The Bloody Love of Poe

A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his left eyebrow collapsed, wearing a cravat resembling a torn bedsheet tied into a noose, his arms crossed. This is what has been made of him by the inclusion of his Gothic fictions in the short story anthologies and all the film adaptations. Meanwhile, his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the two detective stories, his forays into science fiction including “A Descent into the Maëlstrom,” and his fanciful, satirical pieces such as “How to Write a Blackwoods Article” have receded. As for his poems, the silliest have endured, that is, the nursery rhymes of “Annabel Lee,” and that awful quothing raven, while his Coleridgean best, “The City in the Sea,” or “Dream-Land,” won’t ring many bells. There is also, in the Library of America edition, over fourteen hundred pages of essaying and reviewing, much of it now outdated given the obscurity of the books he was at work on, but including comments on Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Dickens, and ambitious treatises on “The Rationale of Verse” and “The Philosophy of Composition.” It is difficult to fit all of this together except to say that he was a magazine man who wrote whatever he could sell. A friend shown his library found that it contained more periodicals and newspapers than books. His long-held ambition, never achieved, was to start his own magazine.