Is/was EAP really that good or was he just the only one doing horror at the time? I like his stuff but it seems rather ordinary (except for the subject matter). If he was that good who else was a contemporary horror writer?
Genius. He was a craftsman who chose his words carefully.
For example, in The Black Cat a wall falls ‘bodily’. This meant that the wall fell down as a single unit, of course. But there was also a body behind it. He could have just said the wall fell, but he added the little flourish. The Raven is full of references. Why did the raven sit upon the bust of Pallas? The narrator was seeking secret knowledge. He was reading ‘volumes of forgotten lore’ – spell books – to try to bring back his lost Lenore. He wanted assurance that at least he and Lenore would be reunited in the afterlife. Pallas Athena was the goddess of wisdom. The raven perching on the bust implied that the raven had wisdom and knowledge to impart. The narrator also jokes that the raven came from ‘the night’s Plutonian shore’. Pluto was, of course, the god of the underworld. So here he has a messenger from the underworld who can answer his questions. And so on. And of course he was known for his use of alliteration.
As far as the stories, he was like the Alfred Hitchcock of his time. (I was tempted to say Stephen King, but The Hitch is a closer match.)
I don’t know about horror writers, but Nathaniel Hawthorne was contemporary and he dealt with Mortal Sin.
Actually, he really wasn’t appreciated much in his own time. That’s part of why he died so young - he was broke and sick and couldn’t afford a warm place to live or any medicine.
He was considered a cheap thriller hack, and his major accomplishment was to get so much of his work actually in print in somewhat reputable papers and rags. (He had several “friends” who published those papers, or were editors at them, and he basically bribed them to slide his stuff in whenever there was a gap or they were in need of some filler material.)
Writers who wanted to be known as “writers” ***had ***to write about appropriate and culturally-elevated subjects like history and philosophy and godly lives of irritating little prats.
Anyone writing what we think of as “genre” or popular fiction was derided as a hack or a sensationalist, and they were very much looked down upon by “real” writers (who wrote what we now would think of as dogmatic or literary fiction, or boring-ass nonfiction). Hacks wrote quickly created paint-by-numbers stories of thrills or escapes or drama over and over and over again (think Harlequin romances if there wasn’t any quality control or desire for originality) for cheap little pulp paper packets that disintegrated quickly, and had horrible print quality (hence “pulp” fiction) and no reputable person would be caught dead reading them in public (hence bathroom reading and misleading book jackets).
Poe’s main genius was in marketing (ie bribery), and understanding that people wanted to read thrilling and somewhat terrible tales sometimes, rather than to be continually educated and/or uplifted.
His other main genius was to realize that you could write a decent-quality story that still had the qualities that the pulps contained. Unlike the paint-by-numbers stories, he actually worked hard to have plot and character and motivation and real dramatic tension instead of “and the poor helpless girl got chloroformed and carted off by the bad guy again, leaving the hero to seek her out.” He wasn’t a *great *writer (I think his stories are pretty well-crafted, and he’s a master of the short-story format, but he’s not Shakespeare) but he was persistent and he knew his genre and was determined enough to keep writing in it, even though he got nearly no encouragement from anyone at all.
I consider him one of the forerunners of genre literature. He mainly proved that people would read stories that were dramatic and “terrible,” and that it was possible to write a dramatic story that wasn’t a total cultural wasteland.
What’s really funny is that in France? They LOVED the guy. They’ve practically sainted him. Even now, French literature considers Poe to be a stellar example of a writer, while most Americans know of him as “That Raven-Beating Heart-horror guy” and very few literary people consider his writing a good model to emulate.
YMMV in literature, even in expert opinions!
Well, he did invent the concept of black holes and an imploding universe.
It’s true that he was under-appreciated in his time. But his stories still hold up.
Look, he singlehandedly invented the detective story genre and pretty much invented literary horror. That takes more than just talent. He’s been dead for a century and a half and writers are still following the paths he trailblazed.
Ground breaking themes and evocative writing. Genius enough.
And he influenced Herman Melville, Jules Verne, Arthur Conan Doyle, H.P. Lovecraft…
Unquestionably a genius.
He wrote horror stories so good they are still being read 163 years after his death. They are taught in high school and college. Not only that, they are being read by average readers, not just academics. There are not too many writers who achieve that feat.
He is the father of the modern detective story. One of his stories, “The Purloined Letter,” is a legitimate classic of the genre since every nearly reader and writer knows “The Purloined Letter” gambit.
He wrote some early science fiction and I would contend that “A Descent Into the Maelstrom” remains a first-rate work of that genre.
He wrote prose poems and humorous stories, though much of his humor does not hold up well, IMO. There are exceptions like “A Talk with a Mummy” (hope I remembered the title correctly, but it’s pretty funny.)
He was a first-rate poet (“The Raven;” “Annabelle Lee,” my personal favorite; etc.).
He was a journalist and a literary critic.
Whether his stories themselves are well-written (and IMHO some are better than others), the situations he presents in them are so iconic that they stick with you, which accounts for a large part of his lasting fame.
He was not the only one doing horror at the time; there was enough other horror being written that Poe actually wrote parodies of the genre. In searching for support for this claim, I came across the following article, which I’m not sure I totally agree with but which certainly provides an interesting point of view:
Absolute genius and probably America’s greatest author, which he would have solidified had he lived a full life.
Annabel Lee and The Raven are probably the two greatest poems I’ve ever read and they are both by the same author.
Genius nuff said, on and on the pedulum goes. Swinging. gotcha
He probably suffers in comparison sometimes the way the Citizen Kane does: The stuff he did first and amazingly well has been redone so many times that modern readers think he was full of cliches.
But someone who invents things that end up being cliches is a genius.
While I don’t know the details with Poe, I can believe this. It was the same with Kafka. He didn’t write about bureaucracy itself because he wanted to portray it as a nightmarish experience. He saw it as comical, and simply used it as a metaphor for other concerns he wanted to write about.
Unquestionably a genius.
Oh come on, put a poe on it!
Hack.
If you registered to post that, would you kindly explain?
I don’t think they registered specifically for that, but I second the quest for explanation.