Edgar Allan Poe has become part of our cultural furniture in a way few authors have ever managed. In popular imagination, he’s the ultimate doomed romantic: a crazed, drug-soaked proto-goth with a baleful raven perched on his shoulder, whose devotees include such varied figures as Abraham Lincoln, Charles Baudelaire, Josef Stalin, Rachmaninov, Michael Jackson, Tracy Emin and Bart Simpson. But does he really matter today? Should we still bother to read him?
Today is the bicentenary of his birth – time, perhaps, to look at what lies behind the myth. Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the child of struggling actors, on 19 January 1809. Before he reached the age of three, his English mother had died and his American father had simply disappeared – a pattern of abandonment that recurred throughout a life that was scarred with (frequently self-inflicted) tragedy, but also marked by an extraordinary literary productivity. He died raving, shattered in body and mind, in a Baltimore hospital on 6 October 1849. Unfortunately for his biographers, Poe had a tendency to provide himself with the life story he felt he deserved rather than the one he actually had – a trait which he compounded by choosing as his executor a clergyman who hated him, and who systematically vilified his memory.
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As strange and unhappy as Poe’s life appears to have been, however, the fact remains that it produced the man who was arguably the first writer of international stature to emerge from the US. Since his death, his work has had a profound and ongoing influence on literature, music, film and art. One reason why he is still so important today is that his stories, in particular, have shown an extraordinary capacity to mutate into other media. There have been more than a dozen films of The Fall of the House of Usher, for example, beginning with Epstein’s 1928 version. Furthermore, his work has directly inspired a stream of composers from Debussy to Lou Reed.
Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven”, with its echoing refrain of “Nevermore”, is a haunting hymn to lost love and the finality of death, tinged (as is so much of Poe’s writing) with the sense that madness is waiting round the corner and there’s nothing we can do to avoid it. In this sense he is a very modern writer. He knows that hell lies within; that we are all guilty, and that death comes to us all. Stories such as The Red Death, The Pit and the Pendulum, William Wilson and The Black Cat resonate with our own lives. Poe knows we are right to be afraid of the dark.
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He planned his effects with all the resources of his supple and formidable intellect. You can see this in the meticulously patterned plot of his one novel, The Narrative of Gordon Arthur Pym, the story of a phantasmagoric voyage that clearly influenced Moby Dick. His careful construction, meanwhile, is also evident in the three Auguste Dupin short stories, in which he invented the format of the eccentric detective with the sidekick narrator that Arthur Conan Doyle exploited so successfully with Holmes and Watson. With remarkable fecundity, he also created variants and refinements of this basic format, from the locked mystery to crucial forensic evidence. He is indisputably the founding father of crime fiction, perhaps the most successful narrative genre in the modern world.
Forget about the myth of Poe’s life: the significance and richness of his work is such that we should be celebrating his bicentenary by rediscovering it. He holds up a mirror to ourselves, and each time we read him we find something new.
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