{"id":12956,"date":"2021-06-04T14:37:51","date_gmt":"2021-06-04T14:37:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=12956"},"modified":"2021-06-04T16:52:00","modified_gmt":"2021-06-04T16:52:00","slug":"michael-dirdais-poe-the-most-influential-american-writer-a-new-book-offers-evidence","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/?p=12956","title":{"rendered":"Michael DirdaIs-Poe the most influential American writer? A new book offers evidence."},"content":{"rendered":"\n

There are many, many biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the most exhaustive being Arthur Hobson Quinn\u2019s<\/a>, first published in 1941, the most concise Peter Ackroyd\u2019s 2009 \u201cPoe: A Life Cut Short<\/a>.\u201d Nearly all of them, however, are written by literary scholars, poets or novelists. By contrast, John Tresch\u2019s \u201cThe Reason for the Darkness of the Night<\/a>\u201d situates our nation\u2019s most influential writer, as I would claim Poe to be, against the backdrop of what its subtitle calls \u201cthe forging of American science.\u201d Tresch himself is a distinguished historian of science, now at London\u2019s Warburg Institute, and author of the prizewinning study, \u201cThe Romantic Machine: Utopian Science and Technology After Napoleon<\/a>.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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(Farrar, Straus and Giroux)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Is Poe really the most influential American writer? Note that I didn\u2019t say \u201cgreatest,\u201d for which there must be at least a dozen viable candidates. But consider his radiant originality. Before his death in 1849 at age 40, Poe largely created the modern short story, while also inventing or perfecting half the genres represented on the bestseller list, including the mystery (\u201cThe Murders in the Rue Morgue,\u201d \u201cThe Gold-Bug\u201d), science fiction (\u201cThe Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,\u201d \u201cThe Conversation of Eiros and Charmion\u201d), psychological suspense (\u201cThe Tell-Tale Heart,\u201d \u201cThe Cask of Amontillado\u201d) and, of course, gothic horror (\u201cThe Fall of the House of Usher,\u201d \u201cThe Masque of the Red Death,\u201d the incomparable \u201cLigeia\u201d).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That\u2019s just the fiction. W.B. Yeats once named Poe \u201cthe greatest of American poets,\u201d which does sound absurd. Still, few poems are more famous than \u201cThe Raven\u201d with its dolorous tocsin, \u201cNevermore.\u201d Among my own earliest memories is hearing my steelworker father, not a bookish man, regularly murmur the first stanza of \u201cAnnabel Lee\u201d: \u201cIt was many and many a year ago\/ In a kingdom by the sea .\u2009.\u2009.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Finally, Poe \u2014 like several of his characters \u2014 haunts us from beyond the grave. When we peer at the mournful figure in those familiar daguerreotypes, we seem to glimpse the emblematic image of the modern artist as misunderstood genius, prey to melancholy, drawn to self-destruction.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

That morose view of Poe, still widespread, isn\u2019t precisely accurate. As Tresch reminds us, Edgar grew up coddled by the wealth and status of his Richmond stepparents, excelled in many of his courses at the University of Virginia and, during his time at West Point, was well liked by his fellow cadets (over half of whom helped underwrite a volume of his poems). While it\u2019s hard to imagine him in any uniform but a severe black suit, Poe actually served in the Army for four years, rising to the rank of sergeant major.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Though punctilious about his honor, in civilian life Poe normally comported himself with genteel courtliness. Professionally, he worked with astonishing diligence. By his early 30s, Poe had already edited major periodicals (the Southern Literary Messenger, Graham\u2019s Lady\u2019s and Gentleman\u2019s Magazine), interviewed international celebrities (such as the visiting Charles Dickens), written a respected guide to, believe it or not, seashells (\u201cThe Conchologist\u2019s First Book<\/a>\u201d), earned notoriety as the \u201cTomahawk Man<\/a>\u201d for his savage reviews of Emerson, Longfellow and other literary pooh-bahs, and even gone on the lecture circuit with a talk modestly titled \u201cThe Universe.\u201d During these same years, Poe had also married his consumptive, teenage cousin, occasionally drunk peach brandy to excess (he chugged rather than savored) and regularly hobnobbed with the era\u2019s intelligentsia.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

As a lifelong \u201cMagazinist,\u201d Poe could write anything: humorous squibs, book reviews, parodies, articles about the latest scientific discoveries, expos\u00e9s of quackery (most notably of Maelzel\u2019s chess-playing automaton), critical essays on \u201cthe philosophy of composition,\u201d an almost unreadable cosmological prose-poem called \u201cEureka\u201d and, of course, those unforgettable stories of self-justifying murderers and shrill psychopaths: \u201cThe thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could, but when he ventured upon insult I vowed revenge.\u201d . . . \u201cTrue \u2014 nervous \u2014 very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In \u201cThe Reason for the Darkness of the Night\u201d (available June 15), Tresch emphasizes how much Poe infuses scientific discourse into his most fantastical imaginings. For example, in \u201cA Descent Into the Maelstrom,\u201d a sailor, whose boat has been sucked into a gigantic whirlpool, rather improbably saves himself by thinking like a physicist: He observes that cylindrical objects fell more slowly into the whirling vortex than other objects of the same size, so he quickly lashes himself to a barrel to escape from a watery grave. In another story, \u201cThe Man That Was Used Up,\u201d Poe describes a highly decorated army officer who, because his body parts have been replaced by various prostheses, is actually a steampunk cyborg.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Poe\u2019s fiction and journalism lead Tresch to discuss all sorts of scientific and pseudoscientific topics: code-breaking, phrenology (the once-popular belief that the bumps on your skull reveal your character), the naturalist-explorer Alexander von Humboldt, 19th-century astronomy, the popularity of hoaxes, P.T. Barnum, the vogue for mesmerism, theories of the universe, the birth of the Smithsonian Institution and, not least, the careers of the important early American scientists Joseph Henry and Alexander Dallas Bache.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Obviously, Tresch packs quite a lot into his book \u2014 there\u2019s even an ingenious deconstruction of the title page of Poe\u2019s nautical novel, the macabre and tantalizingly enigmatic \u201cNarrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.\u201d Still, prospective readers of \u201cThe Reason for the Darkness of the Night\u201d should be aware that it isn\u2019t a sustained, detailed exposition of Poe\u2019s life so much as a rich assemblage of biographical vignettes, brief story analyses and mini-essays on the era\u2019s scientific beliefs.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In general, Tresch\u2019s overall thesis \u2014 that Poe\u2019s \u201cdeep familiarity with science was the fulcrum on which his thought balanced\u201d \u2014 seems unarguable, given the presence of the \u201cratiocinative\u201d in so much of what he wrote. Yet, ultimately, it is Poe\u2019s other aspect, his ability to convey monomaniacal intensity, verging on hysteria, that we are drawn to, his gift for expressing what D.H. Lawrence floridly called \u201cthe prismatic ecstasy of heightened consciousness.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Source: https:\/\/www.washingtonpost.com\/entertainment\/books\/is-poe-really-the-most-influential-american-writer-a-new-book-offers-evidence\/2021\/06\/02\/4311f280-c2ec-11eb-93f5-ee9558eecf4b_story.html<\/strong><\/em>
<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

There are many, many biographies of Edgar Allan Poe, the most exhaustive being Arthur Hobson Quinn\u2019s, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12957,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[46],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12956","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-arts-letters-news"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/lediemchihue.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2021\/06\/10-4.jpg?fit=552%2C368&ssl=1","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p7bhGG-3mY","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12956","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=12956"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12956\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":12976,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12956\/revisions\/12976"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/12957"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=12956"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=12956"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lediemchihue.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=12956"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}