“The Tell-Tale Heart,” a ghastly murder is juxtaposed with the killer’s tender empathy towards the victim – a connection that soon returns to haunt him. The title character of “Ligeia” returns from the dead through the corpse of her husband’s second wife – or at least the opium-addicted narrator thinks she does. And when the protagonist of “William Wilson” violently confronts a man he believes has been following him, he might just be staring at his own image in a mirror. Through his pioneering use of unreliable narrators, Poe turns readers into active participants who must decide when a storyteller might be misinterpreting or even lying about the events they’re relating to.
The origin of gothic horror is mostly attributed to Mary Shelley’s “Frankenstein”, Bram Stoker’s “Dracula”- and literally everything ever written by Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe wrote several iconic horrific short stories, usually about madness, torture, death – all that good stuff. From the prisoner strapped under a descending pendulum blade to a raven who refuses to leave the narrator’s chamber, Poe’s macabre and innovative stories of gothic horror have left a timeless mark on literature. After all, horror was a popular genre of the period, with many practitioners. Yet Poe stood out thanks to his careful attention to form and style. Poe commands the reader’s attention and rewards them with an intense and singular experience – what Poe called the unity of effect. Though often frightening, this effect goes far beyond fear. Poe’s stories use violence and horror to explore the paradoxes and mysteries of love, grief, and guilt while resisting simple interpretations or clear moral messages. And while they often hint at supernatural elements, the true darkness they explore is the human mind and its propensity for self-destruction.
Poe was one of the most versatile and experimental writers of the nineteenth century. He invented the detective story as we know it, with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” followed by “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Purloined Letter.” All three feature the original armchair detective, C. Auguste Dupin, who uses his genius and unusual powers of observation and deduction to solve crimes that baffle the police. Poe also wrote satires of social and literary trends and hoaxes that in some cases anticipated science fiction. Those included an account of a balloon voyage to the moon, and a report of a dying patient put into a hypnotic trance so he could speak from the other side. Poe even wrote an adventure novel about a voyage to the South Pole and a treatise on astrophysics, all while he worked as an editor, producing hundreds of pages of book reviews and literary theory. An appreciation of Poe’s career wouldn’t be complete without his poetry which he was most famous for: haunting and hypnotic. His best-known poems are songs of grief, or in his words, “mournful and never-ending remembrance.” “The Raven,” his best is in which the speaker projects his grief onto a bird who merely repeats a single sound, which made Poe famous.
The man all tortured artists aspire to be. Man, that guy had everything. Parental abandonment, financial ruin, alcoholism, early dead wife, and an appropriately mysterious death at age 40. The man was a legend a legend with a lot of issues, mind you, but a legend nonetheless if he could’ve known how much pleasure and inspiration his writing would bring to generations of readers and writers alike, perhaps it may have brought a smile to his famously brooding visage.
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