Out in the last couple of months is Poe, ed by Ellen Datlow, which is an anthology of 19 horror, dark fantasy, and suspense tales "inspired by" Poe.
There are four stories in the book that people on this list might be interested in for their use of some characteristic Poe themes or how they rework, beyond mere retellings, some Poe works.
"The Brink of Eternity" by Barbara Roden has a protagonist, roughly the contemporary of Poe, strangely compelled to explore the polar regions. The self-annihilation and knowledge he seeks there echoes similar ideas in "Ms. Found in a Bottle" and "Descent into the Maelstrom" and, yes, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym is explicitly alluded to. Also mentioned is Poe's review of Reynolds' expedition in the Southern Literary Messenger.
"Technicolor" by John Langan is cast as an English professor's lecture on "The Mask of the Red Death". Not only are we given an explanation of the story's color sequence but a secret history involving the story's inspiration, Poe's last week of life, and a horrific ending.
"The Pickers" by Melanie Tem takes off on "The Raven" with a griefstricken widow caring for an infant. She meets a mysterious group of people, part gypsy, part raven, that are nature's ultimate recyclers of undesired objects.
"Shadow" by Steve Resnic Tem reworks, yes, "Shadow -- A Parable" but not slavishly and preserves, in its second person narration, the feel of Poe's story.
Off in a category by itself is Kim Newman's "Illimitable Domain". (Newman was one of the authors the BBC turned to for commentary on Poe's 200th birthday.) Newman imagines a wacky alternate history where the Roger Corman films are just the begining of a pop culture Poemania -- with unexpected, sinister consequences.
The ground rules for the anthology were no Poe pastiches and no Poe as character. The last rule is broken or bent on a few occasions.
-- Edited by Reynolds on Saturday 14th of March 2009 08:28:20 AM
Yes, that's right - I forgot about William Friedman! I told that story once with the teaser that "Edgar Poe ended World War II" and the person I told was in disbelief!
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Another huge Poe fan and disciple was Rudyard Kipling, which I have read in David Gilmour's The Long Recessional and which is obvious in Kipling's Poe-inspired use of rhythm.
Don't forget Poe enormous influence on cryptography. Cryptographer William Friedman, who was inspired by the Gold Bug, was the unsung hero of the American war effort in World War II and played a considerable role in the development of modern military intelligence in the early cold war. Besides inspiring this particular great man of world history, Poe's influence helped popularize cryptography in general.
I know Nietzsche listed him as one of the great 19th Century Romantics alongside Byron, and although Nietzsche's opinion of this genre was not wholly positive, it played a major role in his worldview and anyway, being placed in the same category as Byron and Kleist was an honor that escaped Poe in America in his own time, at the time Beyond Good and Evil was written, and unfortunately perhaps even since. Since that book was meant as a sort of commentary on Nietzsche's masterpiece, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, I am convinced that parts of the "Pale Criminal" speech were inspired by Poe.
" authors will perceive the immense advantage of giving their own manuscripts directly to the public without the expensive interference of the type-setter, and the often ruinous intervention of the publisher. All that a man of letters need do will be to pay some attention to legibility of manuscript, arrange his pages to suit himself, and stereotype them instantaneously, as arranged. He may intersperse them with his own drawings, or with anything to please his own fancy, In the new régime the humblest will speak as often and as freely as the most exalted, and will be sure of receiving just that amount of attention which the intrinsic merit of their speeches may deserve."
Moday, Midnight: I've enjoyed your back and forth, but have to say that I never sensed any faintness in Robinson's praise. In a Washington Post profile, she mentioned her interest in Poe, so I called about a guest post. She was happy to do it and did not hesitate. I take her words as genuine.
Here's another excerpt from a guest post, from coroner/author Jonathan Hayes. Maybe you'll agree on his premise? "Those [plot] twists stem from Poe's obsession with the perverse: his characters are compelled to do things they fully know are wrong, to do them just because they are wrong, even though their actions fly in the face of their own professed beliefs and personal interest. The traditional struggle between Wrong and Right is largely foreign to Poe's protagonists they will murder and mutilate, and they will do it because they are perverse.
This resonates with my professional experience. In the real world, most murders are pathetically trite, the fall-out from miserable little squabbles over money, "love", pride. If Poe read the Sun today, I don't see him particularly intrigued by the murder of a drug dealer, for example: the killing of a dealer is too tragically legible, too prosaic. I suspect that Poe would be drawn instead to the bestial lyricism of the serial killing, as much for the opacity of motive as for the macabre obsession with details.
p.s. You can find all of the guest posts, and more on Poe, here: http://weblogs.baltimoresun.com/entertainment/books/blog/edgar_allan_poe/
Have you ever talked to a Harry Potter fan? (I'm not one) They would bite your head off if you even implied Rowling was not a wonderful writer who cared about 'words.'
HA! This is actually quite true! And, what's more, Harry Potter has sparked a huge movement - Rowling's books are on summer reading lists, college courses are focusing on her work, and there's even a massive slew of "legitimate" scholarship analyzing it! The question is, how long will this last? Will Rowling stand the test of time 200 years after her birth?
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Have you ever talked to a Harry Potter fan? (I'm not one) They would bite your head off if you even implied Rowling was not a wonderful writer who cared about 'words.' This is grade school stuff, this 'caring about words.' Poe would laugh off such a jejune compliment.
But you are probably right, Robinson has that Pulitzer Prize and she must be terribly busy, and therefore the poor thing had no time to honor Poe properly and therefore she writes in language that, as you say, 'seems' to be complimentary, but we really can't tell, can we, because she was in such a hurry, and after all, who is Poe? Poe should be honored that a Pulitzer Prize winner should take time out of her busy schedule to say a few words about him.
'Skin of language.' (I'm sorry, but that phrase screams bad taste. I actually shudder every time I read it. It's precisely the sort of thing Poe would have held up for ridicule, a show-off, writerly metaphor that won't stand up under analysis.)
This is the thing about Poe--he's popular, but on the other hand, very few really get him, because he was a scientist, and it is often the writing tribe that most bungles in the attempt to bring his significance into focus. Writers reach out to him as a brother and get their hands burned. Poe, invited to the party, never quite behaves as a proper guest, and for some reason it is often the most honored of the living writers who feel in their hearts that here is a man that perplexes them more than any other, almost to the point where resentment and envy creep in, and resentment and envy may even linger, despite all the national book awards and Nobels and pulitzer prizes--of which Edgar Allan Poe won exactly none.
APOLOGY: > Unaware of the message's shift in this list, I omitted yesterday the web page that I was trying to comment; it was: > <http://www.mathpages.com/home/kmath522/kmath522.htm>, which was mentioned in this list by Veteran on December, 1, 2008. > Besides, in my final paragraph I forgot to include a later confirmation of the Poe's proposition about the Universe throb. In the issue of the Astrophysical Journal Letters, corresponding to November 20, 2002, Kritsuk and Norman said, referring to the ultraviolet variation in the Milky Way: "The pattern repeats like a heartbeat". > Regards.
I agree with you about the astuteness of this essay. It is a pity that the author's name and bibliography had been omitted. It is a deep analysis of some of Poe's propositions. However because of this depth, the analysis did not cover some other propositions, such as the existence of pararell universes (not other clusters), successive universes (through a big crunch), the planetary model of the atom, the chemical affinity and molecular structure, the energy conditions for nuclear fusion, etc.; all of them have been discussed in a previous essay (poedecoder.com). > Even more, in a poem published in "The Centenary Poe" (Bodley Head, London, 1949, p. 358), Poe exposes precisely an example of that proposed 104 years later by Bradbury and Lorenz as the "butterfly effect".
I think too that the characterization of Poe as "a science fiction writer" was normal in his time since his proposals looked incomprehensibles. But, after the Einstein, Bohr, Lemaitre, Teller and other's findings in the last Century, it is a perversity to insist in that label. Poe applied always his intuition together a consistent reasoning, a criterium assumed valid by scientists as Poincaré and Haddamard. He was really a poet of science. He wrote: "Poetry and Truth are one". His spiritual condition was ever present; in the last lines of Eureka he wrote, related to the Universe renewal: "...at every throb of the Heart Divine?. And now - this Heart Divine - what is it? . It is our own".
-- Edited by Juan on Wednesday 29th of April 2009 01:17:32 PM
For the love of God, Monday Love! Read the whole post!
Nonethess, to answer your questions:
1. Isn't this a truism? Don't all writers "think about words?"
You mean to tell me that J. K. Rowling or Dan Brown put a lot of effort into words?
2. The "loveliest word, the loveliest letter" A fine sentiment, I suppose, but rather vague, and she doesn't connect it to any of Poe's actual writings and it seems to imply that Poe is some aesthetic twit. What is the "the loveliest letter," after all? X?
She is saying that Poe inspired her to believe that words themselves are inherently beautiful - as are their individual letters, sounds, etc. She is painting Poe not just as a writer who uses words, but as an artist who creates with them.
3. "unending night," "weight of sorrow" Hasn't this platitude been used enough with Poe?
Yes. But I hardly think you can blame one person for a decades-old trend.
4. "skin of language too elegant, too precise" Skin of language. Ick. Here she says, as many of Poe's detractors do, that Poe is "too elegant" and "too precise."
You're not reading it with the irony she seemed to intend. She's implying that it's easy to believe that Poe is almost taken away by words and almost forgets they have meaning underneath their beauty and sound.
If nothing else, let's give her some credit for being a Pulitzer Prize-winner who is willing to publicly participate in the honor of Poe for his 200th birthday. My assumption is that if she really didn't care for him, or even if she didn't care for him much, she would not have bothered; I'm sure she had other things to do.
-- Edited by Midnightdreary at 12:19, 2009-01-30
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Poe made me think about words. Which is the loveliest word, the loveliest letter? I believe I may have known that these are the kinds of almost idle questions one poses to oneself when a night seems to be unending, when the weight of sorrow is so great as to be dangerous. His stories rehearse grief and guilt, betrayal and accusation, and they are contained in a skin of language that is too elegant, too precise, as if their burden could be distanced by refinements that made art of them, by the wry attentiveness to cadences and sonorities that let the teller seem to think art was the whole point of the tale.
Midnight, sorry if I haven't made myself clear. The above is the Robinson quote I'm working from, posted on this thread.
1. Isn't this a truism? Don't all writers "think about words?" 2. The "loveliest word, the loveliest letter" A fine sentiment, I suppose, but rather vague, and she doesn't connect it to any of Poe's actual writings and it seems to imply that Poe is some aesthetic twit. What is the "the loveliest letter," after all? X? 3. "unending night," "weight of sorrow" Hasn't this platitude been used enough with Poe? 4. "skin of language too elegant, too precise" Skin of language. Ick. Here she says, as many of Poe's detractors do, that Poe is "too elegant" and "too precise."
In this passage Robinson is damning Poe with faint praise.
monday love wrote:Midnight, I have read what has been quoted on this board. You can't take words back. What Robinson has said, so far quoted, is 'damning with faint praise.' Gushing at length on a superficial level and then qualifying that gush is the exact definition of 'damning with faint praise.' Sorry, I protect Poe like a mother defending her cubs. Someone's got to do it and not enough do. You do, and I'm grateful, a few others...
So you still haven't read the post that you are judging? Hmm... Even independent of the full post, looking solely at how she was quoted here, I have trouble seeing where your criticism is coming from. Frankly, I love how she dissected Poe from a writer to an artist who truly understands their chosen medium, namely: words. Very few people make that connection with Poe, including self-described fans of Poe.
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Midnight, I have read what has been quoted on this board. You can't take words back. What Robinson has said, so far quoted, is 'damning with faint praise.' Gushing at length on a superficial level and then qualifying that gush is the exact definition of 'damning with faint praise.' Sorry, I protect Poe like a mother defending her cubs. Someone's got to do it and not enough do. You do, and I'm grateful, a few others...
monday love wrote:Midnight, Poe would not agree that one opinion is worth as much as another.
Robinson--from what I have read--is damning Poe with faint praise. They all do it, and I can see it coming from a mile away. It may not be intentional, and this of course has nothing to do with any personal feelings I have for Ms. Robinson.
Poe would agree with me. He's nodding in agreement somewhere...
At least in theory, perhaps not always in practice, as a literary critic Poe would at least ask you to read the author before noting your opinion. Robinson's "faint praise" is hard to find amidst all the gushing admiration she has for him. Your opinion may be valid, but it is still uninformed. Again, take a chance and read her words before you condemn them. Have you read it yet?
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Midnight, Poe would not agree that one opinion is worth as much as another. Robinson--from what I have read--is damning Poe with faint praise. They all do it, and I can see it coming from a mile away. It may not be intentional, and this of course has nothing to do with any personal feelings I have for Ms. Robinson.
Poe would agree with me. He's nodding in agreement somewhere...
By the way, I'm enjoying your Poe desk calendar. I love today's entry which is "Elizabeth Barrett responds to a Poe story."
I've done some research on this, and I once lectured on Barrett and Poe for the Browning Society in Boston. I speculate that Barrett was falling in love with Poe and Browning made his move on Elizabeth because he was jealous of Poe... I realize that Poe and Barrett never met, but they did write to each other before she eloped with Robert, and after she eloped with Robert she 'cut Poe off.' Poe dedicated his 1845 volume to Elizabeth Barrett and wrote very ambitious reviews of her work. She was famous when she eloped with Robert--at the time, Robert was not.
Poe's "The Rationale of Verse" is the best essay ever written on the subject.
Poe was innovative, though he didn't re-invent poetry or anything like that. He did take musical aspects of verse to new heights.
Poe once said that his invention chiefly impacted the stanza. Most poets are obsessed with the line; Poe saw how the stanza exists because of the line, just as the line exists because of the foot; he thought, 'why not invent new stanzaic forms?' He took seriously the idea that poetry is musical, and this is what distinguishes it from prose. As usual with Poe, he got to the heart of something, boiled down its essence, and then ran with it, paying attention to details that remained hidden to others. Why shouldn't a mathematician/scientist/musician be a poet? Your typical poet is a poet because he is NOT a scientist; Poe was a poet because he WAS a scientist.
Here's a question for the Poe scholars here, particularly Monday who, according to his user profile, knows a whole lot more of poetic forms and history than I do.
Was Poe an innovator of poetic forms? I'm not talking about his skill as a poet. I think that's undeniable. I mean did he come up with new poetic forms or somehow alter existing ones in new ways?
Monday, give Robinson a chance before you chastise her for one or two sentences. I think her guest blog was quite good and looked at Poe from a couple different angles besides the "isn't he cool?" angle. She did a great job showing us how she reacts to Poe's writing (and an opinion can't be wrong) - and she picked a couple specific aspects to focus on. This wasn't a dissertation, just a short guest blog. Personally, I enjoyed her focus on Poe as a good, artful writer (something that is often ignored by mainstream readers of Poe).
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Here's something I always found interesting. Coincidental meter? Perhaps. But remember that Poe has been ripped off by a lot of other writers.
It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL LEE; And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.
E.A. Poe
There are strange things done in the midnight sun By the men who moil for gold; The Arctic trails have their secret tales That would make your blood run cold; The Northern Lights have seen queer sights, But the queerest they ever did see Was that night on the marge of Lake Lebarge I cremated Sam McGee.
"those gothic dreams of his..." I don't agree with this. The 'gothic' was an already existing style (mostly out of Great Britain) that Poe satirized in his fiction. Poe was much more of a conscious craftsman than most people realize. Again, I realize Robinson has a certain 'liking' for Poe, but it just sounds to me like she's getting it all wrong and feeding into common errors that have really turned Poe against himself in the minds of so many audience members who buy into these cheap Poe 'myths.' Poe reminds me of that story where Beethoven makes the young ladies weep when they hear his sonatas and he scoffs at their reaction. It's not that there isn't passion and feeling in Poe--there is. But Poe is bringing it about; he's not under its sway. Poe is Socratic. Like Socrates, Poe doesn't finally trust emotions and art, and in Poe's fiction, truth always threatens to fip it inside out. I will read the entire piece, but I feel Robinson is too enamoured of what Poe was merely intellectualizing.
Monday Love, I don't think Robinson is being disingenuous. Her respect for Poe will be clear when you read her entire post; sorry if the excerpt left you with the wrong impression. Here's a bit more from her post, to be published Monday morning: I think I have always loved [Poe] because to love him requires loyalty. Those gothic dreams of his are the sort of thing a pre-adolescent girl might be enthralled by, and I did notice that brilliance and learning were among the glories of his perishing damsels. But I had to defend him and myself together from the idea that the tales were simply lurid or morbid. I knew better ...
Yikes. Robinson doesn't 'get' Poe at all. Poe is more than 'skin' and 'elegance' and 'refinements' which 'distance.' He's far more than art for art's sake. People take this condescending, one-dimensional view of Poe all the time and they need to be called on it. This is 'damning with faint praise.'
Er...no. His "language is NOT "too elegant, too precise."
It seems to me Ms. Robinson is coming to easy conclusions in order to distance HERSELF from Poe's depths.
Poe's talent is so enormous, he has a tendency to do this to writers.
Next week on The Baltimore Sun's book blog (www.baltimoresun.com/readstreet), a number of authors will write guest posts about being inspired by Poe. Here's an excerpt from Pulitzer Prize-winner Marilynne Robinson (her post will appear Monday): Poe made me think about words. Which is the loveliest word, the loveliest letter? I believe I may have known that these are the kinds of almost idle questions one poses to oneself when a night seems to be unending, when the weight of sorrow is so great as to be dangerous. His stories rehearse grief and guilt, betrayal and accusation, and they are contained in a skin of language that is too elegant, too precise, as if their burden could be distanced by refinements that made art of them, by the wry attentiveness to cadences and sonorities that let the teller seem to think art was the whole point of the tale.
monday love wrote:I don't know if Poe was the first with his literary hoaxes, ficitonal stories believed to be true in the mass media, but he may have been.
Not quite. If nothing else, "The Great Moon-Hoax" predates Poe's first hoax by a couple years (and some have suggested that it inspired "The Balloon-Hoax").
As far as Poe inventing short stories, I wouldn't go there either. Though, I wouldn't hesitate to say that he perfected the short story form - partly through his own fiction but also through his literary theory. But, really, everyone was writing short stories in those days (1830s and earlier), from Washington Irving to Henry Longfellow. You've also got Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emma Embury, Elizabeth Ellet, and countless others pitching in throughout the 1840s and beyond. Poe, of course, corresponded with all of these folks and, as editor of so many journals, had to have had some influence on all of them.
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Monday, I'm surprised you left out Poe's contribution to the whole form of the short story.
Given how many he wrote and his formal theory of what they should do, is it credible to say Poe invented the short story?
I'd like to think it was true, but there's also the work of Washington Irving in American and those German writers. (Though I don't know the dates in respect to Poe.)
Can ANY person, EVER, claim this kind of influence on his fellow creatures?
Here's the list (still growing) of Poe's MAJOR influences/outright INVENTIONS
1. Detective Fiction 2. Science Fiction 3. Modern Physics and Astronomy 4. The Prose Poem 5. Symbolist Lit. 6. Modern French Lit. 7.The Literary Hoax 8. Melville's Moby Dick 9. Twain's Huckleberry Finn 10. T.S. Eliot's Critical Writing 11. Hitch**** and related Cinema 12. Dostoevsky 13. Oscar Wilde's "Dorian Gray" 14. Doyle's Sherlock Holmes 15. Baudelaire
Mark Twain was certainly influenced by Poe's humorous fiction. 'The Gold Bug' features a pair of characters resembling Twain's most famous creation, Huck and Jim.
Michael Bishop's "A Spy in the Domain of Arnheim" plays interestingly off Poe's Arnheim essay/story as well as The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym.
Jules Verne's "The Sphinx of the Ice-Fields" is sort of a sequel to Pym. Poe worshipper H. P. Lovecraft's Antarctica tale "At the Mountains of Madness" has the mysterious "Tekeli-li!" cry in it.
Clark Ashton Smith's "The Uncharted Isle" is a very good reworking of Poe's "Ms. Found in a Bottle".
Did you know that 'Frankenstein' was about Ben Franklin (electricity)? Hey, why quibble when it comes to Poe and science fiction? Poe has suffered from such orchestrated abuse, and his reputation in Letters/Science is far short of what it ought to be, cut the guy a break! Poe has been diminished by outright lies, why shouldn't we say he 'invented science fiction?' If anyone consciously invented it, he did. Mary Shelley stumbled into it, because she was lucky enough to be hanging out with Shelley and Byron, not to take anything away from her; she was only a girl when she wrote that masterpiece. If it's only 'talk' and there is no 'real' inventor of SciFi, what the hell, let's put Poe's name up there. Why don't people want to give Poe his due? Even supposed Poe scholars are timid when it comes to this; I've never understood it. "Poe invented Science Fiction." There, I've said it. What harm has been done?
As for Poe influences, that essay speaks for itself. Poe influenced 'works' of science. Even Darwin, possibly. Direct influence is often difficult to trace, obviously. But I don't see what's wrong with touting Poe's 'firsts.' Influence and 'Doing/thinking something first' are often not the same. But again, Poe deserves all of the attention we can possibly give--and more so.
I'm not sure I can agree that Poe invented science fiction; that's being far too generous. I usually say that he was the progenitor of modern science fiction, being among the first to add more "science" than "fiction." But, to be fair, there was science fiction before Poe. Even Frankenstein was 1818.
Monday, your posting perplexes me more often than not. What does an essay on "Eureka" have to do with "LET'S MAKE A LIST OF OTHER'S WORKS INSPIRED BY POE" - a topic you yourself created? Just curious because you often seem to lose topic (not that there's anything wrong with that, just an idle observation).
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
This essay, which includes an astute scientific analysis of "Eureka," reveals Poe as a scientific prophet.
Poe anticipated, with scientific rigor, all sorts of insights in the scientific community which sprang up after his death, and in the 20th century, and are being puzzled over and discussed to this day.
Poe adored science, and it's no wonder he invented science fiction, for he was a true poet-scientist, or scientist-poet. He used fiction to whet the reader's appetite for scientific speculation and to promote scientific curiosity, but always with an eye on the moral/spiritual component as well.
I don't think Poe wrote fiction to purge emotions or to arouse morbid feelings, or to distract us, or to make a buck. I think was Poe was really trying to elevate literature and improve society--and that's why we think of him as such an odd duck.
Anyway, I just happened to find this essay on the web; I don't agree with the author's summary of Poe's biography (the same old condescending tripe that Poe was a drunk, essentially) but his grasp of Poe the scientist is profound and his writing is very accessible, and, at times, even moving.
Baudelaire has all sorts of 'Modernist' creds, and so do the next two generations of French poets, Mallarme and Valery, who pretended to be Poe devotees (and Poe did genuinely appeal to the French mind which loves 'theory and love,') but these writers, especially Mallarme, who is the latest hip thing among American poet-intellectuals these days, need Poe a great deal more than he needs them. Mallarme's poetic theories are pretentious and nonsensical, the sort of 'absent-minded professorism' material Poe would no doubt have ridiculed. Be that as it may, largely due to Edmund Wilson (a member of the Pound/Eliot modernist clique which included Yeats and Mallarme and Valery to some degree) Poe has 'Symbolist' creds which underlies most Modernist French poetry, and Anglo-American Modernist poetry, since Pound and Eliot were snobbily big on French poetry. I think I am the only Poe scholar at the moment who has discovered how Eliot secretly raided Poe's reviews for his own influential critical essays after WW I. But it must have important to Eliot to trash Poe (as he did in his 1949 "Poe to Valery" piece) for Poe the Symbolist was what Eliot was standing on (in addition to Eliot's secret coppings which I have exposed) and Poe wasn't cool to Eliot's Modernist friends--they all dissed him, from Pound to Yeats to Yvor Winters to Huxley, and besides, Eliot was busy hating Shelley and the Romantics as well, so hating Poe was natural for Eliot in that respect, even as Eliot must have fearfully realized that Poe was many things--more Romantic than the Romantics, more Modern than the faux Moderns (who equated obscurity with 'modernism') and more Everything than Mr. T.S. Eliot. It was the biggest act of repression in American Letters, this sticking it to Poe, from Emerson to Harold Bloom, and it's certainly good for a few laughs.
Baudelaire is crucial for several reasons, some bad and some good.
'The French Poe' is a tool of a host of Poe detractors, beginning with a "Nation" piece at the turn of the century, followed by Aldous Huxley in the 30s, T.S. Eliot (in his little book 'From Poe to Valery' in 1949) and Harold Bloom in the 'New York Review of Books' Oct 11, 1984, all examples of savage abuse and unlearned insult. "The Nation" magazine was, like "The Atlantic," an organ of the Boston Emersonian clique (Henry James, etc) who did not want to, or could not understand Poe; or maybe it was just personal, since Poe was not kind to Emerson, etc. T.S. Eliot can be seen as carrying on the grudge with his 1949 assassination, since Tom's grandfather graduated from the Havard Divinity School and was an associate of Emerson and Ellery Channing, whose nephew poet and Thoreau biographer Poe savaged in a review of Channing 'the younger's' poems. This beauty of a review by Poe posthumously caused the only known comment by Emerson on his illustrious contemporary; Mr. E blurted out his 'jingle man' remark in a rage to William Dean Howells (who would become editor of 'The Atlantic') when the latter innocently mentioned to Emerson that he knew Emerson's friend Channing's poetry only through a review of Poe's.
The 'French Poe' theory is that Poe is a mediocre writer who just happens to sound better in French translation, and thus Poe's renown overseas is sort of an accident, and no reasonable person can really enjoy Poe in English. The theory itself is absurd of course, but it shows the twists and turns Poe-haters have made in order to discredit him. When 'drunk and drug addict' did not work, only making Poe's dionysian fame grow, more subtle forms of slander had to be invented.
Translations of Poe appeared in Russia in the late 1830s.
This fact is not played up, I imagine, because Poe scholarship is stuck in a 'Poe the hothouse plant' rut, preferring to think of him playing house in Baltimore with auntie rather than traveling to St. Petersburg, for instance. There's no evidence Poe was living in Baltimore during the mystery years before he became famous, but biographers choose to put him there, anyway, just because it suits their view. Poe scholars should be smarter than that. Domesticity was crucial to Poe's writing production, of course, but it was not always the dominant feature of Poe's existence.
Tell Tale Heart influenced Dostoevsky, especially his "Notes From the Underground" The Russian writer named Poe as an important influence and published Poe in the magazine he ran with his brother. Poe was read in Russia before he was read in France!
What year is that? "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" was published to great "fanfare" in 1846 in French. "William Wilson" was translated in 1844. Is it earlier than that?
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It was night in the lonesome October, of my most immemorial year.
Tell Tale Heart influenced Dostoevsky, especially his "Notes From the Underground" The Russian writer named Poe as an important influence and published Poe in the magazine he ran with his brother. Poe was read in Russia before he was read in France!
Theme of Painting that Lives While the Painting's Subject Perishes in Poe's tale is very similar to Wilde's in his most famous work.
2. Arthur Gordon Pym --Melville's "Moby Dick"
There are numerous details in Poe's Seafaring Novel which appear in Melville's book.
3. Dupin --Sherlock Holmes (detective fiction, in general)
4. Poe's Criticism --T.S. Eliot's Criticism
This is one I discovered; I have never seen it mentioned, but Eliot (who abused Poe in 'From Poe to Valery') was evidently a secret reader of Poe criticism--raiding it for some of his better known ideas.
