawings of Harry Clarke, some of which are interspersed throughout this review (note: see the illustrated review at threalmoftheunreal.blogspot.com). More than any other author I have encountered, with the exception of Gustav Meyrink, Poe has impacted my thought processes, particular obsessions, and even the direction of my life: for without Poe I would never have been led to the literature of the Gothic or the Decadent, and my academic life would never have taken shape under the influence of those two movements. More importantly: without Poe, I would not write.
In the end, it seems, Poe—the precursor of so many others—is both the father of my muses and the muse himself.
Reading him feels, to me, like an act of almost shameful self-indulgence; rich but sickly; you feel you need a brisk walk afterwards. His weird stories mark a bridge between the Gothic and the new movements of symbolism and decadence and, later, the genres that would become known as horror and science fiction. He also invented the modern detective story.
I think of him as one of those writers that translates easily. In the same way, Tolstoy is venerated by non-Russians while native speakers find his prose mediocre. French speakers often say something similar about Victor Hugo. And the French were, it must be said, quite obsessed with ‘Edgar Poe’, particularly after his works were translated by Baudelaire.
Quelque chose de monomanique was the shrewd judgement of the Goncourts. Hard to argue with that. The predominant theme is death, but death elevated to a supernatural vividness and importance. The archetypal image of his works, for me, is the image of the young, beautiful, dead woman. This trope features heavily in ‘Morella’, ‘Berenice’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, ‘Ligeia’ – and indeed in Poe's own life, because he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and she went on to die of tuberculosis when she was twenty-four. The death clearly left a lasting imprint on him.
So, yes: thanatophilia. I'm rolling out the long words. But it's true. Have a look at how he chooses to end ‘The Masque of the Red Death’, for instance:
And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night. And one by one dropped the revellers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall. And the life of the ebony clock went out with that of the last of the gay. And the flames of the tripods expired. And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.
Sleep tight, kids! Another story ends: ‘the grave was still a home, and the corrosive hours, co-mates.’ Another ends: ‘there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome—of detestable putridity.’ Another ends – well you get the idea.
Poe's prose is melodramatic and rococo and makes full use of Grand Exclamations! And italicised phrases of dread! Oh the Horror and the Agony! And nothing but the drear grave and the worm for evermore! And so forth. But he is also imaginative and, sometimes, positively economical, setting the scene brilliantly in just a few short sentences and creating an atmosphere all his own (what Allen Ginsberg called his ‘demonic dreaminess’). His vocabulary, steeped as it is in the high-flown tradition of dark romanticism, was a constant delight to me, built of ornate items like sulphureous, pulsation, exergue, faucial, chasmal, cachinnatory, asphyctic and many more goodies besides.
Jorge Luis Borges said that Poe's writings as a whole constitute a work of genius, although each individual piece is flawed. This is a very appealing assessment. He is an important writer, and often a very fascinating and enjoyable one – but that said, I don't really feel the desire to spend all that much time in his company.
However, make sure you get a version with Harry Clarke's angular, Beardsley-esque illustrations. They are superlative.
Burying people alive, ghosts, macabre deaths of usually delicate and young women, dark magic, effects of inebriation and hallucination, torture, whirlpools sucking people out of their
If D.H. Lawrence was any close to right about his predicament I wouldn't have liked to be in Mr.Poe's skin, such horrors!
That Poe lead a tormented and dysfunctional life is no secret. Haunted by the death of her mother when he was barely a toddler and later by the long illness and ultimate death of the love of his life(his cousin Virginia)whom she married when she was only thirteen, Poe struggled to keep afloat between the feelings of abandonment and loss and his growing ill-health and addictions which eventually killed him in mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.
Whether this gloomy life served him as inspiration or he released his pain into his work, the extremeness of his imaginative creations managed to capture attention, if not acceptance.
The sickness-the nausea-
The pitiless pain-
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain-
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain.
Considered the father of the short story, Poe manages to control the soul of the reader, nothing intervenes or distracts once you are engulfed in one of his curious and terrifying tales, you feel pulled down by an inexplicable and exotic sort of nostalgia which catches at your breath and prevents you from stopping to read. But make no mistake, Poe plays with you, giving you hope in a futile attempt to search for the truth and offer a plausible explanation for the unaccountable, even though you know deep inside that the end will be doomed from the start.
His literary quality is irrefutable, he borrows from the European Gothic tradition and adds elements of detective stories, creating a new register which seeks for the horrendous truth, for the paincuts into your soul, although sometimes a rare kind of beauty oozes from the text, whether conscious or unconsciously I can't say:
Then silence, stillness, and night were the universe
But mainly, Poe appears as a ruthless, crude and pessimistic voice who wants to put order amid the chaos, who wants to explain the inexplicable to elevate the name of the artist; offering an alternative to the newly born optimism, complacency and materialism of his age, and asking for nothing in return. He didn't seek for approval and often had to endure rebuke, few of his contemporaries valued his work at the time and being considered an oddball he was banned from society (or he excluded himself willingly).
It is through the anguish and torment expressed in his poems and short stories that it is plausible to imagine his existence rather miserable and that he suffered from a precariously balanced state of mind. But then, once again, I ask myself the same question which always arises when I try to link the real life of a writer with his work, was it his eccentricity that made his works so special? Were they the product of a genius or a deranged mind ? Or both?
The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life, and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall step over to Ponnonner's and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.
In any case, although his haunted mind offered no respite, Poe's lucid writing managed to push the scales of reality and redefine the artistic world of beauty and lyricism towards a new daring approach where the probability of terror and darkness prevailed and where the motto could be summed up as to deny what is, and explain what is not .
As it usual happens in real life, neither black nor white, just a blurred smudge of indistinct grey.
In this story,a man is expressed as mad person.However,he doesn't think he is mad and he do what is cruel.For example,he kill animals which once he loved and...
I don't like this story
For me this wasn't the type of book I could sit down with and read from cover to cover. Like a fine cut of meat, I had to take my time in chewing and digesting at times. And even Poe drags on with his stories sometimes, so it's good to have a break now and again.
My copy was the Easton Press leather bound edition, complete with multiple illustrations which really added a lot of atmosphere to the book. The leather binding, paper stock, and typeface lent the book a wonderful feel. The tactile experience of reading it was nearly as enjoyable as the mental. It was a wonderful book from a wonderful publisher, and I couldn't give it a higher recommendation.
These are not fun,but just horrible.
I like ''the Fall of the House of Usher'' best .
I was scarced of it very much.
If you are not interested in horror ,I don't recommend this.
Unfortunately, if you actually read a lot of these tales you realize that the writing itself is almost unbearably wordy and dated, so that the stories lose much of their original power. Put simply, most of the stories, due to familiarity and antiquated style, are just not that scary. Similarly, Poe's forays into the absurd -- "Loss of Breath" and "Some Words with a Mummy" -- fail out of the gate and pale in comparison to his Russian contemporary Nikolai Gogol. "Loss of Breath" in particular reads like a less intelligent and entertaining version of Gogol's "The Nose."
Surprisingly, perhaps the greatest effect is achieved in his murder mysteries. "The Murders at the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Roget," "The Gold Bug," and "The Purloined Letter," are some of the earliest prototypes for the detective genre, and they offer a uniformly compelling reading experience. Of the horror stuff, "Pit/Pendulum," "Red Death," "Amontillado," "Black Cat," and "Maelstrom" are my personal favorites.
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disappoint.
My parents had a copy of the original version of this book, published by Tudor
If you have any interest in either Poe's fiction, or weird art, this book will give you a lifetime of enjoyment--and if you're lucky, a nightmare or two!
Although I didn’t
This anthology has a total of 22 stories and these lurid tales of the macabre, although written in the 1800’s, are still dark and disturbing today.
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This is a reprint of the 1941 edition in a new binding. My copy is ex-library, pretty beat-up.