Thanks, I should have checked their posts before saying that.
Wow, seems unanimous not counting the flier. A casual debate prompted this question not a recent reading. Based on the answers so far looks like I need dust off my Poe.
Thanks for the link Boink.
This I think is important. I vote “genius”.
I am too tired to write much, but this quote is a good start,
“Owen Dudley Edwards once drew up a list of routine accusations. Poe, he noted, was guilty of “endless self-indulgence, wallowing in atmosphere, incessant lecturing, ruthless discourse on whatever took the writer’s fancy, longueurs, trivialisations, telegraphing of punch-lines, loss of plot in effect, loss of effect in plot….”
http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/2012/02/the-great-bad-writer-edgar-allan-poe-raven-cusack/
To be a genius, a writer is up against Shakespeare, Spenser, Whitman, Dickinson, Hemingway, Nabokov.
As to Poe’s still being read, James Fenimore Cooper is still widely read, and that man is one of the hackiest hacks to ever hack.
Go out on the street and start asking random people if they’ve ever heard of Owen Dudley Edwards. Come back when one has.
Spenser? *Faerie Queen *Spenser? Is everybody on that list really up to Shakespeare?
Yeah, that’s a good standard–ask the man on the street. Guess what, Honey Boo Boo’s mom should be president. (She’s not that much different from Sarah Palin. They are reality TV idiots with a mentally-challenged kid.)
You do realize that Shakespeare too was a creator of popular works that appealed to the common people? Guess his works must be worthless too, since those filthy peasants liked it.
It’s a perfect standard for determining if Owen Dudley Edwards is worth listening to.
Poe and his works not only inspired generations of writers, but also generations of artists. Just saw Brandywine River Museum’s Picturing Poe Exhibit. Some good artwork there.
Though I really wish I hadn’t read so much Poe at the age of 10. I was way too impressionable at that age.
Try being 10 and reading it while listening to The Wall on headphones. Madness!
I’ll grant you that he was pretty uneven in his output, but genius nonetheless.
I first red Poe at the age of eight. I had a comic book with a story in it about microbes that were accidentally mutated in a lab, which grew to the size of houses. (Or maybe they were created in a lab through political direction. But anyway…) The microbes multiplied and consumed so much oxygen that people were suffocating and it was only getting worse. At the end and angry group (of scientists?) want to disembowel a politician who figured large in the story. 'After all, politicians are full of hot air!
Two panels had lines from Poe:
*But see, amid the mimic rout
A crawling shape intrude!
A blood-red thing that writhes from out
The scenic solitude!
It writhes! It writhes! With mortal pangs
The mimes become its food,
And seraphs sob at vermin fangs
In human gore imbued.*
And the comic book writer attributed the quotes to Poe’s The Conqueror Worm. I’d never read lines like that, and I was hooked. I found a book of Poe in my elementary school’s tiny library and discovered more.
People do realize that Twain’s critique of Cooper was a joke, right?
Great writer…one of the best! I was scared shitless (at the age of 8)-I stumbled upon and read “The Premature Burial”:eek:
Ask the man on the street who they have heard or who they think is better, Thomas Kinkade or J.M.W. Turner? I guarantee you will get the hack painter of light, not the genius painter of light.
Which isn’t to say that Edwards was a genius (he wasn’t), just that the average person’s opinion is worthless.
These are precisely the things that make Poe so great. All literary criticism is one or another prism that one picks up to look through, and no one prism can claim universality, because each and every prism distorts light in its own way.
Mmm, yeah. No. ‘Who is better?’ is anyone who isn’t Kinkade. Doesn’t work with Poe.
But the average man loves Kinkade. Why you can go to a strip mall and get a genuine piece of art. Genius.
I read an alternative history story once where Poe had survived, and portrayed him twenty years later as a general on the Confederate side in the Civil War. It sounds schlocky, but it read as if the author truly appreciated and sympathized with Poe (the real man) and his inner tortures. At the end, after using innovative tactics to win a victory against the Union forces, and being proven right in the face of the skepticism he was long accustomed to, Poe is still left angry and bitter and despondently reflecting that he should have died that night in Baltimore.