By Dr. Jonathan Blandford
To me, part of what makes Edgar Allan Poe such a fascinating figure is that, more than any other 19th-century American author, he remains incredibly popular today. I teach an upper-level single-author seminar on Poe every couple of years that always fills up with students. With apologies to Herman Melville (my favorite 19th-century fiction writer) and Emily Dickinson (my favorite 19th-century poet), if I taught a course on just either of them, I would probably be in a classroom talking to myself.
Long before Twitter and internet trolls, Poe was a master of publicity and hoaxes who actively sought out controversy and used every means he could to call attention to himself.
And yet, to think of Poe as a popular figure is to push back against his reputation as an outsider—a dark, possibly even disturbed individual brooding on the margins of early 19th-century culture. This image of Poe is largely a myth, albeit one that Poe himself helped to create. Poe wrote the tales of madmen and murderers not because he was himself a madman, but because he concluded very early on in his career that was the kind of material that sold magazines.
Poe lived through two major financial crashes and a near-decade-long collapse that rivals the Great Depression, and he struggled to make a living as a writer. He had some successes, most notably his short story The Gold-Bug, for which he won a contest and a $100 prize, and his poem The Raven, which temporarily earned him the status of literary celebrity. More often than not, though, Poe scraped by, cobbling together a meager living by working as an editor, reviewing books and writing whatever he thought people wanted to read. In the process, he invented, or helped to invent, a number of genres that remain popular today, including the detective story, the modern horror tale, and even science fiction.
Long before Twitter and internet trolls, Poe was also a master of publicity and hoaxes—someone who, like so many celebrities today, actively sought out controversy and used every means he could to call attention to himself. For example, he publicly accused the much more established and successful poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarizing him, and, when Longfellow didn’t take the bait, invented a fictitious persona named “Outis” with whom he engaged in a flame war of sorts on the topic in the pages of The Broadway Journal (which Poe owned and edited at the time).
Readers of Bellarmine Magazine are likely already familiar with famous Poe texts such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Raven. What should you read if you want to delve more deeply into his fascinatingly wacky body of work? Here are six suggestions:
The Mystery of Marie Roget: Not as well-known as the other two tales featuring Poe’s fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Purloined Letter, this tale is notable as an early work of true crime. Marie Roget fictionalizes the story of a woman named Mary Rogers, whose unsolved and violent death inspired months of intense speculation in the early tabloid press. Poe’s blurring of the boundaries between fact and fiction anticipates later works in the genre such as In Cold Blood, and his dubious claim to have solved the crime (!) makes him an antecedent of the legions of amateur sleuths on today’s true-crime podcasts and internet message boards.
Some Words with a Mummy: Did you know Poe was funny? Well, he was. He wrote numerous satires, most of which don’t hold up unless you are an English professor because they rely on references to the literary culture of his day. This one, though, will likely at least make you smile. A mummy named Count Allamistakeo (nyuk, nyuk) comes back to life to lampoon the supposed improvements of modern culture. You’ll get, uh, wrapped up in it.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym: Poe’s only novel, Pym, has puzzles, high philosophy, cannibalism and an ocean voyage gone awry that rivals Moby-Dick. Yann Martel’s novel Life of Pi and the movie adapted from it contain several references to this underappreciated novel, including the name of the tiger, Richard Parker.
The Journal of Julius Rodman: My favorite of Poe’s hoaxes. Poe claimed to have found this journal of an explorer who was the first to cross the continent. In reality, Poe made most of it up, and the parts that he didn’t, he largely plagiarized from other sources, including the Lewis and Clark expedition journals. He managed to fool members of Congress, though; the Journal is cited in the Congressional Record as if it were a real document—which proves that easily duping our elected representatives with elaborate nonsense isn’t just a recent development.
Eureka: Poe rather confusingly called this a “prose poem,” but it is better described as a dizzyingly ambitious meditation on the nature of the cosmos that, among other things, seems to predict later scientific ideas such as the Big Bang, the Big Crunch and multiverse theory. If you want to go through the wormhole with Edgar Allan Poe, this is the text for you.
The Bells: I had to get a poem in here, and I’m going with The Bells. When Ralph Waldo Emerson dismissed Poe as the “jingle man,” this is likely the kind of thing he had in mind. Even so, there are few poems that better capture the relationship between sensation and perception. This one will be ringing in your ears for a while after you read it.
Dr. Jon Blandford, an associate professor of English, is director of Bellarmine’s Honors Program, president of the Kentucky Honors Roundtable and secretary of the Southern Regional Honors Council.