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ellisy's review against another edition
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? No
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
4.75
Edgar Allan Poe, that well-deserved internationally acclaimed American author that has not only been recognized throughout the centuries and obsessed generations, but that also is taught in schools because of his historic significance and the mastery of his writing. The man and the legendary writer, the one whose life was like one of his stories, his death a mystery and his tales some of the best legacies of human brilliance. "There are chords in the hearts of the most reckless which cannot be touched without emotion. Even with the utterly lost, to whom life and death are equally jests, there are matters of which no jest can be made."
He wrote between the years 1835 and around the time of his death, 1849. Depending on the source, he is placed either in his own category, as an American part of the mostly European movement of Romanticism or as part of a new American-made movement called American Renaissance. Barzun explains that he owes much to Romanticism "with the occult and the satanic"; that even though is a misconception of both the author and the movement, is a shot in the dark that actually hits the target with something and is that Poe borrows from the individualism and sentimentalism of this movement, as can be seen in stories like Ligeia, were the narrator takes pages talking about his beloved: "In the intensity of her wild desire for life - for life - but for life - solace and reason were the uttermost folly". Not only explored romantically, but also as "to think of themselves as unique individuals who have the strength of character to go against the flow", the famous rebellious spirit of the Romantics. This can be found in Poe's Dupin when he explains his unconventional way of thinking; but also twisted in psychotic characters like the narrator of The tell-tale heart. But even though we can find these elements of inspiration, this is where the examples end. Placing Poe in something else entirely with his surrealistic twists and maniac protagonists.
Meanwhile, American Renaissance literature was both light and dark, with authors like Emily Dickinson shifting between both of them. Reynolds explains that some authors from the "pessimistic" side were Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and boarded themes of "haunted minds, perverse or criminal impulses, doubt, and ambiguity", which sounds more like Poe. "Americans probed these themes with special intensity largely because of the nation’s Puritan heritage. Calvinist preachers from John Cotton through Jonathan Edwards had devoted their lives to probing ultimate questions about death, God, and human nature. When this metaphysical impulse collided with 19th-century skepticism and secularism, the result was literature that ranged from the exhilarating to the disquieting, from Emerson’s affirmations to the ambiguities of Hawthorne and Melville", which explains the anxiety about death of The premature burial, undescribable conversations like the one in The colloquy in Monos and Una, the whole story of The facts in the case of M. Valdemar and the both fascination and desolation about death seen throughout the whole book. "The graves of all mankind, and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay, so that I could see into the innermost recesses, and there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the worm."
Still, Poe is wildly different from the other authors he's classified with and most of his work has deeply personal themes, basing off some of his stories in biographical episodes. For example, he gambled his allowance away, making him unable to finish college, like in William Wilson. Or that both his young beloved mother and wife died of disease, making a lot of his female characters sickly, like Berenice or Ligeia. He was known to have a drinking problem and change abruptly because of it, like in The black cat; and about this last point, Barzun talked about this duality "The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?" Not mentioning his death, as mysterious as he himself had written it.
Poe’s tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Barzun mentions that a lot of his works are based on his own eerie thoughts, impulses and fears; with what she classified as "tales of death (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Premature Burial), and his tales of wickedness and crime (Berenice,The Black Cat, William Wilson, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver (The Pit and the Pendulum), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death." But the before mentioned eeriness does not only explore death and crime, but also plays with what we cannot understand, from a tale told by a demon (Silence - a fable) to a conversation between two souls about the end of the world (The colloquy of Monos and Una), with surreal spaces and dream-like narration. "When the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rocks, and upon the characters; - and the characters were desolation".
This last tale is usually one that's not talked about enough, and easily one of the bests from the book. The whole strangeness in the tale, the feeling that you shouldn't be able to know what they are saying. A conversation between two lovers that were not separated even by death, talking about their deaths and the mournful future that is awaiting the Earth, all in both a very matter-of-fact and passionate tone: "Your wild sobs floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences, and we're appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth; while the large and constant tears which fell upon my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone". Berenice was maybe the most graphic one, calmly starting with what tricks you into believing to be a romance and escalating to be a sordid tale of mania and body horror "My friends told me that if I visited the grave of my friend, my worries would be relieved a little". And of course The Raven, which has already been talked about enough and for a reason; maybe one of the best poems in history, filled with significance, metaphors, double meanings and still manages to keep a perfect rhyme and a story. "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the palid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!"
Still, after all this perfection, an anthology is hardly ever perfect and this is no exception. Maybe the worst of them all was The mystery of Marie Roget, an unnecessary long story that just ends-up pointing at nothing. For a case that was actually never resolved, it was a really big mistake for Poe to back-off like that. The man of the crowd was another disappointment, so underwhelming it was hard to even follow its thread. Finally Metzengerstein, the first story I actively disliked for trying to be complicated when it didn't have to be, and had so much room to work with to end-up with such a narrow plot-twist. Three pieces of coal for what is a mine of gems.
Even though his brilliance had some specs of dust, most of his works varied little from masterpiece, making the Gothic and macabre his own, and the eerie and unreal the best piece of poetry ever written. He has left very big foot prints for every other writer after him, and has made into art what was reserved to only disgust, working through that same feeling from the tiniest details to the biggest plot. That's why it is important to remember, that "Evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been".
He wrote between the years 1835 and around the time of his death, 1849. Depending on the source, he is placed either in his own category, as an American part of the mostly European movement of Romanticism or as part of a new American-made movement called American Renaissance. Barzun explains that he owes much to Romanticism "with the occult and the satanic"; that even though is a misconception of both the author and the movement, is a shot in the dark that actually hits the target with something and is that Poe borrows from the individualism and sentimentalism of this movement, as can be seen in stories like Ligeia, were the narrator takes pages talking about his beloved: "In the intensity of her wild desire for life - for life - but for life - solace and reason were the uttermost folly". Not only explored romantically, but also as "to think of themselves as unique individuals who have the strength of character to go against the flow", the famous rebellious spirit of the Romantics. This can be found in Poe's Dupin when he explains his unconventional way of thinking; but also twisted in psychotic characters like the narrator of The tell-tale heart. But even though we can find these elements of inspiration, this is where the examples end. Placing Poe in something else entirely with his surrealistic twists and maniac protagonists.
Meanwhile, American Renaissance literature was both light and dark, with authors like Emily Dickinson shifting between both of them. Reynolds explains that some authors from the "pessimistic" side were Poe, Hawthorne and Melville and boarded themes of "haunted minds, perverse or criminal impulses, doubt, and ambiguity", which sounds more like Poe. "Americans probed these themes with special intensity largely because of the nation’s Puritan heritage. Calvinist preachers from John Cotton through Jonathan Edwards had devoted their lives to probing ultimate questions about death, God, and human nature. When this metaphysical impulse collided with 19th-century skepticism and secularism, the result was literature that ranged from the exhilarating to the disquieting, from Emerson’s affirmations to the ambiguities of Hawthorne and Melville", which explains the anxiety about death of The premature burial, undescribable conversations like the one in The colloquy in Monos and Una, the whole story of The facts in the case of M. Valdemar and the both fascination and desolation about death seen throughout the whole book. "The graves of all mankind, and from each issued the faint phosphoric radiance of decay, so that I could see into the innermost recesses, and there view the shrouded bodies in their sad and solemn slumbers with the worm."
Still, Poe is wildly different from the other authors he's classified with and most of his work has deeply personal themes, basing off some of his stories in biographical episodes. For example, he gambled his allowance away, making him unable to finish college, like in William Wilson. Or that both his young beloved mother and wife died of disease, making a lot of his female characters sickly, like Berenice or Ligeia. He was known to have a drinking problem and change abruptly because of it, like in The black cat; and about this last point, Barzun talked about this duality "The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?" Not mentioning his death, as mysterious as he himself had written it.
Poe’s tales are brief flashes of chaos that flare up within lonely narrators living at the fringes of society. Barzun mentions that a lot of his works are based on his own eerie thoughts, impulses and fears; with what she classified as "tales of death (The Fall of the House of Usher, The Masque of the Red Death, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Premature Burial), and his tales of wickedness and crime (Berenice,The Black Cat, William Wilson, The Cask of Amontillado, The Tell-Tale Heart). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver (The Pit and the Pendulum), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death." But the before mentioned eeriness does not only explore death and crime, but also plays with what we cannot understand, from a tale told by a demon (Silence - a fable) to a conversation between two souls about the end of the world (The colloquy of Monos and Una), with surreal spaces and dream-like narration. "When the moon shone with a fuller red, and I turned and looked again upon the rocks, and upon the characters; - and the characters were desolation".
This last tale is usually one that's not talked about enough, and easily one of the bests from the book. The whole strangeness in the tale, the feeling that you shouldn't be able to know what they are saying. A conversation between two lovers that were not separated even by death, talking about their deaths and the mournful future that is awaiting the Earth, all in both a very matter-of-fact and passionate tone: "Your wild sobs floated into my ear with all their mournful cadences, and we're appreciated in their every variation of sad tone; but they were soft musical sounds and no more; they conveyed to the extinct reason no intimation of the sorrows which gave them birth; while the large and constant tears which fell upon my face, telling the bystanders of a heart which broke, thrilled every fibre of my frame with ecstasy alone". Berenice was maybe the most graphic one, calmly starting with what tricks you into believing to be a romance and escalating to be a sordid tale of mania and body horror "My friends told me that if I visited the grave of my friend, my worries would be relieved a little". And of course The Raven, which has already been talked about enough and for a reason; maybe one of the best poems in history, filled with significance, metaphors, double meanings and still manages to keep a perfect rhyme and a story. "And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the palid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted - nevermore!"
Still, after all this perfection, an anthology is hardly ever perfect and this is no exception. Maybe the worst of them all was The mystery of Marie Roget, an unnecessary long story that just ends-up pointing at nothing. For a case that was actually never resolved, it was a really big mistake for Poe to back-off like that. The man of the crowd was another disappointment, so underwhelming it was hard to even follow its thread. Finally Metzengerstein, the first story I actively disliked for trying to be complicated when it didn't have to be, and had so much room to work with to end-up with such a narrow plot-twist. Three pieces of coal for what is a mine of gems.
Even though his brilliance had some specs of dust, most of his works varied little from masterpiece, making the Gothic and macabre his own, and the eerie and unreal the best piece of poetry ever written. He has left very big foot prints for every other writer after him, and has made into art what was reserved to only disgust, working through that same feeling from the tiniest details to the biggest plot. That's why it is important to remember, that "Evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are, have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been".
Content Warnings
Graphic: Addiction, Alcoholism, Animal cruelty, Animal death, Body horror, Chronic illness, Death, Domestic abuse, Mental illness, Terminal illness, Blood, Grief, Death of parent, Murder, Fire/Fire injury, Abandonment, and Alcohol
roadki77's review against another edition
dark
funny
inspiring
lighthearted
mysterious
reflective
sad
tense
medium-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? N/A
- Diverse cast of characters? N/A
- Flaws of characters a main focus? N/A
5.0
His poetry ranges from a lovelorn man to psychosis incarnate. His stories are even more insane, and often contain magical or fantastical elements. Themes vary.
Content Warnings
Graphic: Death, Gore, Mental illness, Panic attacks/disorders, Suicidal thoughts, Torture, Violence, Forced institutionalization, Blood, Medical trauma, Stalking, Murder, Schizophrenia/Psychosis , and Injury/Injury detail
Moderate: Addiction, Alcoholism, Animal death, Body shaming, Bullying, Confinement, Cursing, Domestic abuse, Panic attacks/disorders, Physical abuse, Sexism, Toxic relationship, Grief, Medical trauma, Fire/Fire injury, Gaslighting, and Alcohol
Minor: Ableism, Cursing, Emotional abuse, Misogyny, Terminal illness, Vomit, and Cannibalism