Poe's 200th anniversary: Rob Velella
Rob Velella, who describes himself as a "devourer of Poe," is among the organizers of the Edgar Allan Poe 200 Project and created the Edgar Allan Poe 2009 Bicentennial Desk Calendar. He also blogs about Poe. In this guest post, he describes Poe's timeless appeal:
I first read Edgar Allan Poe when I was in my seventh grade English class. It was 1992 and I was 13 years old. I don’t remember the teacher’s name or the name of any of the other authors I read that year. But I remember Poe.
We read "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Raven" and probably others. I was moved enough to write my own "Gothic" story, so close in concept to "The Tell-Tale Heart" that the Poe estate could have legitimately accused me of plagiarism (and not even Longfellow could deny it). Poe was the first author that I wasn’t ashamed to enjoy – and I remember what pulled me in were his sights and sounds. I heard the tremor in the narrator’s voice when he told me how "calmly" he would tell me the whole story. I saw the old man’s evil, vulture-like eye, blue film and all. I heard the sound of the old man’s heart, beating like the ticking of a watch when enveloped in cotton.
What appealed to me then is still what appeals to me now: his ability to take words that do more than tell a story, but show one. He was a writer of sensation, creating images that are impossible to forget – a writhing black tongue in "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," a shackled man in jester’s motley appealing "for the love of God!" in "The Cask of Amontillado," and the one-eyed black cat sitting triumphantly on the head of a murdered wife in "The Black Cat," just to name a few.
During Poe’s time, just as today, horror writers were a dime a dozen; anyone can write a horror story. But, rather than just presenting us a few scary images, Poe writes stories that are not only terrifying, but shockingly possible – or, at least, he convinces us as much. His rich words pull us out of our rational selves for a moment and into these fictional worlds that are beyond reality. We listen to the murderous narrator as he inadvertently proves his insanity to us. We fear for the man doomed to die either by pit or by pendulum despite his best efforts as his captors mock him at every step. We lament our lost Annabel Lee in that kingdom by the sea and truly believe it was the love that was more than love that caused her death.
Poe, of course, was more than a horror writer. Poe has the distinction as "father of the modern detective story." There may have been earlier examples, but Poe’s creation of a coherent model inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes, and every fictional detective thereafter owes Poe a nod. Today, mystery is one of the most enduring and popular genres out there, not only in paperbacks but also on screen.
What helped make his horror popular posthumously may have been an unintended side effect of the mechanizations of Rufus Griswold: the real-life villain who tried to crush Poe’s reputation in a series of lies and exaggerations about his personal character. In presenting Poe as a disreputable, perpetual drunkard with no moral compass, he created the "Poe myth" which endures today as part of his appeal and helped create a sort of Poe cult. After all, why just read about a fictitious murder, when you can read about a fictitious murder written by an alleged madman? This mythical character endures today and, regardless of where the truth ends, is perpetually linked to his works, making the name "Poe" synonymous with "horror story."
But to say that Poe’s modern popularity is only owed to the image of Poe as one of his own characters doesn’t do him justice. He is still one of the most widely-read American authors today because of his writing, independent of his biography. Like me, many others say that Poe was the first assigned reading they weren’t embarrassed to admit they enjoyed, and sought out more to read after class. And, even though he’s been adopted as a symbol of the Goth subculture, you don’t have to wear black nail polish to say, "This stuff is good."
Even people with Ph.D.s think Poe’s stuff is good. When Poe wrote "The Raven," as he explained in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," he intended to write one poem that at once appealed to both the popular and the critical taste.
It is this ability to dually please both mainstream readers and the literary scholars that has led to Poe’s enduring legacy today.
Poe’s fans include Matthew Pearl, who fictionalized a quest to look into the author’s mysterious death in the novel The Poe Shadow. Others who have brought Poe into modern fiction include Louis Bayard, Harold Schechter, Joyce Carole Oates, and a distant relative named Robert Poe.
The Alan Parsons Project helped kick start a flurry of music inspired by Poe as well, from big names like Lou Reed to obscure bands like Tiger Army. Even the Beatles sang about "kicking Edgar Allan Poe" and featured his tiny visage among dozens of others on the album for Sgt. Pepper’s. On screen, Roger Corman re-introduced Poe to millions of viewers, and films referencing Poe and his works range from the subtle (a short recitation of "The Raven" in The Crow) to the blatant (the upcoming Edgar Allan Poe’s Ligeia sticks the author’s name right in the title, even if the plot of the film doesn’t coincide with the source story). On television, Poe and his works have made appearances in The Simpsons, Boy Meets World, The Venture Bros., and even Gilmore Girls (or so I hear).
Ultimately, what leads people back to Poe? He’s a good, talented writer, who creates rich stories with luscious textures and deep underpinnings – and he makes it all seem so easy. Top it all off with his inherent "cool factor," and you have a writer who will endure and for generations to come.
While she always preferred The Hardy Boys to Nancy Drew, 
