edgar allan poe research paper topics

Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

This page provides students with a rich tapestry of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics . From the haunting beauty of his poetry to the chilling narratives of his short stories, Poe’s works present a myriad of research opportunities. This comprehensive guide not only delves into a categorized list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics but also offers insights into choosing the perfect Poe topic and crafting an impeccable research paper. Additionally, iResearchNet’s unparalleled writing services are showcased, promising meticulous research and tailored writing solutions. Dive deep into the Gothic allure of Poe, and embark on an academic journey with iResearchNet’s expert guidance.

Edgar Allan Poe’s enigmatic style and dark themes have continuously intrigued scholars and avid readers alike for generations. For those seeking to delve deep into the recesses of Poe’s mind, here is a comprehensive list of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics spanning across various facets of his work:

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Get 10% off with 24start discount code, 1. poe’s poetry.

• An analysis of the rhythmic patterns in The Raven .
• The exploration of love and loss in Annabel Lee .
• Ulalume – A journey through grief and remembrance.
• The dark romanticism of A Dream Within a Dream .
• Symbolism in The Bells .
• The personification of death in The Conqueror Worm .
• Navigating the landscapes of Eldorado .
• Themes of sorrow and yearning in Lenore .
• Imagery and melancholy in The Sleeper .
• To Helen and the ideals of beauty.

2. Tales of the Macabre

• Psychological terror in The Tell-Tale Heart .
• The thin line between sanity and insanity in The Black Cat .
• The descent into madness in The Cask of Amontillado .
• Death and disease in The Masque of the Red Death .
• Exploration of guilt in William Wilson .
• The Fall of the House of Usher and the Gothic tradition.
• The pursuit of the unknown in The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar .
• The torment of the soul in Ligeia .
• Themes of revenge in Hop-Frog .
• The intricate narrative of The Pit and the Pendulum .

3. Detective Fiction

• The Murders in the Rue Morgue and the birth of detective fiction.
• The analytical prowess of C. Auguste Dupin.
• The detective’s role in The Mystery of Marie Rogêt .
• Deductive reasoning in The Purloined Letter .
• Poe’s influence on the modern detective genre.
• Examination of crime in Poe’s detective tales.
• The development of sidekicks in detective fiction.
• The detective’s moral compass in Poe’s works.
• Female characters in Poe’s detective stories.
• The evolution of clues and red herrings in Poe’s mysteries.

4. Poe and the Supernatural

• Exploration of the afterlife in Morella .
• Ghosts and hauntings in Poe’s tales.
• The dichotomy of life and death in Berenice .
• The metaphysical in Silence – A Fable .
• Exploration of the soul in The Oval Portrait .
• Visions and prophecies in Poe’s works.
• The exploration of otherworldly realms.
• Portrayal of apparitions and spirits.
• The supernatural as a reflection of human psyche.
• Dreams and omens in Poe’s tales.

5. Poe’s Personal Life and Works

• The influence of Poe’s turbulent love life on his poetry.
• Tragedies of Poe: The deaths that shaped his tales.
• Poe’s relationship with alcohol and its reflection in his work.
• The financial struggles of Poe and their impact on his writings.
• Poe’s tumultuous relationship with the literary community.
• The mystery of Poe’s death: Theories and narratives.
• Poe’s years in Baltimore and their influence.
• Poe and his foster parents: A complicated bond.
• The influence of Poe’s academic life on his tales.
• Poe’s critiques and their influence on American literature.

6. Poe’s Literary Techniques

• Poe’s use of unreliable narrators.
• The symbolism of the Gothic in Poe’s works.
• The mastery of first-person narrative in Poe’s stories.
• Poe’s pioneering use of psychological horror.
• The recurring motif of the ‘eye’ in Poe’s tales.
• Exploration of sound, from the beating heart to the ominous raven.
• The role of nature in setting the mood in Poe’s works.
• The juxtaposition of beauty and decay in Poe’s prose.
• Poe’s portrayal of women: Idealization and objectification.
• Themes of confinement and entrapment in Poe’s narratives.

7. Poe’s Influence on Modern Literature

• Poe’s impact on 20th-century horror writers.
• The continuation of C. Auguste Dupin in Sherlock Holmes.
• Poe’s influence on contemporary gothic fiction.
• Adaptations of Poe in cinema and theater.
• Modern reimaginings of The Tell-Tale Heart .
• The legacy of The Raven in modern pop culture and more.
• The reinterpretation of Poe’s themes in graphic novels.
• Poe’s legacy in the genre of psychological thrillers.
• How contemporary poets have built upon Annabel Lee .
• The Fall of the House of Usher in modern architectural narratives.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

• Exploration of obsession in tales like The Tell-Tale Heart .
• Madness and sanity: The blurred lines in Poe’s narratives.
• Delving into paranoia in The Black Cat .
• Love, loss, and mourning in Poe’s poetic and prose works.
• The subconscious fears in The Premature Burial .
• The human psyche’s struggle with mortality.
• Guilt, conscience, and human nature in Poe’s writings.
• The role of memory in stories like Eleonora .
• The fine line between reality and illusion in Poe’s tales.
• Analyzing self-identity and duality in works like William Wilson .

9. Poe and the Victorian Era

• The portrayal of Victorian society in Poe’s works.
• Social conventions and restraints in Poe’s narratives.
• The influence of the Victorian Gothic on Poe’s tales.
• Victorian views on mortality and their reflections in Poe’s stories.
• The role of women in Poe’s Victorian narratives.
• Poe’s criticism of Victorian moral hypocrisy.
• Poe’s interaction with other Victorian writers.
• The role of science and reason in Poe’s Victorian tales.
• The Victorians’ fascination with the macabre and the supernatural.
• Poe’s view on Victorian advancements and industrialization.

10. Analysis of Selected Works

• A deep dive into The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym .
• The many layers of The Descent into the Maelstrom .
• Isolation and despair in The Island of the Fay .
• The metaphysical quandaries of Eureka: A Prose Poem .
• Unraveling Tamerlane : Poe’s early hints at genius.
• Delving into the drama of Politian .
• Love and loss: An analysis of Bridal Ballad .
• The journey of self-discovery in Al Aaraaf .
• Dissecting the mysteries of MS. Found in a Bottle .
• The symbolism and depth of The Man of the Crowd .

Delving into Edgar Allan Poe’s vast realm of literary contributions is akin to embarking on a journey through layers of the human psyche, societal reflections, and transcendent themes. His works, suffused with intricate symbolism and profound emotion, continue to resonate powerfully with readers across the globe, even after centuries. These Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics serve as a window, offering a glimpse into the multifaceted world of Poe, where every narrative, be it prose or poetry, reveals a new dimension of understanding. By exploring these subjects, students not only immerse themselves in the richness of Poe’s genius but also engage in critical thinking, analytical assessments, and a deeper appreciation of literary artistry. As one ventures deeper into his narratives and poems, it becomes clear why Poe stands as an immortal pillar in the pantheon of literary greats.

Edgar Allan Poe and the Range of Research Paper Topics

Edgar Allan Poe, a name that evokes a mosaic of emotions – from eerie suspense to profound melancholy. Often hailed as the master of the macabre, Poe’s contributions to American literature span much more than just tales of horror and the uncanny. His works are a rich tapestry woven with intricate themes, unparalleled symbolism, and a deep understanding of the human psyche. This literary genius’s stories and poems have continually fascinated scholars, readers, and writers alike, offering a plethora of Edgar Allan Poe research paper topics for literature enthusiasts to dive into.

To understand the vast range of research avenues in Poe’s works, one must first grasp the breadth of his literary portfolio. Although primarily recognized for his gothic tales, Poe was also an astute critic, an innovative poet, and a pioneer of the short story genre. He adeptly merged both European romanticism and American originality, resulting in a unique literary style that still stands unmatched.

The Enigmatic Poe

One of the enduring fascinations with Poe is his own life – as mysterious and tragic as some of his tales. Orphaned at a young age, battling personal demons, and facing numerous adversities, Poe’s tumultuous life deeply influenced his writings. Exploring the parallels between his personal experiences and his fictional worlds is a research area that continues to captivate scholars. His enigmatic death, still a mystery, is a testament to the lingering intrigue surrounding his life.

Poe’s Exploration of the Human Psyche

Much ahead of his time, Poe delved deep into the complexities of the human mind. Stories like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat are not just tales of horror but profound psychological studies of guilt, paranoia, and mental descent. Analyzing the psychological undertones in his works provides a multi-dimensional approach to his stories, making them relevant even in modern psychoanalytical discussions.

Symbolism and the Supernatural

Poe’s tales are replete with symbols. Be it the hauntingly sentient House of Usher or the relentless Raven, Poe used symbols to enhance the atmospheric dread of his stories and to dive deep into abstract concepts. This prolific use of symbolism offers researchers a rich field to dissect, interpret, and reinterpret.

Poe and Science Fiction

Often overshadowed by his gothic tales, Poe’s foray into science fiction, exemplified by stories like The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall and Mellonta Tauta , is an area ripe for exploration. Here, he blends his narrative genius with speculative visions of science, creating stories that can be viewed as precursors to the modern science fiction genre.

Poetic Techniques and Innovations

Poe was not just a storyteller; he was a poet par excellence. His poems, such as Annabel Lee , The Bells , and Ulalume , are studies in rhythm, sound, and emotion. They oscillate between the melancholic and the macabre, making them enduring pieces of poetic art. Researching his poetic techniques, innovations, and influences can be a fulfilling journey for anyone interested in poetic forms and structures.

Literary Criticism and Theories

As a critic, Poe had strong opinions on art, literature, and the role of the critic. His reviews, essays, and theories on writing are illuminating, offering a peek into the mind of a literary genius. Exploring Poe’s literary criticism can provide insights into 19th-century literary standards, Poe’s influences, and his expectations from literature and fellow writers.

Poe’s cultural impact is another intriguing facet to consider. His influence is not limited to American literature but spans globally, impacting various art forms. From cinema adaptations to his influence on subsequent writers and even musicians, Poe’s legacy is extensive and multifaceted.

The very nature of Poe’s work – its depth, diversity, and enduring relevance – makes it a goldmine for research. Whether one is analyzing the structural aspects of his poems, dissecting the themes of his tales, or tracing the influences of his personal life on his works, the opportunities for scholarly exploration are virtually limitless.

In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe’s literary contributions are not mere tales to be read and forgotten. They are intricate webs of narrative brilliance, emotional depth, and symbolic complexity. For literature students and scholars, every Poe story or poem presents a unique research challenge, beckoning them to delve deeper, question more, and embark on an endless journey of literary discovery.

How to Choose Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Topics

Selecting a topic for a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is like being a kid in a candy store. The options are vast, intriguing, and tempting. But with so many directions to pursue, how does one choose a topic that’s not only engaging but also academically rewarding? Let’s embark on this journey of selection with some structured steps and key considerations.

• Identify Your Interest: Begin by determining which of Poe’s works or themes particularly captivate you. Is it the eerie atmosphere of “The Fall of the House of Usher” or the relentless psychological torment in “The Tell-Tale Heart”? Your genuine interest will make the research process more enjoyable and your paper more passionate.
• Consider the Scope: While it’s tempting to pick a broad topic like “Poe’s contribution to American literature,” it might be too vast for a detailed study. Instead, opt for more narrow focuses, such as “Poe’s influence on the detective fiction genre.”
• Historical Context: Poe’s writings did not emerge in a vacuum. Understanding the socio-political and cultural context of his time can offer a fresh lens to view his works. Topics like “Poe and the American Romantic Movement” or “Societal Reflections in Poe’s Gothic Tales” can be compelling.
• Analytical versus Argumentative: Determine the nature of your paper. An analytical paper on “The Symbolism in The Raven ” differs from an argumentative paper asserting “Poe’s Representation of Women as Symbols of Death and Decay.”
• Relevance to Modern Times: Exploring how Poe’s themes resonate with contemporary issues can be enlightening. For instance, examining the portrayal of mental health in his stories in light of current psychological understanding can be a rich research area.
• Cross-disciplinary Approaches: Don’t restrict yourself to purely literary angles. Poe’s works can be explored from psychological, sociological, or even philosophical perspectives. A topic like “Freudian Analysis of Poe’s Protagonists” can be intriguing.
• Comparative Studies: Comparing Poe with other contemporaries or authors from different eras can shed light on literary evolutions and contrasts. Topics such as “Poe and Hawthorne: A Study in Dark Romanticism” can offer dual insights.
• Unexplored Angles: While much has been written about Poe’s famous works, venturing into his lesser-known stories, poems, or essays can be rewarding. Delving deep into these uncharted territories can present fresh perspectives.
• Consider Available Resources: Ensure that there are enough primary and secondary sources available for your chosen topic. While original interpretations are valuable, building upon or contrasting with existing scholarship enriches your research.
• Seek Feedback: Before finalizing your topic, discuss it with peers, professors, or literature enthusiasts. Fresh eyes can offer new perspectives, refine your focus, or even present angles you hadn’t considered.

In conclusion, choosing a research paper topic on Edgar Allan Poe requires a blend of personal interest, academic viability, and originality. Remember that the goal is not just to explore the enigmatic world Poe created but to add a unique voice to the ongoing discourse about his works. Armed with passion and a structured approach, you’re set to select a topic that will not only enlighten readers but also deepen your appreciation of Poe’s literary genius.

How to Write an Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper

Crafting a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is a journey into the heart of 19th-century American Gothic literature. Known as the master of macabre, Poe’s works are rich in symbolism, psychological insights, and intricate narratives. To bring justice to such depth in a research paper, a systematic approach is necessary. Here’s a step-by-step guide to help you navigate the hauntingly beautiful world of Poe and create a compelling paper.

• Deep Reading: Before everything else, immerse yourself in the selected work(s) of Poe. Read it multiple times, noting the nuances, literary techniques, and recurrent themes. This isn’t just casual reading; it’s about diving deep into the text.
• Thesis Statement: A research paper isn’t merely a summary. It needs a central argument or perspective. Craft a clear, concise thesis statement that conveys the essence of your paper. For instance, “Through The Fall of the House of Usher , Poe explores the thin boundary between sanity and madness.”
• Outline Your Thoughts: Structure is vital when delving into Poe’s intricate narratives. Create an outline with clear sections, including introduction, literature review, methodology (if applicable), main arguments, counterarguments, and conclusion.
• Historical and Biographical Context: To understand Poe, it’s imperative to understand his life and times. Infuse your paper with insights about Poe’s tumultuous life, his contemporaries, and the broader socio-cultural milieu of his era.
• Literary Analysis: Delve into the literary aspects of the work. Explore Poe’s use of symbolism, metaphor, allegory, and other devices. Analyze his narrative structures, use of unreliable narrators, or the rhythm and meter in his poems.
• Interdisciplinary Insights: Don’t limit your analysis to a purely literary perspective. Draw insights from psychology (especially when discussing tales like The Tell-Tale Heart ), philosophy, or even the sciences.
• Engage with Scholars: Your interpretations should be in dialogue with established Poe scholars. Reference critical essays, research papers, and academic discourses that align or contradict your arguments. This lends credibility to your work.
• Address Counterarguments: A well-rounded research paper acknowledges differing views. If there are prominent interpretations that contradict your thesis, address them. It shows academic integrity and a comprehensive understanding of the subject.
• Effective Conclusion: Wrap up by reiterating your thesis and summarizing your main arguments. Also, hint at the broader implications of your findings or suggest areas for future research.
• Proofreading and Citations: After pouring so much effort into your analysis, don’t let grammatical errors or incorrect citations mar your paper. Review your work multiple times, use citation tools, and adhere to the desired formatting style (MLA, APA, etc.).

In summary, writing a research paper on Edgar Allan Poe is an intricate dance between analysis and appreciation. While the process requires a meticulous approach, it’s also an opportunity to immerse oneself in the rich tapestry of Poe’s imagination. Remember, it’s not just about producing an academic paper, but also about connecting with one of the literary world’s most enigmatic figures. Embrace the challenge, and let Poe’s haunting allure guide your pen.

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Dive into the shadowy realms of Edgar Allan Poe’s universe, a world filled with intricate tales of love, despair, horror, and the supernatural. As you traverse this intricate literary landscape, let the expertise of iResearchNet guide and support you. While the gothic beauty of Poe’s works is undeniably captivating, the task of analyzing and interpreting them can be daunting. Why wander alone in these literary labyrinths when you can have a seasoned guide by your side?

By choosing iResearchNet, you’re not just selecting a service; you’re opting for a partnership. A partnership that understands the nuances of Poe’s writings, recognizes the depths of his narratives, and captures the essence of his stories in every line written. Each tale, from the heart-wrenching Annabel Lee to the haunting Masque of the Red Death , demands more than just a surface-level reading. It calls for a deep dive into the very soul of the narrative, a task that our expert writers are perfectly poised to undertake.

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94 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics

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• Symbols in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
• “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis
• “Eleonora” by Edgar Allan Poe: A Short Story Analysis
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allen Poe Through a Psychological Lens
• Symbol of the Cat in the Story “Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Alan Poe
• Imagery in “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Writing Style of “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” is written in a tone of anxiety and fear, and its plot emphasizes several important social aspects of life associated with the commission of a crime.
• Gloominess and Terrible Reality in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe In the current paper, the setting, characterization, narration, and plot of The Cask of Amontillado are analyzed to understand true intentions of the author.
• Literary Devices in The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe This paper analyzes the poem by Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” and pays specific attention to repetition as well as syntactic and morphological features.
• Transformation of Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style The paper states that Allan Poe’s life and writings reflect hope despite painful hardships. The characters were representative of lower-class citizens.
• Death Within Edgar Allan Poe’s Works Edgar Allan Poe was one of the authors who turned to the notion of death in his works: the most emotively it is expressed in Poe’s poems “The Raven”, “Lenore”, and “Annabel Lee”.
• Literary Elements in “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Masque of the Red Death” is one of the more famous works of the author. It tells the story of a grotesque plague that is sweeping the land.
• Literary Analysis: “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe Elements of jealousy are evident in the poem. Overcoming this jealousy, even after Annabelle’s death, allowed the speaker to stay in touch with his significant other.
• Evil and Vengeance in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most astonishing short stories that has been interpreted in numerous ways.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Works and Their Characteristics Edgar Allan Poe is one of the greatest American writers. Numerous poems and short stories are still being studied, and new facets and hidden meanings are being discovered.
• The Detective and the Criminal: “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe The depiction of the detective and the criminal in the short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” presents readers with a number of concepts both well-known and unique to the genre.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe This paper will focus on the comparison of styles and themes in two of Poe’s short stories: “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Black Cat”.
• Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe’s Detective Stories The works of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Edgar Allan Poe are separated by nearly half a century, but they are united by the genre.
• Poem Analysis: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven” teaches people to accept their terrible situations to protect themselves from emotional and psychological torture.
• Contrasts and Details of “The Cask of Amontillado“ by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” was first published in 1846, and it is widely recognized today as the best or one of the best short stories written by the author.
• Deceit in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Poe is an example of a strait plot based on revenge. It touches upon different aspects of life: friendship, trust, deceit, and envy.
• Strong Moral Principles in “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe is written too immorally, with cruelty to animals and people, and there are many similar examples in the world.
• “The Mask of the Red Death”: Story by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe published several stories with gothic inspiration, but none more critically acclaimed than “The Mask of the Red Death.”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Analysis Edgar Allan Poe represented American romanticism, the forerunner of symbolism and decadence. The paper analyzes several short stories and poems written by Edgar Allan Poe.
• “The Cask of Amontillado” Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe is a mystical story about a cold-blooded murder that raises numerous questions for every reader.
• Analysis of Stories: The Gold-bug and Other by Edgar Allan Poe and In Our Time by Ernst Hemingway This paper aims to discuss how the two famous authors namely Edgar Allan Poe and Ernst Hemingway tries to use the concept of foreign and foreigner in their short stories.
• “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis “The Tell-Tale Heart” is one of Edgar Allan Poe’s scary stories. The story is told on behalf of an unnamed narrator who killed an older man with whom he lived under the same roof.
• The Short Story “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe: Reliability of the Narrator After finishing the story by Edgar Poe, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the reader may be left wondering about the validity of the events that took place during the narration.
• “The Masque of the Red Death” by Edgar Allan Poe The story Red Death was written by Edgar Allan Poe. The story is about Fight of prince Prospero against red death, the plague which affected the country.
• Edgar Allan Poe: The Concept of Punishment The concepts of punishment and alienation are familiar to the author and can be easily traced in Poe’s two works: “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.”
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Review The raven stands for the narrator’s inner self, who is trying to come to terms with the loss he has to endure. The man lost the woman he loved, Leonore.
• Mental Health in “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Yellow Wallpaper” by Charlotte Perkins Gilman The stories The Tell-Tale Heart and The Yellow Wallpaper highlight how schizophrenia can arrive unnoticed in both men and women and only result in an episode after it is too late.
• The Use of Eerie and Bizarre of Edgar Alan Poe This article is an analysis of what tools the creepy and bizarre Edgar Alan Poe uses to develop the effect of horror in his works.
• Love and Loss in Poem “Annabelle Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe The poem celebrates the invincible love between the lyrical hero and his little childhood friend. The main idea of the poem is that love is stronger than death.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s The Cask of Amontillado In The Cask of Amontillado, Po pursues the goal of analyzing the character’s motives but does not provide the necessary information.
• The Short Story “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe In Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”, universal and specific symbols prove the uniqueness of his writing style.
• “Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Poe’s story is a monologue of a man who decided to kill his old neighbor. The narrative begins in medias res, and the reader cannot know for sure anything about the characters.
• The Tell-Tale Heart Story by Edgar Allan Poe “The Tell-Tale Heart” is a short story written by Edgar Allan Poe. While reading it, I did not see any signs of difficult language or complex structure.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart” The paper discusses one macabre story, saturated with Gothic atmosphere, madness, and decay. The name of this story is “The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe.
• Edgar Alan Poe’s Stories Analysis The short stories written by Edgar Alan Poe contain masterfully indented elements of suspense using Gothicism in depicting death, mental madness, and supernatural elements.
• Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights” The paper discusses Edgar Allan Poe’s “Wuthering Heights”. The narrator wanted to take revenge with impunity, also making sure that it would be recognized as revenge.
• Alcoholism and Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Many arguments support alcoholism as the cause of Poe’s death, including his friends’ testimonials, newspapers’ reports about brain congestion, and social observations.
• The Biography Narrative About Edgar Allan Poe The paper contains three of Edgar Allan Poe’s life episodes, which reveal the personality and creativity of the writer and may be informative about the Civil War and the Wild West.
• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe In “The Fall of the House of Usher”, the storyteller visits a mansion, which belongs to his sick friend, Roderick Usher.
• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe The article is an overview of Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado”: the author summarizes the essence, telling what the intrigue is.
• Works by Edgar Poe as Examples of Good Essay Creating an outstanding piece of writing is highly dependent on Poe’ three main arguments: length, methodology, and writing.
• “Cask of the Amontillado” a Story by Edgar Allan Poe In his short story The Cask of Amontillado, Edgar Poe uses foreshadowing and irony techniques in order to create a sense of suspense that engages the readers.
• Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat Comparison This research paper explores the lives and artistic works of two outstanding creators – Edgar Allan Poe and Jean-Michel Basquiat.
• Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King: A Comparison and Contrast of Their Writing Careers
• The Road Not Taken by Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Frost
• Edgar Allan Poe, the Personification of Death and a True American Genius
• Overview of Gothic Literature and the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• The Setting and the Narrative Style in Four Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Beliefs About the Afterlife
• The Childhood, Achievements, and Literary Works of Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe, Stephen King, and Literary Portrayals of Fear and Madness
• Analysis of the Symbolism Used in Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Masque of the Red Death”
• Edgar Allan Poe and the American Romantic Revolution
• How Edgar Allan Poe’s Work Is Affected by His Predecessors?
• Edgar Allan Poe Virtually Created Detective Story and Perfected the Psychological Thriller
• Symbolic Motifs and Gothic Imagery of “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe and the Obsessed Characters of the Narrators of “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Cask of Amontillado”
• The Mourning for Lost Love in “Wuthering Heights” by Emily Bronte and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Concentrated Emotional Effects
• The Literary Elements Used by Edgar Allan Poe in the Story “The Fall of the House of Usher”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Life and the Effects It Had on His Writing
• Revenge, Betrayal, and Premature Burial in Edgar Allan Poe’s Novel “The Cask of Amontillado”
• Edgar Allan Poe’s Key Influence on the Zombie Fiction
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence Literature?
• Does Imagination Overcome Fear in “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Keep the Reader in Suspense?
• What Influenced Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Style?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Use Dreams to Portray Terror and Mirror the Narrator’s Sense of Reality?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe So Great?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Create Horror in “The Pit and the Pendulum”?
• Does Edgar Allan Poe Favor Death and Terror Over Other Literary Genres?
• What Makes Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Unique?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Define American Literature?
• What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings About?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Explore Similarities Between Love and Hate in His Work?
• What Is the Most Interesting Fact or Facts About the Life of Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Do Edgar Allan Poe’s Writings Illuminate His Upbringing?
• What Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Greatest Influences?
• How Was Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Influenced by His Life?
• What Are the Four Major Themes of Edgar Allan Poe?
• How Has Edgar Allan Poe’s Literature Influenced Today’s Culture?
• What Were Edgar Allan Poe’s Two Main Rules of Writing?
• Did Edgar Allan Poe Contribute to the Development of a New Literary Genre?
• How Is Edgar Allan Poe Remembered Today?
• What Is Edgar Allan Poe’s Most Important Legacy?
• Do the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe Reflect the Characteristics of Gothic Literature?
• How Did Edgar Allan Poe Influence America?
• Why Did Edgar Allan Poe Write Such Dark Stories?

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StudyCorgi . 2021. "94 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics." December 21, 2021. https://studycorgi.com/ideas/edgar-allan-poe-essay-topics/.

These essay examples and topics on Edgar Allan Poe were carefully selected by the StudyCorgi editorial team. They meet our highest standards in terms of grammar, punctuation, style, and fact accuracy. Please ensure you properly reference the materials if you’re using them to write your assignment.

This essay topic collection was updated on January 8, 2024 .

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100 Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topic Ideas & Examples

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Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential and celebrated writers in American literature. Known for his dark and mysterious themes, Poe's work continues to captivate readers and inspire new generations of writers. If you're a student tasked with writing an essay on Edgar Allan Poe, you may be struggling to come up with a compelling topic. To help you get started, here are 100 Edgar Allan Poe essay topic ideas and examples:

• Analyze the use of symbolism in Poe's "The Raven."
• Discuss the theme of madness in Poe's short stories.
• Explore the role of women in Poe's works.
• Compare and contrast the different narrators in Poe's stories.
• Investigate the influence of Poe's personal life on his writing.
• Examine the use of Gothic elements in Poe's poems.
• Discuss the significance of death in Poe's poetry.
• Analyze the theme of isolation in Poe's works.
• Explore the role of the supernatural in Poe's stories.
• Compare Poe's poetry to his short stories.
• Investigate the use of irony in Poe's writing.
• Discuss the theme of revenge in Poe's works.
• Analyze the role of fear in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of love and loss in Poe's poetry.
• Discuss the influence of Edgar Allan Poe on modern horror literature.
• Analyze the use of setting in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of guilt in Poe's works.
• Discuss the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Analyze the use of suspense in Poe's writing.
• Explore the theme of obsession in Poe's works.
• Discuss the role of the narrator in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of duality in Poe's works.
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Black Cat."
• Discuss the use of unreliable narrators in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of addiction in Poe's works.
• Explore the role of death in Poe's poetry.
• Discuss the theme of betrayal in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the use of repetition in Poe's writing.
• Explore the theme of imprisonment in Poe's works.
• Discuss the significance of the title character in "Ligeia."
• Analyze the use of foreshadowing in Poe's stories.
• Explore the theme of redemption in Poe's works.
• Discuss the role of the supernatural in Poe's poetry.
• Analyze the theme of decay in Poe's works.
• Explore the significance of the title character in "Lenore."
• Discuss the use of unreliable memory in Poe's stories.
• Analyze the theme of madness in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Explore the role of guilt in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Analyze the theme of obsession in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Explore the role of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
• Discuss the use of irony in "The Masque of the Red Death."
• Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Black Cat."
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Raven."
• Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
• Analyze the theme of duality in "William Wilson."
• Explore the role of fear in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the significance of the setting in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."
• Analyze the theme of isolation in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Explore the role of the supernatural in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the use of unreliable narration in "The Black Cat."
• Analyze the theme of love and loss in "Annabel Lee."
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Tell-Tale Heart."
• Discuss the role of the narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Analyze the theme of revenge in "The Cask of Amontillado."
• Explore the use of repetition in "The Raven."
• Analyze the theme of madness in "The Black Cat."
• Discuss the use of symbolism in "The Masque of the Red Death."
• Analyze the theme of addiction in "The Pit and the Pendulum."
• Explore the significance of the title character in "The Fall of the House of Usher."
• Discuss the role of fear in

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34 Poe and His Global Advocates

Department of English, Bringham Young University

• Published: 05 April 2018
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This essay explores Edgar Allan Poe’s extraordinary relationships with various literary traditions across the globe, posits that Poe is the most influential US writer on the global literary scene, and argues that Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the work of Poe’s literary advocates—many of whom are literary stars in their own right—as it does on the brilliance of Poe’s original works. The article briefly examines Poe’s most famous French advocates (Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Valéry); glosses the work of his advocates throughout Europe, Asia, and the Americas; and offers a concise case study of Poe’s influence on and advocacy from three twentieth-century writers from the Río de la Plata region of South America (Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar). The essay concludes by reading the relationships between Poe and his advocates through the ancient definition of astral or stellar influence.

To claim that no other US writer has had as much influence on world literature as Edgar Allan Poe is not to practice hyperbole. To stake this claim in the active voice that it deserves: Poe is the most influential US writer in the world. The United States has certainly produced other writers whose works have influenced literature on a global scale, but we (as scholars, readers, consumers) would be hard-pressed to find another US author whose global presence is as broad and whose international impact resonates as deeply as Poe’s. Poe is ubiquitous. His works and his image manifest themselves in highbrow (literature, critical theory, art, classical music, and cinema), popular (B movies, T-shirts, comic books, various genres of popular music, and all sorts of kitsch), and social media cultures (YouTube videos, blogs, Twitter accounts, and countless memes) across the world. Most Poe audiences—regardless of the language(s) in which they access Poe—come to Poe in more than one way, and these varied avenues to Poe speak to the lasting power of his works themselves and to the rejuvenating power of what translation studies scholar André Lefevere calls “refractions,” “rewrites,” or “rewritings” of literary works. Lefevere argues that translators, literary critics, creators of anthologies, and literary historians are all rewriters of texts and that their works or rewritings wield significant power that keeps “original” works or source texts and their authors alive in the literary marketplace and in our literary canons. 1 Linking this type of rewriting with the creative responses to Poe that poets and fiction writers have created since Poe’s death in 1849 reveals the almost incalculable strands of influence Poe’s works and his persona have generated.

Although the scope of this essay does not allow me to prove quantitatively my claim about Poe’s global impact with raw data, a brief list of the distinct threads of Poe’s influence on world literature and culture, along with my analysis, substantiate my declaration. Poe’s invention of the detective genre, alone, puts him on a short list of globally influential US writers. The influence of Poe’s Dupin tales and other stories of ratiocination, the weight of his tales of terror, the power of his pre-Freudian explorations of the human psyche, the resonance (both formal and narrative) of his melancholy poetry, the timeliness of his attempts at early science fiction, and the longevity of his theory of effect on the way we think about short fiction all combine to make a clear case for Poe’s position as the most influential US writer. 2 In short, Poe came fairly early in the US literary tradition, he wrote in more genres than many influential US writers, and, importantly, his disparate works have led to his being championed by some of the most significant writers in various global literary traditions from the middle of the nineteenth century until now.

My argument rests on this last point—on the championing of Poe and the advocacy for his literature that numerous writers who are considered important, or even essential, to their own literary traditions have adopted from the late 1840s onward. Poe influenced these writers, but they also influenced him (or, stated more directly, they influenced his reputation and his overall image) by giving his work and his life special attention in their own literary corpora. 3 These literary stars act as advocates who “plead for,” “speak on behalf of,” “support, recommend, [and] speak favorably of” Poe. 4 Their advocacy continually refreshes and maintains Poe’s image while spreading Poe’s work across divides of both time and space.

Considering the reciprocal relationship between Poe and his global advocates allows us to reread the opening paragraph of Rufus Griwold’s now infamous obituary for Poe as ironic or unintentional foreshadowing:

EDGAR ALLAN POE is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. The poet was well known, personally or by reputation, in all this country; he had readers in England, and in several of the states of Continental Europe; but he had few or no friends; and the regrets for his death will be suggested principally by the consideration that in him literary art has lost one of its most brilliant but erratic stars. 5

Several positive obituaries and rebuttals to Griswold’s caustic commentary demonstrate that Poe did, in fact, have plenty of friends when he died in 1849. 6 However, Griswold’s nod to Poe’s growing reputation outside of the United States unwittingly points toward the friendships that would later salvage Poe’s reputation from Griswold’s character assassination. These “foreign” friends or advocates treated Poe’s work with a seriousness and his image with a reverence that, in the former case, would not be seen in his own country until at least the modernist period and, in the latter case, might never be equaled on Poe’s home turf. Many of them were vivid literary stars who brought a stability to Poe’s reputation, raising it to the astral level regardless of Griswold’s attempt to diminish Poe’s brilliance by qualifying it as erratic.

In the following pages, I offer both a sweeping and a specific analysis of Poe and his global advocates. In the first section, I examine in broad terms, beginning with France and then glossing East Asia and Latin America, how Poe’s writings and his persona resonated with key literary figures from disparate nations throughout the globe, how these writers became strong advocates for Poe, and how their advocacy made Poe a central figure in many of their specific literary traditions and a cardinal presence on the global literary map. For most of this section, I approach authors from literary and linguistic traditions outside of my own training and expertise, and although I cite some of the primary texts in their source languages, most of the scholarship with which I engage in this section is in English. This section hints at the extensive reach of both Poe’s global influence and the world’s influence on Poe, inherently reveals the linguistic limits of any single-authored project on Poe’s global presence, and demonstrates that the significance of the relationships between Poe and these particular writers has reached a level in which entire bodies of literary criticism in the source languages and in English are dedicated to their analysis. I then offer a case study of three particular writers who were Poe advocates in the Río de la Plata region of South America, a literary and linguistic tradition I know well, as a detailed example of Poe’s reciprocal influence and the positive power of his advocates. I conclude by examining the ancient concept of astral influence, describing these advocates as literary stars, and arguing that, in both the broad and the specific cases, Poe’s current global reputation relies at least as much on the radiance of the advocacy as on the brilliance of his original works.

Global Advocates from France and Beyond

Poe’s global advocates have received increased attention in the English-language academy since the middle of the twentieth century. While T. S. Eliot wondered aloud about what the French saw in Poe in a Library of Congress lecture in 1948 and walked away seeing Poe with new eyes, 7 other scholars have produced several important treatises on Poe and France over the last century, including Célestin Pierre Cambiaire’s 1927   The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (which predates Eliot’s musings), Patrick F. Quinn’s 1957   The French Face of Edgar Poe , and many works by Lois Davis Vines. 8 Poe’s relationship with both Spanish American letters and peninsular Spanish literature has received serious treatment since 1934, when John Eugene Englekirk published what was, at the time, an exhaustive book on Poe and his Spanish-speaking advocates on both sides of the Atlantic— Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature . 9 In more recent decades, several edited collections have reiterated the importance of the French and Spanish/Spanish American Poe connections while casting broader nets that demonstrate Poe’s resounding influence and its reciprocal responses across Asia, the Americas, Europe, northern Africa, and various islands throughout the world’s oceans: Benjamin Franklin Fisher’s 1986   Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities ; Lois Davis Vines’s 1999   Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities ; Barbara Cantalupo’s 2012   Poe’s Pervasive Influence ; and my and Margarida Vale de Gato’s 2014   Translated Poe all expose and examine Poe’s impact on disparate world sites and literary traditions and the enormity and intensity of the efforts of his global advocates. 10

French poet Charles Baudelaire serves as the archetypal Poe advocate. Although not Poe’s first foreign reader or his first French translator, Baudelaire took to Poe with an alacrity rarely seen in a relationship between two literary giants. Their literary affinity became the relationship that delivered Poe to a truly global audience, and it still serves as the most powerful example of a major literary figure in his own right dedicating a significant amount of time, effort, and love to the spreading of Poe’s work and the cultivation of his image. Literary advocacy can take many forms, and in the case between Baudelaire and Poe, we could describe Baudelaire as a disciple, a translator, and a biographer/literary critic of Poe—all particular parts that other Poe advocates tend to play as well, although not every advocate adopts all three roles.

Baudelaire’s Poe discipleship might best be captured in the oft-quoted passage from Mon cœur mis à nu [ My Heart Laid Bare ] in which he resolved: “Faire tous les matins ma prière à Dieu, réservoir de toute force et de toute justice, à mon père, à Mariette et à Poe , comme intercesseurs;” [“To pray every morning to God, the source of all power and all justice; to my father, to Mariette and to Poe , as intercessors.”] 11 This resolution, made during Baudelaire’s final years of life, demonstrates both his intimate relationship with Poe (as he places the dead author on the same level as his own dead father and his family’s deceased servant who had cared for him in his youth) and his elevation of Poe to the very position which Baudelaire himself had spent his adult life fulfilling for Poe—the role of the advocate. The Oxford English Dictionary ’s first and oldest definition of the noun “advocate” describes the word in clearly religious terms as follows: “1. Christian Church . A person or agent believed to intercede between God and sinners; spec. Christ or the Virgin Mary.” 12 While Baudelaire places Poe in the position of a spiritual advocate as an intermediary between himself and God, Baudelaire had already placed himself as a literary advocate, first between Poe and France and then between Poe and the world, for almost two decades according to the OED ’s more common definition of the term: “Advocate: 4. gen . a. A person who pleads for or speaks on behalf of another; a person who supports, recommends, or speaks favorably of another.” 13

Baudelaire’s advocacy for Poe is most visible through his massive translation project of Poe’s prose and his treatment of Poe’s persona in his biographical sketches of the US writer. As Vines notes, “[b]etween 1848 and his premature death in 1867, Baudelaire published translations of forty-four of Poe’s tales, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Eureka , and other prose pieces while continuing to write” his own works. 14 He also wrote a lengthy biographical piece on Poe that opened his famous 1856 collection of Poe translations, Histoires extraordinaires . 15 In all, the French poet “devoted” a total of “1,063 pages [ . . . ] to Poe.” 16 In short, Baudelaire maintained a career within a career as a Poe advocate, and the global impact of his Poe advocacy is incalculable. The various essays in Poe Abroad and Translated Poe reiterate how Baudelaire, his translations, and/or his writings on Poe’s biography served as founding elements of Poe’s rising reputation across Europe (especially in Portugal, Spain, and Romania) and the Americas (from Mexico to Argentina, from Nicaragua to Brazil, and most literary traditions in-between). Each of these literary polysystems embraced Poe, but by comparing story titles, which stories appear (and often in which order), and basic details from Poe biographies available in these places in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, we know that this Poe is primarily Baudelaire’s Poe. As Poe’s primary advocate, he also served as a filter that influenced which type of Poe these traditions initially received and which type of Poe they originally revered. Even in the twenty-first century, Baudelaire’s proclivity for the darker, guilt-ridden, or mysterious Poe tales that he published in Histoires extraordinaires and Nouvelles histoires extraordinaires still reveals itself through the way contemporary readers and scholars view Poe in these traditions.

Staying closer to Baudelaire’s home, his work with Poe also brought about profound effects on several French writers who wrote in his wake—especially Stéphane Mallarmé and Paul Valéry. Mallarmé continued the Poe translation project where Baudelaire had left off and translated a small number of Poe’s poems into verse and a large number into prose. 17 In another move of discipleship, he purportedly moved to London with the expressed purpose of improving his English so that he could better understand Poe’s works. 18 Mallarmé’s own poem, “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” advocates for Poe by chastising Poe’s “blasphemous” detractors in his and Mallarmé’s own century and by marking eternity as Poe’s territory. 19 Valéry, in contrast, was more interested in Poe as thinker and gravitated toward pieces such as “The Philosophy of Composition,” the Dupin tales, and Eureka . His own Monsieur Teste develops a character who can be read as an extension or exaggeration of Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin or as an attempt at capturing self-consciousness. 20 By approaching Poe’s thoughts on thought rigorously, Valéry acts as a different kind of Poe advocate who assigns a seriousness to Poe that, as we have already seen with Eliot’s “From Poe to Valéry,” affects Poe’s reputation and his standing back in his own country.

In short, France was and is a special place for Poe advocacy, and this first wave, or set of three waves, of French advocacy for Poe functions as a clear example of how translation studies theorist Itamar Even-Zohar describes the integration of “translated literature” into a “central position” in a particular “literary polysystem.” 21 Even-Zohar argues that

to say that translated literature maintains a central position in the literary polysystem means that it participates actively in shaping the center of the polysystem. In such a situation it is by and large an integral part of innovatory forces, and as such likely to be identified with major events in literary history while these are taking place. This implies that in this situation no clear-cut distinction is maintained between “original” and “translated” writings, and that often it is the leading writers (or members of the avant-garde who are about to become leading writers) who produce the most conspicuous or appreciated translations. 22

The overwhelming success of Baudelaire’s translations of Poe inserted Poe firmly into the French literary tradition, making Poe (not just Baudelaire) influential on Mallarmé, Valéry, and the French Symbolists. These latter writers’ work as Poe translators, as poets, and as thinkers further wrote Poe into the French literary polysystem, where his writings and persona continue to influence new generations of French writers. We cannot, however, separate this Poe influence from these “leading writers” who did happen to be “members of the avant-garde who . . . bec[a]me leading writers.” 23 In other words, Poe–Baudelaire–Mallarmé–Valéry are so entangled that it can be difficult to distinguish between Poe’s influence per se on French literature and art versus Poe’s influence via his three most famous French advocates. One thing, however, remains certain: without the advocacy there would be no French Poe. A Poe in France would certainly exist, but Poe’s position as a writer central to the French literary tradition relies on the pointed and painstaking advocacy of these three writers who, themselves, form essential parts of the French canon. 24

The early start date, deep national impact, and widespread global influence of Poe’s relationship with his French advocates make this particular example of Poe advocacy remarkable, but Poe’s good fortune with significant writers on the global scene is not singular to France. Essential writers in several disparate literary traditions discovered (some through the French and some on their own), enjoyed, and advocated for Poe. In some cases, these advocates played more than one part—translator, biographer, literary critic, anthologizer, poet, fiction writer—in their advocacy for Poe, whereas in other circumstances individual advocates adopted single roles. Poe Abroad and Translated Poe demonstrate time after time how Poe influenced important literary figures and how these writers then became Poe advocates in numerous ways and at various levels of intensity.

In the rest of Europe and in Russia, important national writers continually advocated for Poe. Elvira Osipova describes Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s publication of Dmitry Mikhailovsky’s Russian translations of “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” in the former’s magazine Vremya as an important “turning point” in Poe’s well-documented Russian reception, 25 and both Osipova and Eloise M. Boyle examine the reciprocal relationship between Poe and the Russian Symbolist poets Konstantin Bal’mont and Valery Brjusov. 26 Liviu Cotrău calls two of Poe’s early translators in Romania—Mihai Eminescu and Ion Luca Caragiale—“Romania’s best poet and best playwright, respectively” and demonstrates how these authors both translated Poe via Baudelaire. 27 This early interest by important Romanian authors in a French Poe cast the US writer as a significant figure and led to an extensive tradition of Poe translation and retranslation in Romania that has flourished throughout the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. 28 Margarida Vale de Gato examines how Fernando Pessoa, “the leading figure of Portuguese modernism,” continually returned to Poe “in his prolific unpublished papers” and published three of his translations of Poe’s poems. 29 And this list could continue. Whether early in Poe’s global reception (e.g., Baudelaire), much later in that reception (e.g., the postmodern German writer Arno Schmidt), or somewhere in between (e.g., late nineteenth-century Swedish writers Ola Hansson and August Strindberg), many European writers who were key movers in their own national literary traditions “supported” and “spoke for” Poe by translating, responding to, and/or rewriting his works.

Poe’s influence in East Asia began later than his influence in Europe, and although that influence might seem less reciprocal than the Poe–Europe relationship (with the influence running from Poe to the local writer rather than from the East Asian writer back to Poe’s reputation), Japan stands out as one site of two-way influence and powerful Poe advocacy. 30 Takayuki Tatsumi demonstrates Poe’s lasting influence in Japan from the Meiji period (1868–1912) through the contemporary Heisei period, noting that Poe was particularly influential during the twentieth century and that Japanese artists of that century actively responded to Poe rather than passively receiving his influence: “from the Taisho period (1912–1926) through the Showa period (1926–1989), Poe was deeply imbibed, further developed, and creatively rewritten by a number of talented Japanese writers.” 31 Along this path, Poe was privileged enough to be translated or adapted by “the distinguished novelist Aeba Kōson” and “noted journalist” Morita Shiken during the earlier Meiji period as a part of Japan’s major shift from archaic, formal written expression to modern, conversational writing; 32 to be translated by Sato Haruo and Tanizaki Jun’Ichiro and rewritten by Akutagawa Ryūnosuke—all “major Romantic and even decadent writers of the Taisho period” 33 —and to be taken up by the popular detective writer Edogawa Rampo of the Showa period, who “established the Japanese literary subgenre of detective fiction” and whose penname references Poe. 34 Tatsumi clearly demonstrates the reciprocal relationship between Poe and Rampo in specific terms that we can apply to the Poe–Japan relationship more generally: “While it is true that Poe’s arabesque, grotesque, and ratiocinative tales exerted great influence upon Rampo’s Ero-Gro-Nonsense detective fiction, it is also true that Rampo’s powerful and creative misreadings of his precursor compel us today to reread the earlier tradition through the prism of his modern re-creations.” 35 Poe has influenced several of Japan’s important writers, these writers have advocated for his work (particularly his fiction), and their own work now influences how the contemporary Japanese audience reads Poe.

Significant writers from various nations in Latin America have also adopted Poe into their literary systems and served as his faithful advocates. At several moments over the last one hundred and forty years or so, the literary relationships between specific Latin American writers and Poe have been nearly as productive as the reciprocal or symbiotic relationship between Poe and Baudelaire. Not surprisingly, some of the earliest relationships between Poe and his Latin American advocates were also mediated by Baudelaire, but scholars have demonstrated that Poe’s long-term connections with the Spanish American literary tradition rely on a three-headed source of Poe in English, French, and Spanish and that his relationship with Brazilian letters includes English-, French-, and Portuguese-language texts. 36 Poe’s presence in Brazil, as Carlos Daghlian argues, “developed independently from the American author’s renown in the Spanish-language countries of the continent[,]” and it began with the “good fortune of being discovered by Brazil’s most outstanding writer, Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis.” 37 Machado translated Poe’s “The Raven” in 1883, and both the bird and its author have been significant figures in Brazilian literature ever since. While Machado introduced Brazil to Poe, many other Brazilian writers and translators have advocated for Poe either in their own works or as Poe translators, and at times their “supplications” have taken new and interesting routes. For example, the acclaimed postmodern novelist Clarice Lispector translated eighteen of Poe’s tales for a collection aimed specifically at teenage readers. 38 Although Lispector’s own novels are known for their narrative complexity, Lenita Esteves demonstrates how Lispector’s translations of Poe’s stories partially “abridge” Poe’s texts while both “simplif[ying]” Poe’s language and shifting it to “a more colloquial register,” 39 serving as a powerful and peculiar example of how one of Poe’s advocates speaks both “favourably” and “on behalf of” him to a very specific audience: Brazilian teens. This audience, it appears, has openly received Lispector’s message about Poe since her translated collection was in its twenty-second edition in 2014. 40

Spanish America’s advocacy for Poe has been even more tireless than Brazil’s, with key figures from the late nineteenth century through the early twenty-first century praising, responding to, and interacting with Poe. Adaptations/translations of three of Poe’s tales were circulating in Peru as early as the late 1840s, and Poe’s works were being translated in various Spanish American locales during the 1860s and 1870s. 41 However, Poe truly entered Spanish American letters with force in the late 1880s and early 1890s as a part of the modernista movement headed by the Nicaraguan poet Ruben Darío. The Venezuelan poet Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde had translated Poe’s “The Raven” in 1887, 42 just a year before Darío’s collection Azul openly launched Spanish American modernismo and six years before Darío consecrated Poe as one of the “special” or “rare ones” in his 1893 text “Los raros.” 43 Pérez Bonalde’s translation was not the first in the Spanish language, but its rigor and its timing made it an extremely effective tool for promoting Poe across the Spanish-speaking world, and it remains the Spanish-language version of Poe’s most famous poem, even though other Spanish-language translations of “The Raven” that follow in its wake do a better job of re-creating Poe’s odd rhyme and meter. 44 Pérez Bonalde’s translation, coupled with Darío’s Baudelaire-influenced praise for Poe as the ultimate artist for art’s sake—“un sublime apasionado, un nervioso, uno de esos divinos semilocos necesarios para el progreso humano, lamentables cristos del arte, que por amor al eterno ideal tienen su calle de la amargura, sus espinas y su cruz” [“a passionate sublime being, a nervous man, one of those divine partially madmen necessary for human progress, lamentable Christs of art who for the love of an eternal ideal have their via dolorosa , their thorns, and their cross”] 45 —cast Poe as one of modernismo ’s primary icons and fountains of influence. This particular Poe, Englekirk argues, “was to fertilize the intellect and imagination of Central and South America more than any other American author,” and as he avers, “almost all of the followers of Modernism were directly or indirectly influenced by Poe.” 46 This influence spans the American continent from Mexico to Central America and from the equatorial nations of Colombia and Venezuela down to the southern cone. Several Poe pieces appeared in periodicals in Spanish America before the modernistas , and his presence significantly increased via the translation work of his French advocates, but the advocacy of Pérez Bonalde and Darío—the former as translator and the latter as image-curator—fused Poe and Spanish American modernismo in a way that was beneficial to both parties while permanently inscribing both the movement itself and its foreign poet-prophet into Spanish American literary history.

The reciprocal relationship of influence and advocacy between Poe and his Spanish American advocates remained strong through the twentieth century and continues today. Poe was a significant influence on the writers of the so-called Boom—especially on the Argentine Julio Cortázar and the Mexican Carlos Fuentes—and on major authors after the Boom like the Chilean Roberto Bolaño. Contemporary Spanish American writers also continue to sing his praises. For example, in 2008 Mexican author Jorge Volpi and Peruvian writer Fernando Iwasaki coedited a new edition of Cortázar’s Poe translations in which they engaged sixty-seven current Spanish American and peninsular writers (including themselves) with Poe, inviting each contemporary author to write a brief introduction for one of Poe’s tales. This edition clearly shows Poe’s influence on the Boom and on the generation that followed. It also demonstrates the Poe advocacy of writers from both eras since, along with Cortázar’s translations and the sixty-seven contemporary introductions, the volume begins with an essay from Fuentes and another from the Peruvian Nobel laureate Mario Vargas Llosa as prologues. 47

Perhaps the most pointed example of extended Poe advocacy in Spanish America comes from the Río de la Plata region of Argentina and Uruguay. This example spans the twentieth century from the latter part of the modernista era well through the Boom via the works of Horacio Quiroga, Jorge Luis Borges, and Julio Cortázar—each author a major figure in Spanish American literary history, each indebted to Poe, and each a powerful advocate for Poe who helped to solidify his presence in the national/regional traditions of the Río de la Plata and in the broader literary polysystem of Spanish America.

A Trinity of Advocates

Quiroga, Borges, and Cortázar, each in his own right, continue to wield significant influence over the literature of the Río de la Plata region and over Spanish American letters in general several decades after their respective deaths in 1937, 1986, and 1984, and each writer served and continues to serve as a powerful Poe advocate for Spanish-language readers. Grouping the three authors as a trinity rather than simply a trio might appear problematic on the surface since they did not hold a singular purpose, literary or otherwise. Indeed, Borges was a rather harsh critic of Quiroga’s writing, and Cortázar, while heavily influenced by and indebted to Borges’s poetics, clearly disagreed with his fellow Argentine’s politics. In their advocacy for Poe, however, these three literary giants find some common ground, although they each played distinct roles as Poe advocates. Each of these writers was influenced by Poe, and each one spent a significant amount of time responding to Poe. Quiroga’s advocacy can best be defined in terms of discipleship; Borges’s advocacy for Poe was multilayered, but many of his interactions with Poe (whether articles, prologues, or anthologized pieces) can all fit under the broader umbrella of the work of the literary critic; and Cortázar’s advocacy, although also multifaceted, remains most visible through his translations of the vast majority of Poe’s prose. The disciple, the critic, and the translator all spoke for, supported, and recommended Poe to their reading public. This trinity’s advocacy for Poe is matched only by the earlier trinity of Baudelaire, Mallarmé, and Valéry, whose French advocacy for Poe—to the bemusement of Borges and to the pleasure of Cortázar—had already placed Poe in a space of privilege in the Río de la Plata by the beginning of Quiroga’s career. 48

Quiroga’s Poe discipleship began early and continued throughout his publishing career, and Quiroga advocated for Poe via imitation of, conversation with, and prescription of the techniques and themes of his literary master. In the realm of imitation, Quiroga’s first attempt to re-create the horrors of revenge (felt both by the seeker of vengeance and by the victim) in Poe’s famous “The Cask of Amontillado” appeared as a brief prose entry entitled “El tonel de amontillado” in Quiroga’s first published book—a modernista collection of poetry titled Los arrecifes de coral that Quiroga published in 1901. 49 The very title reveals the lack of distance between this tale and Poe’s text since it is simply a translation of the title of Poe’s most famous revenge story. Quiroga’s piece begins: “Poe dice que, habiendo soportado del mejor modo posible las mil injusticias de Fortunato, juró vengarse cuando éste llegó al terreno de los insultos. Y nos cuenta cómo en una noche de carnaval le emparedó vivo, a pesar del ruido que hacía Fortunato con sus cascabeles” [“Poe says that, having tolerated in the best way posible the thousand injustices of Fortunato, he swore to avenge himself when Fortunato entered the territory of insult. And he tells us how in a night of carnival he walled Fortunato up alive, despite the noise that Fortunato made with his bells.”] 50 After this brief summary of Poe’s story, which strangely inserts Poe into the role of Montresor, Quiroga’s tale, in less than three hundred words, has a lime-covered Fortunato relate his “aventura anterior” [“previous adventure”] to the story’s narrator, Montresor—first in front of a large mirror and then in the catacombs where he attempts to reverse Poe’s tale by taking revenge on the narrator. 51 In Quiroga’s next rendition of this tale, “El crimen del otro” from 1904, he changes the setting to turn-of-the-century Montevideo, but he once again repeats Poe’s plotline as the narrator buries his friend—named Fortunto—alive. 52 In this rendering, the narrator does not seek revenge so much as try to rid himself of a friend whom he has driven mad by introducing him to the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Although both of these stories interrogate the character of Montresor more than Poe’s source text, they do so only through a direct rewriting that relies overwhelmingly on Poe’s characters and plotline.

After these first two attempts, Quiroga repeatedly captures the horror of “Cask” and other Poe tales in several stories that seek to create Poe’s effect in new settings with original characters who have their own story arcs. As Caroline Egan has argued, two of these stories—“La lengua” and “Una bofetada” [“A Slap in the Face”]—subtly converse with “Cask” and the theme of revenge, 53 but several of Quiroga’s most famous stories create a Poe-like horror without even faintly referencing any of Poe’s source texts. For example, Quiroga’s “El almohadón de pluma” [“The Feather Pillow”] from 1907, “La miel silvestre” from 1911, and “El hijo” [“The Son”] from 1928 each creates a nervous tension that builds to a painful and horrific climax that leaves the reader both shocked and satisfied. 54 In all three cases, Quiroga relies on his own characters, settings, and plotlines rather than on Poe’s creations to develop this sense of horror. “La gallina degollada” [“The Decapitated Chicken”], perhaps Quiroga’s most masterful piece of horror fiction, finds a middle ground between his own creation and Poe’s influence. This 1909 tale creates a horrendous scene in which four sick brothers whose parents have treated them like animals kill their younger, healthy sister. 55 The setting and the plot are Quiroga’s, and while this story almost allows for a reading of the killing in terms of revenge that might put it in conversation with other Poe stories, it appears to more pointedly reference Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” since the boys, like the orangutan in Poe’s tale, imitate common human actions that create terrible outcomes. In Poe’s story, the orangutan’s aping of his master shaving leads to the vicious death of two women—a mother and a daughter (M 2: 565–568). In Quiroga’s story, the boys’ imitation of the decapitating and bleeding of the family’s evening meal—a chicken—leads to their sister’s brutal death and to the metaphorical destruction of their parents, who have placed all of their hopes in their one healthy child while neglecting their four disabled sons. 56 With a brilliant stroke, Quiroga taps into the latent horror of Poe’s initial detective story to create an effect that significantly veers away from the feeling of awe surrounding Dupin’s intellect toward a localized terror that Quiroga hones and masters during his prolific career.

Finally, along with imitating and then conversing with Poe’s works and methods, Quiroga eventually prescribed them to aspiring writers. In his 1925 article “El manual del perfecto cuentista,” Quiroga taps into Poe’s theory of effect by explaining that authors must know the end of a story before they write that story’s introduction. 57 In his 1928 article “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” he approaches the hopeful writer in even more didactic terms by listing ten rules for writing. His first rule, “[c]ree en un maestro—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chejov—como en Dios mismo” [“believe in a master—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekov—as in God himself”], reiterates his belief in following established models and reifies his Poe discipleship in the latter portion of his career. 58 His fifth rule echoes Poe’s theory of effect and the concept that authors must know where they want to arrive before they can start writing. 59

Quiroga’s discipleship functions as advocacy for Poe through both his fiction and his writing instructions. Englekirk notes that younger Spanish American writers in the 1930s were absorbing Poe via “Quiroga’s genius,” but his “Poesque spirit” 60 was still visible over sixty years later in an article by Bolaño from the late twentieth century. In a piece called “Consejos sobre el arte de escribir cuentos” [“Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories”], Bolaño takes up Quiroga’s model for offering tips on how to write short fiction, names Quiroga as one of the authors an aspiring writer needs to read, and claims that “[l]a verdad de la verdad es que con Edgar Allan Poe todos tendíamos de sobra” [“[t]he honest truth is that with Edgar Allan Poe, we would have more than enough good material to read.”] 61 Quiroga, the Poe disciple, continues to speak for and recommend Poe both directly and indirectly.

Borges sustained a lengthy and complex literary relationship with Poe that included several types of advocacy. He translated two of Poe’s stories (“The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” and “The Purloined Letter”) with his friend and writing partner Adolfo Bioy Casares, anthologized the former in Antología de la literatura fantástica and the latter in Los mejores cuentos policiales (two anthologies with major staying power that have each been reprinted several times since their original publication dates in the early 1940s), 62 responded to Poe’s Dupin tales with a detective trilogy of his own, conversed with several of Poe’s themes and creative ideas in his other fictional works, mentioned Poe in over 130 articles, and discussed Poe in scores of interviews and question/answer sessions. John T. Irwin has thoroughly examined Borges’s conscious conversation with Poe’s detective fiction in The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story , and I have analyzed Borges’s relationship with Poe beyond their detective stories in Borges’s Poe: The Influence and Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America . 63 Here, I would simply like to focus on Borges as a literary critic and public intellectual whose returns to Poe kept the US writer in the Argentine literary spotlight throughout the twentieth century.

Borges was an insatiable reader, and Poe was one of the writers whom Borges first encountered in his youth in his father’s library and whom he reread time and again throughout his long life. 64 After going blind in the mid-1950s, Borges continued to reread Poe by having the latter’s works read to him aloud by his mother (Leonor Acevedo de Borges), his students, his friends, and his second wife, María Kodama. 65 For example, as late as 1985, Borges claimed that he could no longer count the times that he had read and reread Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum” and suggested that he would continue rereading it in the future. 66 Borges could not stop reading Poe, and he could not stop writing and talking about him either. Borges wrote only two articles dedicated specifically to Poe—“La génesis de ‘El cuervo’ de Poe” in La Prensa in 1935 and “Edgar Allan Poe” in La Nación in 1949—but he mentioned Poe in over 130 other solo-authored pieces, often framing his discussions of detective fiction, US literature, translation, and several other subjects around Poe. 67 His references to Poe reached disparate reading audiences in Argentina, the Río de la Plata region, and Spanish America from the popular and local/national readers of the daily papers La Prensa and La Nación , to the middle-class and typically female audience of the household magazine El Hogar , to the highbrow and international readership of the literary journal Sur . Borges perennially returned to Poe in his public persona as well. He taught Poe in the classroom, mentioned Poe in lectures at university campuses and in public forums throughout the Americas and Europe, and talked about Poe in several interviews that were broadcast to wide audiences over the radio.

Borges, unlike Quiroga and Cortázar, was more willing to openly criticize Poe. He did not admire everything that Poe wrote, he was particularly critical of Poe’s poetry, and he occasionally questioned Poe’s taste. However, his praise for Poe as the inventor of the detective genre and as a powerful writer of the fantastic not only kept Poe in front of Borges’s local, regional, and international readerships, but it also created a new version of Poe in the Río de la Plata region and Spanish America in general. Despite Quiroga’s reciprocal relationship with Poe’s fiction, most Río de la Plata and Spanish American readers still considered Poe a poet during the last years of Quiroga’s life and the early years of Borges’s career. Borges’s advocacy permanently shifted Poe’s image from dark poet-prophet to masterful story writer. Borges was the type of advocate who admitted that Poe had weaknesses but championed him nonetheless. In this sense, Borges’s advocacy for Poe also resonates with the religious definition of the noun “advocate” since he acted as an agent between Poe and the reader in spite of what he saw as some of Poe’s literary “sins.” Borges did not ignore Poe’s problems, but he felt that the positive far outweighed the negative and asked that Poe’s readers judge Poe for his strengths and forgive him for his weaknesses.

Like Borges, Cortázar maintained a long and multilayered relationship with Poe that began in his youth and flourished during his adult life. Cortázar also read Poe as a child, and according to various personal accounts, he had to do so on the sly because his mother thought he “was too young.” 68 “[S]he was right,” Cortázar later claimed, and his earliest encounters with Poe’s texts purportedly scared him to the point of illness. 69 These early readings of Poe thrust Cortázar into the realm of the fantastic, a space that he thoroughly enjoyed as a reader and consistently recreated in his own work, particularly his short fiction. Several of Cortázar’s most famous short pieces—“Casa tomada” [“House Taken Over”], “Lejana” [“The Distances”], “La noche boca arriba” [“The Night Face Up”], “La isla al mediodía” [“The Island at Noon”], and “El ídolo de las Cíclades” [“The Idol of the Cyclades”]—function within this supernatural mode while others such as “Axolotl” or “Carta a una señorita en París” [“Letter to a Young Lady in Paris”] turn from the fantastic toward magical realism. 70 The theme of the double appears throughout Cortázar’s tales, and he often employs it in ways that resemble works by Poe. “Lejana,” for example, creates a powerful inversion of Poe’s “William Wilson” as Cortázar’s protagonist—Alina Reyes—literally loses herself in an open battle of wills against her double. 71 Cortázar’s first published story under his own name, “Casa tomada,” itself plays the double since one of the most common yet influential interpretations of the tale reads it as an Argentine doubling of Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

Although Cortázar’s stories spread Poe’s themes and approaches to new audiences, he advocated for Poe most powerfully as a translator. In a 1983 interview with Jason Weiss, Cortázar claimed that when translating Poe he learned to appreciate Poe’s language, regardless of the critiques that various English-speaking readers had offered: “I explored his language, which is highly criticized by the English and the Americans because they find it too baroque, in short they’ve found all sorts of things wrong with it. Well, since I’m neither English nor American, I see it with another perspective. I know there are aspects which have aged a lot, that are exaggerated, but that hasn’t the slightest importance next to his genius.” 72 Cortázar spent two years in the early 1950s translating that genius into Spanish before becoming a famous writer in his own right, and he returned to, refined, and republished those translations over the next two decades, even though he had already made an international name for himself as a novelist and story writer.

Before the 1956 release of Cortázar’s two-volume set of Poe’s prose translations, Obras en prosa , no single Spanish-language translator in the Americas or on the Iberian Peninsula had tackled the majority of Poe’s fiction. 73 Poe’s poetry was readily available in Spanish translation, and many of his stories were also available, but the fictional titles were spread throughout disparate periodicals across Spain and the Americas, found in short collections in which a single translator would offer a dozen or so stories, or combined into larger collections that contained translations by several different translators. For example, the Argentine translator Carlos Olivera offered thirteen of Poe’s tales in Spanish as Novelas y cuentos in 1884; an anonymous collection of translations of twelve Poe tales appeared in Buenos Aires in 1903 under the Hispanicized Baudelaire title Historias extraordinarias ; and Armando Bazán edited a substantial Poe collection, Obras completas , that included, along with several poems, over forty prose pieces translated by five different translators. 74 Cortázar’s volumes, in contrast, include all of Poe’s short fiction, Pym, Eureka , and hundreds of pages of Poe’s other prose pieces. He republished both volumes in 1969, and then in 1970, he split the first volume into two, revised the translations, and published this new two-volume set as Cuentos, 1 and Cuentos, 2 . 75 Finally, in 1973, he revised and rereleased the second volume of his Obras en prosa as Ensayos y críticas . 76

Out of all of these translations and repackagings, the 1970 two-volume set of the stories has had, by far, the most significant impact. The Madrid publishing house Alianza has republished these two volumes over thirty times in Madrid and Buenos Aires, and these two books (often released as inexpensive paperback “libros de bosillo” or “pocket books”) are now almost synonymous with Poe in the Spanish-speaking world. In the introduction to their 2008 rerelease of Cortázar’s translations in their Edición comentada , Volpi and Iwasaki venerate this particular two-volume set, claiming that each of the sixty-seven writers whom they have chosen to introduce Poe’s stories have come to Poe via Cortázar’s two-volume edition of the tales and stating that their goal is to celebrate Poe’s bicentennial by “rescatando aquellos míticos tomitos azules” [“rescuing those mythic little blue volumes.”] 77 In short, Cortázar advocated for Poe by translating what he saw as Poe’s “extraordinary genius” 78 into Spanish, regardless of any perceived shortcomings with Poe’s language. His translations provided previously unprecedented access to that genius to millions of new readers through a single translation filter, and many of those readers, who are also writers, continue to distribute Cortázar’s Poe to future generations.

The Influence of the Stars

Throughout this essay, I have referred to both the general definition and the more specific, Christian definition of the noun “advocate.” I would like to end by playing with an older and more specific definition of the noun “influence.” The O xford English Dictionary shows that “influence” was used as a noun for almost three hundred years before it was used as a verb and that the oldest usage of the noun referred to a phenomenon between heavenly bodies and human bodies:

2. a. spec . in Astrol. The supposed flowing or streaming from the stars or heavens of an etherial fluid acting upon the character and destiny of men, and affecting sublunary things generally. In later times gradually viewed less literally, as an exercise of power or “virtue,” or of an occult force, and in late use chiefly a poetical or humorous reflex of earlier notions. b. transf . The exercise of personal power by human beings, figured as something of the same nature as astral influence. Now only poet . 79

My use of “influence” throughout this essay, of course, typically refers to the “b” definition of the noun or to the common definitions of the verb, which the Oxford English Dictionary defines as “1. trans. To exert influence upon, to affect by influence. a. To affect the mind or action of; to move or induce by influence; [ . . . ] b. To affect the condition of, to have an effect on.” 80 The ancient and astral definition of the noun, however, also seems relevant. Baudelaire symbolically raised Poe into the heavens as a celestial advocate between himself and God, and Poe’s work and his image certainly appear to have had an elevated effect “upon the character and destiny of” many of his readers that could be compared to a “supposed flowing or streaming” from above. However, it took Baudelaire, Borges, Rampo, Bal’mont, Pessoa, and many other significant writers to elevate Poe to this level. These Poe advocates, literary stars during their own lifetimes, made him into a literary star who could then influence us, and his and their astral influence continue to affect other literary stars as well as the mere mortals or “sublunary” beings that we, Poe readers and scholars, tend to be.

One of these stars, Vargas Llosa, describes Poe as a fortunate writer, not in life, but in his posthumous rise to prominence through the work of two amazing advocates: “Aunque su vida estuvo marcada por la desgracia, Edgar Allan Poe fue uno de los más afortunados escritores modernos en lo que concierne a la irradiación de su obra por el mundo” [“Even though his life was marked by misfortune, Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most fortunate modern writers in what concerns the irradiation of his work throughout the world”] because he was translated by both Baudelaire, the “poeta más grande del siglo XIX” [“greatest poet of the nineteenth century”], and Cortázar, “uno de los mejores escritores de nuestra lengua y un traductor excepcional” [“one of the best writers in our language and an exceptional translator.”] 81 To Vargas Llosa’s shortlist, we could add the names of dozens of other literary stars from distinct traditions who have served as Poe advocates. Some of these stars, Baudelaire-Mallarmé-Valéry and Quiroga-Borges-Cortázar, have formed guiding constellations that direct readers to Poe, while others have acted as solitary beacons that radiate Poe’s works and image. The advocacy of these literary stars—via translation, discipleship, rewriting, literary criticism, and other creative and critical endeavors—keeps Poe in orbit to shine down on future generations of readers and on occasional rising stars.

1. André Lefevere , Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context (New York: MLA, 1992), 6–7, 13–14. Lefevere uses the terms “rewrites” and “refractions” rather than “rewritings” in other works to describe the same concept. See “Why Waste Our Time on Rewrites? The Trouble with Interpretation and the Role of Rewriting in an Alternative Paradigm,” in The Manipulation of Literature: Studies in Literary Translation , ed. Theo Hermans (New York: St. Martins, 1985), 215–243 ; and “Mother Courage’s Cucumbers: Text, System and Refraction in a Theory of Literature,” in The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York & London: Routledge, 2012), 203–219.

This list could go on to include Poe’s hoaxes, his biting satires, and his contributions to science via Eureka: A Prose Poem .

3. I see this type of reciprocal influence functioning in two ways. The first way is fairly intuitive—translators, critics, anthologizers, biographers, and others openly affect how we understand and interpret the writers they approach in their work. The second way is less intuitive and recalls Jorge Luis Borges’s descriptions of influence in his famous essay “Kafka y sus precursores” [“Kafka and His Precursors”] in which Borges argues that newer writers influence the works of older writers by changing us, the readers, so that we see the work of a newer writer in the work of an older writer and, thus, experience the strange, anachronistic sensation of seeing Kafka in a poem by Robert Browning or in a text by Søren Kierkegaard and feeling that these earlier texts are actually Kafkaesque. See “Kafka y sus precursores,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé Editores, 2007), 2:107–109 and “Kafka and His Precursors,” in Selected Non-Fictions , ed. and trans. Eliot Weinberger (New York: Penguin, 1999), 363–365.

5. Rufus Wilmot Griswold , “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” New-York Daily Tribune , October 9, 1849, p. 2, cols. 3–4, Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/nyt49100.htm .

6. See, for example, George R. Graham , “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” Graham’s Magazine (Philadelphia), March 1850, 36:224–226, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/18500301.htm ; Henry B. Hirst , “Edgar Allan Poe,” McMakin’s Model American Courier , vol. XIX, no. 33 (whole no. 969), October 20, 1849, p. 2, cols. 3–4, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/hbh18491.htm ; or Nathaniel Parker Willis , “Death of Edgar Poe,” Home Journal (New York), October 20, 1849, p. 2, cols. 2–4, http://www.eapoe.org/papers/misc1827/18491020.htm .

7. Thomas Stearns Eliot , “From Poe to Valéry,” in The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe , ed. Eric W. Carlson (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966), 205–219.

8. Célestin Pierre Cambiaire , The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (New York: G. E. Stechert & Co., 1927) ; Partick F. Quinn , The French Face of Edgar Poe (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957) ; Lois Davis Vines , Valéry and Poe: A Literary Legacy (New York: New York University Press, 1992). Also see Vines’s chapters in Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities , ed. Lois Davis Vines (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999) ; and “Poe Translations in France,” in Translated Poe , ed. Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014), 47–54.

9. John Eugene Englekirk , Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature (New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1934). There are many other titles that tackle Poe’s relationship with specific national or regional literary traditions—books on Poe and Scandinavia, Poe and Germany, Poe and Japan, or Poe and Russia, for example.

10. Benjamin Franklin Fisher , ed., Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities (Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986) ; Lois Davis Vines , ed., Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999) ; Barbara Cantalupo , ed., Poe’s Pervasive Influence (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012) ; Emron Esplin and Margarida Vale de Gato , eds., Translated Poe (Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014).

11. Charles Baudelaire , Œuvres complétes (Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1968), 642 ; Christopher Isherwood , trans., My Heart Laid Bare , in Intimate Journals (New York: Howard Fertig, 1977), 61.

Oxford English Dictionary Online , s.v. “advocate.”

14. Lois Davis Vines , “Poe Translations in France,” in Translated Poe , 48. Vines also notes that Baudelaire translated four of Poe’s poems (48–49).

Vines, “Poe Translations in France,” 49.

Vines,“Poe Translations in France,” 49.

19. Stéphane Mallarmé , “Le tombeau d’Edgar Poe,” Œuvres complétes. (Paris: Gallimard, 1998), 38.

Vines avers that “[t]he unpublished manuscript of an early draft of Valéry’s Evening with Monsieur Teste bears the title ‘Memoirs of Chevalier Dupin’ ” (51).

21. Itamar Even-Zohar , “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem,” in The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), ed. Lawrence Venuti (New York: Routledge, 2012), 162–167.

Even-Zohar, “The Position of Translated Literature,” 163.

Poe’s centrality to the French literary canon is clearly demonstrated by the fact that he was the first non-French writer included in the Bibliothèque de la Pléiade and the fifth writer, regardless of language, included in this monumental series. The Pléiade edition of Poe, which uses Baudelaire’s translations, was first published in April 1932, only six months after the series published its first book—the first volume of Baudelaire’s complete works. See “Le catalogue—Par année de parution,” La Pléiade, http://www.la-pleiade.fr/Le-catalogue/Par-annee-de-parution, for historical details about books published in this series.

25. Elvira Osipova , “The History of Poe Translations in Russia,” in Translated Poe , 73.

26. Osipova, 73 , and Eloise M. Boyle , “Valery Brjusov and Konstantin Bal’mont,” in Poe Abroad , 177–182. For a monograph-length study of Poe in Russia, see Joan Delaney Grossman , Edgar Allan Poe in Russia: A Study in Legend and Literary Influence (Würzburg: Jal-Verlag, 1973).

27. Liviu Cotrău , “Edgar Allan Poe in Romanian Translation,” in Translated Poe , 77.

Cotrău, “Edgar Allan Poe in Romanian Translation,” 77–84.

29. Margarida Vale de Gato , “Poe Translations in Portugal: A Standing Challenge for Changing Literary Systems,” in Translated Poe , 9–10.

Essays in Poe Abroad, Poe’s Pervasive Influence , and Translated Poe demonstrate Poe’s presence in China and South Korea, but more research into the literary traditions of these two nations would need to be conducted in order to discover whether important artists in these two countries who are influenced by Poe also act as Poe advocates.

31. Takayuki Tatsumi , “The Double Task of the Translator: Poe and His Japanese Disciples,” in Translated Poe , 171. For more on Poe’s relationship with Japan, see Noriko Mizuta Lippit’s pair of essays in Poe Abroad , several essays in Poe’s Pervasive Influence , and Scott Miller’s analysis of Japanese translations of “The Black Cat” in Translated Poe , 261–270 and 416–417.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 167–168.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 168–171.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 171–172.

Tatsumi, “The Double Task of the Translator,” 172, emphasis in the original.

36. For Spanish America, see Esplin , “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction: Edgar Allan Poe’s Reception and Influence in Spanish American from the Beginnings through the Boom,” Resources for American Literary Study 4 (2007): 31–54. For Brazil, see Carlos Daghlian , “Poe in Brazil,” in Poe Abroad , 130–134.

Daghlian, “Poe in Brazil,” 130.

38. Clarice Lispector , trans., Histórias Extraordinárias , by Edgar Allan Poe (Rio de Janeiro: Ediouro, 1998). This book appeared in a series for youth readers entitled Clássicos para o Jovem Leitor .

39. Lenita Esteves , “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Edgar Poe in the Brazilian Literary System,” in Translated Poe , 157.

Esteves, “The Unparalleled Adventure,” 158.

For details about the early reception of Poe in Spanish America, see Esplin, “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction,” 33–38.

42. Juan Antonio Pérez Bonalde , trans., “El cuervo” by Edgar Allan Poe , 1887, in J. A. Pérez Bonalde: Estudio preliminar de Pedro Pablo Paredes , ed. Pedro Pablo Paredes (Caracas: Academia Venezolana, 1964), 2:151–157.

43. Rubén Darío , Azul , 1888 (Buenos Aires: Espasa- Calpe, 1945) ; Darío , “Los raros,” 1893, in Obras completas (Madrid: Afrodisio Aguado, 1950), 2:245–517.

See Esplin, “From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction,” 35–38 and 43–46, for a comparative analysis of Pérez Bonalde’s translation, “El cuervo,” and Carlos Obligado’s more meticulous version of the poem from 1932.

Darío, “Los raros,” 267, my translation.

Englekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature , 146.

47. Fernando Iwasaki and Jorge Volpi , eds., Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , by Edgar Allan Poe , trans. Julio Cortázar , prologues by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa (Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2008).

48. Borges notes in several texts that he thinks it is strange that Poe, a writer born in Boston, makes his way to Argentina via France. See, for example, Borges , “Prólogo de prólogos,” in Obras completas (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 2007), 4:13 ; and Borges , “Sobre los clásicos,” in Páginas de Jorge Luis Borges: Seleccionadas por el autor (Buenos Aires: Celtia, 1982), 231. Cortázar, contrastingly, calls Baudelaire “el doble de Edgar Allan Poe” [“the double of Edgar Allan Poe”] and claims to have kept a copy of Baudelaire’s Poe translations nearby while translating Poe into Spanish. See Ernesto González Bermejo , Conversaciones con Julio Cortázar (Barcelona: Editora y Distribuidora Hispano Americana, 1978), 35–36.

49. Horacio Quiroga , “El tonel de amontillado,” 1901, in Todos los cuentos (Madrid: Allca, 1997), 813. The few prose pieces from Los arrecifes de coral appear in Todos los cuentos from pages 807–824.

Quiroga, “El tonel de amontillado,” 813, my translation.

Quiroga, “El tonel de amontillado,” 813.

52. Quiroga , “El crimen de otro,” 1904, in Todos los cuentos , 871–879.

53. Caroline Egan , “Revivification and Revision: Horacio Quiroga’s Reading of Poe,” The Comparatist 35 (2011): 239–248.

54. Quiroga , “El almohadón de pluma,” “La miel silvestre,” and “El hijo,” in Todos los cuentos , 97–102, 122–128, and 752–757. The Quiroga titles for which I provide English translations all come from Margaret Sayers Peden , trans., The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories , by Horacio Quiroga (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1976).

55. Quiroga , “La gallina degollada,” 1911, in Todos los cuentos , 89–96 ; Peden , trans., “The Decapitated Chicken,” in The Decapitated Chicken and Other Stories , 49–56.

Quiroga, “La gallina degollada,” 94–95; “The Decapitated Chicken,” 55–56 .

57. Quiroga , “El manual del perfecto cuentista,” in Todos los cuentos , 1189–1191.

58. Quiroga , “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” in Todos los cuentos , 1194–1195 , my translation.

Quiroga, “Decálogo del perfecto cuentista,” 1194–1195.

Englekirk, Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature , 368.

61. Roberto Bolaño , “Consejos sobre el arte de escribir cuentos,” in Entre paréntesis (Barcelona: Editorial Anagrama, 2004), 324–325 ; Bolaño , “Advice on the Art of Writing Short Stories,” trans. David Draper Clark , World Literature Today 80, no. 6 (2006): 48–49. Although published in 2004, Bolaño begins the essay by noting that he is forty-four years old, showing that he wrote the essay in 1997 or 1998.

62. Jorge Luis Borges and Adolfo Bioy Casares , trans., “La verdad sobre el caso de M. Valdemar,” by Edgar Allan Poe , in Antología de la literatura fantástica , 1940, eds. Jorge Luis Borges , Bioy Casares , and Silvina Ocampo (Buenos Aires: Sudamericana, 1971), 371–379 ; Borges and Bioy Casares , trans., “La carta robada,” by Edgar Allan Poe , in Los mejores cuentos policiales , 1943, eds. Borges and Bioy Casares (Buenos Aires: Emecé, 1997), 23–38.

63. John T. Irwin , The Mystery to a Solution: Poe, Borges, and the Analytic Detective Story (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1994) ; Esplin , Borges’s Poe: The Influence and the Reinvention of Edgar Allan Poe in Spanish America (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2016).

64. Borges often mentioned reading Poe in his childhood. See, for example, Borges and Norman Thomas di Giovanni , “Autobiographical Notes,” New Yorker , September 19, 1970, 42 and 78.

Copies of books by Poe held at the Fundación Internacional Jorge Luis Borges and at Argentina’s national library in the Sala del Tesoro reveal Borges’s continual return to Poe. The books contain notes in Borges’s hand, in Leonor Acevedo de Borges’s hand, and/or in Kodama’s hand.

66. Borges , “Prólogo,” in Edgar Allan Poe, La carta robada , ed. Franco Maria Ricci . (Madrid: Siruela, 1985), 12–13.

67. Borges , “La génesis de ‘El cuervo’ de Poe,” La Prensa (Buenos Aires), August 25, 1935 ; Borges , “Edgar Allan Poe,” La Nación (Buenos Aires), October 2, 1949 , sec. 2. For detailed accounts of Borges’s Poe references, see Esplin , “Jorge Luis Borges’s References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 1,” Poe Studies 48 (2015): 120–160 ; and “Jorge Luis Borges’s References to Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography, Section 2,” Poe Studies 49 (2016): 128–159.

68. Jason Weiss , “Writing at Risk: Interview with Julio Cortázar,” in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar , ed. Jamie Alazraki (New York: G. K. Hall & Company, 1999), 73. Cortázar makes similar claims in François Hébert’s “An Interview with Julio Corázar,” in Critical Essays on Julio Cortázar , 62.

Weiss, “Writing at Risk,” 73; Hébert, “An Interview with Julio Corázar,” 62.

70. Although originally published in various collections, each of these Cortázar short stories is available in Cortázar , Relatos (Buenos Aires: Editorial Sudamericana, 1970). All of the cited English translations of Cortázar’s stories except “The Island at Noon” are available in Cortázar , Blow-Up and Other Stories , trans. Paul Blackburn (New York: Pantheon, 1967).   “The Island at Noon” appears in Cortázar, All Fires the Fire , trans. Suzanne Jill Levine (New York, Pantheon, 1973), 90–98.

Cortázar, “Lejana,” 437–438; Cortázar, “The Distances,” 26–27.

Weiss, “Writing at Risk,” 73.

73. Julio Cortázar , trans., Obras en prosa by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Madrid: Revista de Occidente; Río Piedras: Editorial Universitaria Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1956).

74. Carlos Olivera , trans., Novelas y cuentos , by Edgar Allan Poe (Paris: Garnier Frères, 1884) ; Edgar Allan Poe , Historias extraordinarias (Buenos Aires: Biblioteca de la Nación, 1903) ; and Armando Bazán , ed., Obras completas , by Edgar Allan Poe (Buenos Aires: Claridad, 1944).

75. Cortázar , trans., Obras en prosa by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Barcelona: Editorial Universitaria de la Universidad de Puerto Rico, 1969) ; Cortázar , trans., Cuentos , by Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1970).

76. Cortázar , trans., Ensayos y críticas by Edgar Allan Poe (Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 1973).

77. Volpi and Iwasaki , “Poe & Cía,” in Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , 13.

Weiss, Writing at Risk,” 73.

81. Mario Vargas Llosa , “Poe y Cortázar,” Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , 19–20.

Cantalupo, Barbara , ed. Poe’s Pervasive Influence . Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2012 .

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Englekirk, John Eugene.   Edgar Allan Poe in Hispanic Literature . New York: Instituto de las Españas en los Estados Unidos, 1934 .

Esplin, Emron. “ From Poetic Genius to Master of Short Fiction: A Map of Edgar Allan Poe’s Reception and Influence in Spanish America from the Beginnings through the Boom. ” Resources for American Literary Study 31 ( 2006 ): 31–54.

Esplin, Emron , and Margarida Vale de Gato , eds. Translated Poe . Bethlehem, PA: Lehigh University Press, 2014 .

Even-Zohar, Itamar. “The Position of Translated Literature within the Literary Polysystem.” In The Translation Studies Reader (3rd ed.), edited by Lawrence Venuti , 162–167. New York: Routledge, 2012 .

Fisher, Benjamin Franklin , ed. Poe and Our Times: Influences and Affinities . Baltimore: Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1986 .

Iwasaki, Fernando , and Jorge Volpi , eds. Cuentos completos: Edición comentada , by Edgar Allan Poe . Translated by Julio Cortázar . Prologues by Carlos Fuentes and Mario Vargas Llosa . Madrid: Páginas de Espuma, 2008 .

Lefevere, André . Translating Literature: Practice and Theory in a Comparative Literature Context . New York: MLA, 1992 .

Quinn, Patrick F.   The French Face of Edgar Poe . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957 .

Vines, Lois Davis.   Valéry and Poe: A Literary Legacy . New York: New York University Press, 1992 .

Vines, Lois Davis , ed. Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999 .

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Article contents

Poe, edgar allan.

• Thomas Wright
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
• Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka (1848)
• Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
• The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
• The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
• Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

Further Reading

• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966. Collection of all of the famous essays on Poe, including those by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Walt Whitman.
• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. A Companion to Poe Studies . Westport, Conn., 1996. A comprehensive collection of modern appraisals of every aspect of Poe's life and work.
• Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge, 2002. Excellent and wide-ranging collection of late-twentieth-century Poe scholarship.
• Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 . Boston, 1974.
• Silverman, Kenneth . Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York, 1991. Its psychoanalytic explanations are sometimes unconvincing, but it is easily the best biography available.
• Walker, I. M. , ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage . New York, 1986. Anthology of contemporary reviews of Poe's work.

Related Articles

• American Detective Fiction
• Popular Fiction
• The Short Story in America

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Edgar Allan Poe by Richard Kopley LAST REVIEWED: 27 October 2016 LAST MODIFIED: 27 October 2016 DOI: 10.1093/obo/9780199827251-0050

Born to a gifted actress and a less talented actor, Edgar Allan Poe (b. 1809–d. 1849) was orphaned in 1811 and taken in by the Allans of Richmond. Over time, tensions with John Allan grew, culminating with young Poe’s withdrawal from the University of Virginia in 1826 for incurring gambling debts and leading to his 1827 voyage to Boston. Poe published Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), then joined the army, eventually serving as a cadet at West Point, and, after deliberately causing his own court-martial, lived in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm, his cousin Virginia, and his brother, Henry (who died in 1831). Having published Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems (1831), Poe shifted to fiction, and in 1835 he became an editor of Richmond’s Southern Literary Messenger . He published short stories, poems, and criticism, and he began to write his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Owing to his drinking, however, he lost his job in 1837 and ventured, with his new wife, Virginia, and his aunt (now his mother-in-law), to New York City—where he published Pym (1838)—and then to Philadelphia. In 1842 Virginia developed tuberculosis, his drinking intensified, and his poverty continued—indeed, he declared bankruptcy late that year. Yet, also during the Philadelphia period, he served as a magazine editor and wrote some of his greatest stories. His collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in 1840, and he soon thereafter created the modern detective story. In 1844 Poe and his family moved to New York City, where he achieved his greatest fame with “The Raven” in 1845. Also, he published The Raven and Other Poems (1845) and Tales (1845). But his drinking interfered with his editing the Broadway Journal , and he became involved in literary and legal conflicts. He and his family moved to Fordham, and Virginia died there in January 1847. In 1848 he published his cosmological prose-poem, Eureka , and in 1849 he returned to Richmond and became engaged to a wealthy widow, Elmira Royster Shelton, whom he had known in his youth. But he clearly was unhappy with the arrangement. Exactly what happened in Baltimore is not known, but on 3 October 1849 he was found inebriated and “rather the worse for wear”; he died in the Washington College Hospital four days later. Rufus Griswold, his literary executor, wrote an infamously hostile obituary, from which Poe’s reputation has never fully recovered. Certainly, Poe had his share of mortal frailties, but he also created immortal works of literature.

A wide variety of full-length studies of Poe are available; a selection is offered here. The introductory works are Fisher 2008 , Hammond 1983 , Hayes 2009 , and Symons 1978 . All are written with ease, brevity, and clarity. The most rewarding for the new student of Poe is surely Fisher 2008 . The ambitious full-length studies are Allen 1934 , Hoffman 1972 , Quinn 1998 , and Silverman 1991 . For the authority of its research, Silverman 1991 is clearly the book to read. But Hoffman 1972 , with its lively, idiosyncratic interpretation of Poe’s writings, is a delight. And Allen 1934 and Quinn 1998 furnish important and interesting foundational work, which helped shape decades of Poe studies.

Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe . New York: Farrar & Rinehart, 1934.

If its prose is sometimes a bit overheated and the detail occasionally imagined, this volume, which updates and corrects the two-volume 1926 version, is still a worthwhile, spirited, and engaging presentation of Poe’s life.

Fisher, Benjamin F. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2008.

DOI: 10.1017/CBO9780511816888

Slender, clear, even-handed, accessible introduction to Poe. This is a very good place to start for its brief and cogent considerations of his life, his context, his work, and its reception.

Hammond, J. R. The Edgar Allan Poe Companion . London: Macmillan, 1983.

A convenient introduction, featuring a brief biography, an analysis of his works in various genres, and handy orienting tools—a Poe dictionary and a listing of people and places in Poe’s works.

Hayes, Kevin J. Edgar Allan Poe . London: Reaktion, 2009.

This brief, recent account of Poe’s life opens with his influence and his participation in literary contests and then takes a more traditional chronological trajectory. The attitude conveyed is a mixture of pity and admiration.

Hoffman, Daniel. Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe . 1st ed. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1972.

Lively, personal, compelling study of Poe and his works, written con brio . The author offers a series of jaunty and provocative close readings with attention to a range of matters, from the hoaxical to the heroic.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . Foreword by Shawn Rosenheim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

The classic biography of Poe, written with ample research and evident affection. It includes a generous sampling of the letters and a deft blending of the life and the work. Sympathetic and appreciative, this volume continues to be a substantial contribution. Originally published in 1941.

Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance . New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Thoroughly researched standard biography of Poe, readable and reliable. It ably relates the life to the work but sometimes offers restrained admiration. The approach is psychoanalytic, with a thoughtful emphasis on Poe’s lifelong mourning.

Symons, Julian. The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe . New York: Harper & Row, 1978.

This work offers two separate overviews—one of Poe’s life and one of Poe’s works. The writing is straightforward, the interpretation tilted toward the psychoanalytic and without great regard for the academic.

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Edgar Allan Poe Essay Topics & Ideas

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Edgar allan poe essay topics for college students, ✒️ persuasive essay topics about edgar allan poe.

• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe and “The Tyger” by William Blake
• “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• “Black Cat” a Story by Edgar Allan Poe
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• “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe Essay (Book Review)
• “The Black Cat” Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe
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• “The Fall of the House of Usher” by Edgar Allan Poe Literature Analysis Research
• “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” by Edgar Allan Poe Research
• A Comparison of The Black Cat by Edgar Allan Poe and The Cat from Hell by Stephen King
• A Dark Mood in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
• A Report on The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
• Analysis “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Analysis “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Analysis of “The Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe
• Analysis of Alone by Edgar Allan Poe
• Analysis of Styles and Themes in The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
• Analyze the Edgar Allan Poe
• Anti Transcendentalism in the Literary Works of Edgar Allan Poe 1
• Author’s Life and Experiences in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
• Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

✨ Best edgar allan poe Topic Ideas & Essay Examples

• Edgar allan poe conclusion Edgar Allan Poe, those who are familiar with that famous name always allow a chill to run down their spines when they hear it. Poe has always been known for his dramatic and eerie writing style that has entertained readers for centuries. Of course ….
• Edgar allan poe prompts “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Fall of The House of usher”, and “The Raven”, when I hear his name Imagine murderers, madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women coming back from their graves. He was a very versatile writer who was able to write ….
• Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe is a man who is considered to be a true American genius of our time, and by many, the personification of death. His works have been collected and celebrated for over a hundred years from this day. He was a man who’s dreary horror ….
• Edgar allan poe hooks The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe : “The Raven” is a narrative poem by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. First published in January 1845, the poem is noted for its musicality, language, and supernatural dark atmosphere. It tells of a talking raven’s ….
• Edgar Allan Poe vs. Stephen King Poe was the classic horror writer during the 1800’s. He is known as the first horror writer in the United States. He is also known as the first writer of detective stories. Poe set the precedent for the horror writers in the USA. Stephen King ….
• Research Paper “The Raven” Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe s The Raven is a fabulous verse form that is looked at by legion pupils each twelvemonth. This verse form is a dark verse form that has a sad tone to it. A adult male is about off-guard ( l. 3 ) in his chamber when he hears a knock ….
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe Analysis “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is undoubtedly the dark poet’s most acclaimed work, and subsequently one of the most famous poems ever written. These facts come as no surprise once one reads this enigmatic narrative poem and examines the themes and ….
• Analysis of the Poem “To Helen” by Edgar Allan Poe The abduction of Helen of Troy, the wife of Menelaus, by the Trojan Prince Paris, was the catalyst for the Trojan War. Because of the ambiguity of the occurrence, there exist feelings toward Helen that are at odds with one another. There are those ….
• Edgar Allan Poe as American Writer Edgar Allen PoeWho is Edgar Allen Poe? He was a 19th century American writer born to Elizabeth (‘betty’;) Arnold Hopkins and David Poe. (Internet source) Poe was an well-educated individual. He would attend a private school in London and then an ….
• “The Raven” Poem by Edgar Allan Poe “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe is about a lonely man who tries to ease his “sorrow for the lost Lenore” by distracting his mind with old books. The narrator is then interrupted by a tapping on his chamber door, which he hopes will be his lost love, ….
• Writing Techniques of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps one of the best writers of suspense novels that there has ever been. Poe’s works are widely known due to his technique of writing. Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Black Cat are perfect examples of his ….
• Edgar Allan Poe Rhetorical During the Romantic Era, the Dark Romantics sought to oppose the ideas of the Transcendentalists, who believed in following one’s own heart alone. A quintessential Dark Romantic, Edgar Allan Poe uses literary devices, the theme of death, and the ….
• Edgar Allan Poe Research Paper Everyone Else is Pleading Insanity, Why can’t l? If one were to say that Edgar Allan Poe is a good writer, he or she is making an understatement of his work. He is one of the most critically acclaimed writers of all time. HIS stories have put him in ….
• Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens One contrast between the works of Edgar Allan Poe and Charles Dickens is style. Nicholas Neckline is an example of style from the author’s works. Nicholas Neckline at that time was considered to be the funniest novel in the English language. ….
• Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusets, January 19, 1809. His parents were touring actors, and they both died before Poe was three years old. After their death, Poe was taken in by a wealthy merchant named John Allan in Richmond, Virginia. ….
• The Life of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe is a man constantly searching for beauty to depart from the mental and moral ugliness in his life. This reflects in his the poetry and short stories. Poe sees evil as a major threat to himself and to man due to the fact that he lives ….
• Comparison between Edgar Allan Poe and Stephen King King Pick two authors from the gothic portion of literature and compare/ contrast them. By Walkthlsway442 Comparisons can be made between everyone in the world, whether it be a man, woman, child, or animal. In this sense, one can compare authors, ….
• Edgar Allan Poe Internet Research Paper The topic of this research paper is to attempt to explain the writing styles and writing techniques used by of one of the most famous American short-story writer, author, and poet, Edgar Allan Poe. This paper will also discuss why when Poe writes ….
• The Tell Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe ‘The Tell Tale Heart’ is a story about a man who killed an old man Just because he didn’t Like the way his eyes looked like. The mall character speaks about madness as being a gift and not a kid of disability for example In paragraph one on page 93 ….
• “A Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart,” is a story in which the narrator uses great detail to describe the murder of an innocent old man who suffers from cataracts and the narrator’s consistent argument regarding his mental state. It ….

✍ Interesting Essay Topics About Edgar Allan Poe

• Compare/Contrast Works of Edgar Allan Poe
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• Edgar Allan Poe and Momentary Satisfaction Revenge
• Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne: a Comparison
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• How does Edgar Allan Poe create atmosphere in “The Tell Tale Heart”?
• How Does Edgar Allan Poe Keep the Reader in Suspense?
• Imagery Use in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe
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• The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Fall of the House of Usher by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Gothic-Romantic Story, “Ligeia” by Edgar Allan Poe Essay (Critical Writing)
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• The Life, the Death, the Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe
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• The Narrator’s Sentence and Punishment in The Tell-tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Pit and the Pendulum by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Poem “Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe Rhetorical
• The Rejection in the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Significance of The Motif of Denial in The Masque of The Red Death, a Short Story by Edgar Allan Poe
• The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
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• The Theme of Revenge in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe and The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• The Use of Symbolism and Irony in The Cask of Amontillado by Edgar Allan Poe
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‘are we doomed’ class debates end of the world—and finds reason for hope, the haunting power of edgar allan poe, uchicago course explores work of writer beyond his greatest hits.

It’s difficult not to encounter the work of Edgar Allan Poe. His famous raven’s refrain “Nevermore” continues to caw in high school classrooms. The icy grip of his short stories keeps hold of our movie and TV screens generation after generation. But there’s more to Poe than spooky tales. 

Brion Drake is taking students beyond “The Raven” in a new UChicago course dedicated to the works of Poe.    

“We tend to think of ravens and still-beating hearts of the newly murdered, hidden beneath floorboards,” said Drake, an English Ph.D. candidate studying 19th-century American literature. “We think of this comic or campy, pop cultural icon of horror and the grotesque. And that's part of the story, but not nearly all of it.”  

Born in Virginia in 1809, Poe wrote in an era when American identity and literature were still being defined. Though best known for his Gothic horror stories and poetry, Poe also wrote humor, satire, hoaxes and is even credited for inventing the detective genre.  

While navigating a nascent, difficult publishing industry, Poe attempted to scrape together a living as a writer when few could. His personal life, including notorious squabbles with other writers and his mysterious death in 1849, has made Poe into a mythological figure as compelling as any of his characters. 

In this edited Q&A, Drake gives insight into the course and explores the author’s range of work and pervasive hold on popular culture.  

Why teach a course solely focused on Poe? 

The reason I'm probably drawn to Poe probably has something to do with my lifelong passion for death metal and for horror movies. The image of Poe sits there in the background and provokes me from time to time. 

There's an insight, or an intimacy, that develops out of reading an author's body of work. To sit closely with his work over a course, you encounter a very different Poe than the character that we see in pop culture, or by only reading his greatest hits. I think the students are learning quite quickly that the more you read, the more enigmatic he becomes. 

What are some lesser-known works of Poe that you’ll be reading? 

He has a great essay called “The Balloon-Hoax,” which is trying to convince the American public that a passenger balloon floated across the Atlantic. At the end of his career, he writes this long metaphysical essay called “Eureka.” Is it a performance piece or a sincere treatise on the nature of the universe?  

I wanted that to be a capstone on the class to see where we situate Poe. Is he always winking at us? Where do we find genuine sentiment? It’s hard to know because he's a brilliant satirist alongside the gothic and the horror. It’s difficult to pin him down.  

What did the literary world look like during Poe’s era?   

Poe was very much embedded in a moment when American literature was just coming into its own. It was still undefined; there was a question of who would define it. 

This is also a time when it was nearly impossible to make a living as a writer. Poe published most of his work in magazines. What does it mean to carve out an authorial identity in a miscellany where you're situated next to a bunch of different writers, often anonymous?  

In trying to make a living, Poe scrambled and would travel and write whatever he could sell. So, being a shrewd, itinerant writer—and understanding how text circulated at the time—he understood that sensational literature sold and people liked reading it. He would be intentionally excessive; he would push boundaries. He'd go to the extreme and others wouldn't. 

What do you hope students will take away from the course? 

I think the range of Poe is what I'm hoping my students come away with. He invents the detective genre entirely. We don't have Sherlock Holmes without Poe, we don't have “House” without Poe. 

I hope we're also animating him in the terms of today. Why are we continually reworking him into modern idioms? For example, what can a pathological narrator tell us about our fixations with digital media?  

I want them to make Poe their own—develop an intimate connection with this writer in a way that kind of incorporates the mass cultural image of him, but also a more nuanced understanding of him as writer and as a person. 

Why do you think Poe’s writing has such staying power?  

His work is not only terrifying, but it's kind of delightful. It's a pleasure to read the raven’s retort “Nevermore.” Or to watch a narrator go mad while listening to the heartbeat of the man who he murdered and buried beneath his floorboard. These are scenes of torment. Yet, we read them with the same kind of joy of modern suspense or horror films.  

But I also agree with those who see a dispassionate clarity in his work, a willingness to confront the terrible and the dramatic head on without flinching from it. He finds tenderness in anxiety, fear and trauma.  

He models a way of seeing that resonates beyond this historical moment. There's an intensity of focus in horror that reveals what is typically hidden or lurking at the margins of thought.  

What’s your favorite piece by Poe? 

Of his short fiction, “The Fall of the House of Usher.” We can see his poetic practice at work in the structure of the story. There's tenderness, there's horror. I think it has a bit of everything. 

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Last Update: April 20, 2024 Navigation: Main Menu Poe's Works Bookshelf Editorial Policies Searching

Text: Evert A. Duyckinck, “[Review of The Works of the late Edgar A. Poe ],” Literary World (New York, NY), vol. 6, no. 156, January 26, 1850, p. 81

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

[page 81, column 2, continued:]

POE'S WORKS.

The Works of the late Edgar Allan Poe: with Notices of his Life and Genius. By N. P. Willis, J. R. Lowell, and R. W. Griswold. In two vols. J. S. Redfield.

F ROM the announcement we expected a somewhat fuller account of the life of Mr. Poe than is furnished in the few pages prefixed to this collection of his writings. If we had considered carefully the character of the man's talent this expectation would have been found to be ill-founded. Poe was strictly impersonal; as greatly so as any man whose acquaintance we have enjoyed. In a knowledge of him extending through several years, and frequent opportunities, we can scarcely remember to have had from him any single disclosure or trait of personal character; anything which marked him as a mover or observer among men. Although he had travelled in distant countries, sojourned in cities of our own country, and had, at different times, under favorable opportunities, been brought into contact with life and character of many phases, he had no anecdote to tell, no description of objects, dress, or appearance. Nothing, in a word, to say of things. Briefly, he was what Napoleon named an ideologist — a man of ideas. He lived entirely apart from the solidities and realities of life: was an abstraction; thought, wrote, and dealt solely in abstractions. It is this which gives their peculiar feature to his writings. They have no color, but are in pure outline, delicately and accurately drawn, but altogether without the glow pow pulse of humanity. His genius was mathematical, rather than pictorial or poetical. He demonstrates instead of painting. Selecting some quaint and abstruse theme, he proceeds to unfold it with the closeness, care, and demonstrative method of Euclid; and you have, to change the illustration, fireworks for fire; the appearance of water for water; and a great shadow in the place of an actual, moist, and thunder-bearing sky. His indifference to living, flesh and blood subjects, explains his fondness for the mechanism and music of verse, without reference to the thought or feeling. He is therefore a greater favorite with scholars than with the people; and would be (as a matter of course) eagerly followed by at rain of poetastering imitators, odes to do them justice in a familiar image, “hear the bell ring and don’t know where the clapper hangs.” Poe is an object of considerable, or more than considerable size; but the imitation of Poe is a shadow indescribably small and attenuated. We can get along, for a while, on a diet of common air — but the exhausted receiver of the air-pump is another thing! The method and management of many of Mr. Poe's tales and poems are admirable, exhibiting a wonderful ingenuity, and completely proving him master of the weapon he had chosen for his use. He lacks reality, imagination, every-day power, but he is remarkably subtle, acute, and earnest in his own way. His instrument is neither an organ nor a harp; he is neither a King David nor a Beethoven, but rather a Campanologian, a Swiss bell-ringer, who from little contrivances of his own, with an ingeniously-devised hammer, strikes a sharp melody, which has all that is delightful and affecting, that is attainable without a soul. We feel greatly obliged [column 3:] to Messrs. Willis, Lowell, and Griswold, for helping to wheel forward into public view this excellent machine; to which Mr. Redfield has furnished an appropriate cloth and cover, with the performer's head, as large and as true as life, stamped on its front, in an excellent daguerreotype portrait.

The description of the cover, with a daguerreotype portrait, is curious. No copies of this set with an image of Poe stamped on the cover are known, certainly not “as large . . . as life.” The description may be a confusion of some sort in regard to the engraved frontispiece of the first volume. In 1850, it was not possible to reproduce photographs, except in the form of engravings or lithographs.

[S:0 - LW, 1850] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - Bookshelf - Review of The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (E. A Duyckinck, 1850)

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Sat / act prep online guides and tips, understanding the raven: expert poem analysis.

General Education

"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most well-known poems ever written. It brought its author worldwide fame and has frequently been analyzed, performed, and parodied. But what about this poem makes it so special?

In this guide, we give you a complete overview of "The Raven," discussing everything from the sad stories behind its creation and what is actually going on between the narrator and the raven, to its themes and the poetic devices it uses so effectively.

The Raven Poem: Full Text

Below is the complete text of The Raven poem, written by Edgar Allan Poe and published in 1845. It consists of 18 stanzas and a total of 108 lines.

What Is "The Raven" About?

"The Raven" is a poem about a man who is heartbroken over the recent death of his beloved Lenore. As he passes a lonely December night in his room, a raven taps repeatedly on the door and then the window. The man first thinks the noise is caused by a late night visitor come to disturb him, and he is surprised to find the raven when he opens the window shutter. After being let in, the raven flies to and lands on a bust of Pallas (an ancient Greek goddess of wisdom).

The man is amused by how serious the raven looks, and he begins talking to the raven; however, the bird can only reply by croaking "nevermore."

The man reflects aloud that the bird will leave him soon as all the people he cared about have left him. When the raven replies "nevermore," the man takes it as the bird agreeing with him, although it's unclear if the raven actually understands what the man is saying or is just speaking the one word it knows.

As the man continues to converse with the bird, he slowly loses his grip on reality. He moves his chair directly in front of the raven and asks it despairing questions, including whether he and Lenore will be reunited in heaven. Now, instead of being merely amused by the bird, he takes the raven's repeated "nevermore" response as a sign that all his dark thoughts are true. He eventually grows angry and shrieks at the raven, calling it a devil and a thing of evil.

The poem ends with the raven still sitting on the bust of Pallas and the narrator, seemingly defeated by his grief and madness, declaring that his soul shall be lifted "nevermore."

Background on "The Raven"

Edgar Allan Poe wrote "The Raven" during a difficult period in his life. His wife, Virginia, was suffering from tuberculosis, Poe was struggling to make money as an unknown writer, and he began drinking heavily and picking fights with coworkers and other writers. It's easy to see how he could have conjured the dark and melancholy mood of "The Raven."

It's not known how long Poe spent writing "The Raven," (guesses range from anywhere to a single day to over a decade) but it's thought most likely that he wrote the poem in the summer of 1844. In his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe stated that he chose to focus the poem on the death of a beautiful woman because it is "unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world." He hoped "The Raven" would make him famous, and, in the same essay, stated that he purposely wrote the poem to appeal to both "the popular and the critical taste."

"The Raven" was published in the newspaper The New York Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845 (depending on the source, Poe was paid either $9 or $15 for it). "The Raven" brought Poe instant fame, although not the financial security he was looking for. Critical reception was mixed, with some famous writers such as Ralph Waldo Emerson and William Butler Yeats expressing their dislike for the poem. Despite those initial mixed reviews, The Raven poem has continued its popularity and is now one of the most well-known poems in the world. Countless parodies have been written, and the poem has been referenced in everything from The Simpsons to the NFL team the Baltimore Ravens (their mascot is even named "Poe").

Major Themes in "The Raven"

From The Raven summary, we know it's definitely a melancholy poem, and most of its themes revolve around grim topics. Here are three of the most important themes.

Theme 1: Grief

Grief is the overwhelming emotion in "The Raven, " and the narrator is absolutely consumed by his grief for his lost love, Lenore. At the beginning of the poem, he tries to distract himself from his sadness by reading a "volume of forgotten lore", but when the raven arrives, he immediately begins peppering it with questions about Lenore and becomes further lost in his grief at the raven's response of "nevermore." By the end of the poem, the narrator is seemingly broken, stating that his soul will never again be "lifted" due to his sadness.

Poe stated that the raven itself was a symbol of grief, specifically, that it represented "mournful and never-ending remembrance." He purposely chose a raven over a parrot (a bird species better known for its ability to speak) because he thought a raven suited the dark tone of the poem better.

Edgar Allan Poe had experienced a great deal of grief by the time he wrote "The Raven," and he had seen people close to him leave, fall gravely ill, or die. He would have been well aware of the consuming power that grief can have and how it has the ability to blot everything else out.

Theme 2: Devotion

It's the narrator's deep love for Lenore that causes him such grief, and later rage and madness. Even though Lenore has died, the narrator still loves her and appears unable to think of anything but her. In the poem, he speaks of Lenore in superlatives, calling her "sainted" and "radiant." In his mind, she is completely perfect, practically a saint. His love for this woman who is no longer here distracts him from everything in his current life. With this theme, Poe is showing the power of love and how it can continue to be powerful even after death.

Theme 3: Rationality vs Irrationality

At the beginning of the poem, the narrator is rational enough to understand that Lenore is dead and he will not see her again. When the raven first begins repeating "nevermore," he realizes that the answer is the bird's "only stock and store," and he won't get another response no matter what he asks. He seems to even find the bird vaguely amusing.

However, as the poem continues, the narrator's irrationality increases as he asks the raven questions it couldn't possibly know and takes its repeated response of "nevermore" to be a truthful and logical answer. He then descends further into madness, cursing the bird as a "devil" and "thing of evil" and thinking he feels angels surrounding him before sinking into his grief. He has clearly come undone by the end of the poem.

In "The Raven," Poe wanted to show the fine line between rational thought and madness and how strong emotions, such as grief, can push a person into irrationality, even during mundane interactions like the one the narrator had with the raven.

The 7 Key Poetic Devices "The Raven" Uses

Edgar Allan Poe makes use of many poetic devices in "The Raven" to create a memorable and moving piece of writing. Below we discuss seven of the most important of these devices and how they contribute to the poem.

Alliteration

An allusion is an indirect reference to something, and Poe makes multiple allusions in "The Raven." Some key ones include:

The bust of Pallas the raven sits on refers to Pallas Athena, the ancient Greek goddess of wisdom.

Nepenthe is a drug mentioned in Homer's ancient epic The Odyssey, and it is purported to erase memories.

The Balm of Gilead is a reference to a healing cream mentioned in the Book of Jeremiah in the Bible.

Aidenn refers to the Garden of Eden, although the narrator likely uses it to mean "heaven" in general, as he wants to know if that's where he and Lenore will reunite.

Ravens themselves are mentioned in many stories, including Norse mythology and Ovid's epic poem Metamorphoses.

The majority of "The Raven" follows trochaic octameter, which is when there are eight trochaic feet per line, and each foot has one stressed syllable followed by one unstressed syllable.

However, Poe actually used several types of meter, and he is said to have based both the meter and rhyming pattern of "The Raven" off Elizabeth Barrett's poem " Lady Geraldine's Courtship." Meter is very prominent in "The Raven," and, along with other poetic devices, helps make it such a popular poem to recite.

The rhyming pattern in "The Raven" follows the pattern ABCBBB. The "B" lines all rhyme with "nevermore" and place additional emphasis on the final syllable of the line.

There is also quite a bit of internal rhyme within the poem, such as the line "But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token," where "unbroken" rhymes with "token."

Internal rhyming occurs in the first line of each stanza. It also occurs in the third line and part of the fourth line of each stanza. In the example "Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!/Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!" "token" and "spoken" in the third line of the stanza rhyme with "unbroken" in the fourth line of the stanza.

Onomatopoeia

Onomatopoeia is when the name of a word is associated with the sound it makes, and it occurs throughout "The Raven," such as with the words "rapping," "tapping," "shrieked," and "whispered." It all helps add to the atmospheric quality of the poem and makes readers feel as though they are really in the room with the narrator and the raven.

What's Next?

"Ozymandias" by Percy Shelley is another famous and often-studied poem. Learn all about this poem and its famous line "look on my works, ye mighty, and despair" in our complete guide to Ozymandias .

There are many more poetic devices than those included in "The Raven." Read our guide on the 20 poetic devices you need to know so you can become an expert.

Taking AP Literature? We've got you covered! In our expert guide to the AP Literature exam, we've compiled all the information you need to know about the test and how to study for it to get a top score.

Christine graduated from Michigan State University with degrees in Environmental Biology and Geography and received her Master's from Duke University. In high school she scored in the 99th percentile on the SAT and was named a National Merit Finalist. She has taught English and biology in several countries.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Writing Themes Research Paper

Edgar Allan Poe was an American short fiction writer who lived a life of afflictions and tragedies such as the claiming of his loved ones by tuberculosis, which then had no cure.

Tuberculosis killed many people. It speared neither his mother nor his wife. As Penguin Readers Teachers Support Program reckons, “he was one of the earliest writers to use the short story form to write many chilling horror stories in the romantic tradition” (1).

He is also widely acclaimed as the originator of detective story. Edgar Allan Poe attempted to live by just writing. However, he faced quite a lot of challenges since the proceeds raised from the works were quite less to afford a decent living coupled with acts of plagiarism.

Interpreting his literary works from the author’s context perhaps ardently reveals these challenges. Additionally, his works arguably, are profoundly inspired by his close people who succumbed mainly to tuberculosis. Consequently, his life experiences prompted him to create stories that conveyed certain themes.

The short story, X-ing a Paragraph, perhaps well portrays the Edgar Alan Poe concerns for acts of plagiarism and non-protection of written works by the Copy Right law; something that immensely impeded his success and subsequent publication of his works.

Penguin Readers Teachers Support Program notes that, in X-Ing a Paragraph “a stubborn Mr. Touch-and-Go Bullet-head…settles down to Alexander-the-great-o-nopolis, where he opens the Nopolis Teapot, a newspaper” (2).

Right from the very first article, he enormously attacks the editor of a local daily newspaper, namely John smith, criticizing over usage of the letter “O” in his publications. In an attempt to show Mr. Smith how skillful he is in writing, Mr. Bullet- head finds himself overusing the letter “O” again. Before he prints the article, Bob discovers that Os were widely missing in the boxes.

However, his boss directs him to print the article in some way. Unfortunately, as Penguin Readers Teachers Support Program puts it, “Following the printer’s tradition, he replaces all Os with Xs”…making the article unreadable, which leads the population to believe that there was something devilish in it” (2). The angry mob tries to find me Mr. Bullet-head. Unfortunately, he ends up to have vanished.

Arguably, the theme of X-ing a Paragraph reflects on the Edgar Alan Poe’s experience in his writing career life. Congruent with this argument, Penguin Readers Teachers Support Program lament, “although Edgar Alan Poe is known for his tales of horror and mystery, X-ing a Paragraph is a sharp satire on newspapers, their editors and gullibility of their readers” (3). This argument largely has some substance especially bearing in mind that Edgar Alan Poe’s work had faced hefty criticisms.

For instance, Neimeyer claims how an anonymous critic suggested that works were unsuitable for the then readers in that they were “below the average of newspaper trash… wild, unmeaning, pointless, aimless…without anything of elevated fancy or praiseworthy humor” (207). Other critics such as Alexandra’s weekly massager commended the author’s creativity and cute use of his power of imagination and incredible powerful level of intellectualism while developing his literary works.

Considering these two commentaries of his literary works, some, levels of mixed criticisms appears just like there was confusions the usage of the Os and Xs in the X-ing a Paragraph. In this context, the theme of the X-ing a Paragraph, widely reflects on the author’s experiences in the writing career.

Horror and mystery were part of the Edgar Alan Poe life. He only attended the university for one semester and then dropped due to financial difficulties. Orphaned at a tender age, he attempted to join the army at the capacity of cadet but failed. Later, he left the people who took care of him, John and Frances Allan, to join the world of uncertainties. Therefore, it is not by coincidence that some of his works reflects terror and misery themes. Such works include The Black Cat amongst others.

Edgar Alan Poe’s literary works appear in three categories, with each category perhaps presenting the various phases of life experiences. Poe fell in love at an early age as sixteen with Elmira Royster. He engaged her despite the lack of parental consent.

Coincidentally, he dedicated his first wave of writing to themes of innocence and beauty coupled with “Love and Joy as dynamic life values in the poet’s feeling for the potentiality of the harmony of mind with nature, of the “soul” with “God” or the universal ‘Ens’” (Cornelius 5). This first category, between1827 to 1831, possessed impeccable romantic myths tantamount to the memoirs of paradise or perhaps if anything less than that, Eden. Edgar Alan Poe’s mother died when he was quite young.

The tragedy left him under foster care. Reflections of pain and loss of the close relatives arguably are evident in his publications of the 1831 to 1841 decade. In this end, Cornelius laments, “a radical change was reflected in poems and tales on the theme of death as finality in a cosmic void of darkness and silence” (13). Though not predicted, state of desperation associated with loss of loved ones in this generation of his literal works, were to turn around and afflict his life again when he lost his wife who he treasured so much in 1847.

Additionally, his works introspects critically the theme of love and hatred. Among the stories in which he ardently addresses hatred and love include William Wilson and Tell-Tale Heart. He looks at the two opposite emotions as complex in nature with deferring psychological impacts especially in the way they serve to blend with each other.

With regard to William Wilson and Tell-Tale Heart, hatred and love stand out as universal realities. It is impossible to separate one from the other. As a way of example, in Tell-Tale Heart, Edgar Alan Poe admits loving a man who he, in turn, murders violently. He presents a paradox between the early men that he loves to the dead man that he hates him.

Arguably, one might extend this paradox to the experiences of Edgar Alan Poe, which were full of instances of happiness. This is evident when he falls in love at sixteen, as well as the instances when he suffers psychologically from the loss of his loved ones where he feels as if the world hates him most.

Edgar Alan Poe was a poet right from his birth. His life experiences provide him with the vital tools for use in the development of his talent.

As Bits and pieces II comment, “He Delights in the wild and visionary, his mind penetrates the inmost recesses of the human soul, creating vast and magnificent dreams, eloquent fancies and terrible mysteries” (Para 10). His life encounters blends well with the recurring themes of horror in his vast literal works, about seventy of them. The Black Cat is one of the stories that bring out the themes of horror and misery.

Much similar to The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat deploys the madness decent of the narrator. Right from the start of the story, he asserts that he is sane despite acknowledging that the tale that he is about to narrate is predominantly wild. The story does not just dwell on the preconceived narrator’s state of mind. It brings into the attention the likely cause of this mental state. The author contented that alcoholism had immensely contributed to this state of mind.

Alcoholism interfered with the manner in which the narrator conceived and grasped realities, as it produced swings of his mood. The cat, consequently, serves almost the same purpose like alcohol in that it interferes with the dynamics characterizing the plot development of the story. The incorporation of alcohol and its associated repercussions is somewhat significant in terms of reflection of the author’s life encounters in the themes of his works.

In fact, Edgar Allan Poe involved himself in the abuse of alcohol especially when he experienced challenges in his life. Perhaps congruent with this proposition, majority of his biographies contend that Edgar Allan Poe could have died of alcohol poisoning in Baltimore. However, others claim based on the impossibility of determining the actual cause of his death. They associate it with afflictions by deleterious effects arising from overconsumption of alcohol.

Conclusively, based on the expositions put forth in the paper, it suffices to declare the life experiences of playwrights and filmmakers the chief determinants of most of the themes they feature in their works. Poe is not an exception.

The paper has pointed out how the situation on the ground contributed towards the many themes: horror and misery, academic crimes, and financial challenges amongst others that are present in his works. Otherwise, Poe’s provides an informative piece of mastery that reflects the life he encountered right from his childhood.

Works Cited

Bits and Pieces II. Selected Quotations about Edgar Allan Poe , 2010. Web. < https://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poebtsp2.htm >.

Cornelius, Kay. Bloom’s BioCritiques: Edgar Allan. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers, 2002. Print.

Neimeyer, Mark. Poe and Popular Culture collected in the Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . London: Cambridge University Press, 2002. Print.

Penguin Readers Teachers Support Program. Outstanding Short Stories , 2008. Web.

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IvyPanda. (2022, February 23). Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes. https://ivypanda.com/essays/edgar-allan-poe/

"Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes." IvyPanda , 23 Feb. 2022, ivypanda.com/essays/edgar-allan-poe/.

IvyPanda . (2022) 'Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes'. 23 February.

IvyPanda . 2022. "Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes." February 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/edgar-allan-poe/.

1. IvyPanda . "Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes." February 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/edgar-allan-poe/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "Edgar Allan Poe's Writing Themes." February 23, 2022. https://ivypanda.com/essays/edgar-allan-poe/.

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