The Portable Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1]
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This edition first published in Penguin Books 2006
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Introduction
An alien presence in the first generation of professional American authors, Edgar Allan Poe has fascinated generations of readers around the world while perplexing scholars. From the outset he overturned expectations and flouted conventions. The self-proclaimed need to “conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced” drove Poe to stretch the boundaries of literary representation. When an editor scolded him in 1835 for the disgusting particulars of an early tale, he coolly enumerated the narrative modes he meant to exploit: “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” Committing himself to an extreme art sometimes approaching “the very verge of bad taste,” Poe aimed to achieve celebrity by shocking the public. “To be appreciated, you must be read,” he insisted, justifying his tactics. While magazines and gift books purveyed sentimentalized images of death, he conjured subversive scenes of dissolution, dismemberment, and decomposition; his poems and tales defined a twilight zone of primal anxiety and endless melancholy. Dismissing a charge that he emulated the German romantics, Poe hinted at the origins of his own creativity when he observed in 1840 that “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” He rejected the assurance of contemporary religionists, making the condition of dread—and a corollary yearning for transcendence—his trademark as a writer. But he also mocked both Gothic terror and Transcendentalism.
Poe’s paradoxical trafficking in corporeality and spirituality, in vulgarity and sublimity, in banal humor and mortal seriousness may have something to do with his wide appeal as well as his resistance to facile categorization. His compulsion to astonish or perplex led him to overturn familiar assumptions, as when his detective C. Auguste Dupin observes: “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.” Reversing