Exploring the Legacy of E. A. Poe

Authors who Inspired Me, blog series.

Thank you for checking out the latest blog in my Authors Who Inspired Me series. This series has become a labor of love. As I slide back in time to the authors who impacted my youth. Many of you might know that I was extremely lucky to have parents who didn’t censor my reading choices. I was not told that a novel was beyond my reading level or something inappropriate for me to read.

Everything we read affects us, and often in different ways as we grow and change. Something I read as a child will have a new meaning for me as an adult. This is one reason I don’t say I dislike an author or their work to someone if I can help it. Because it’s not the author or the story, it’s me and how I interact with the work.

This author is one of my all-time favorites and I learn something new about him every time I read his work. I can’t remember the first time I found his work, but I know it was his most famous work, The Raven, of course. After that I found the Vincent Price horror series of movies based on his work and fell in love with more of his work. The children’s television show Wishbone introduced me to his detective story, The Purloined Letter. Yes, I watched Wishbone even though I wasn’t a child anymore. I grew up on PBS and continued watching shows there even after I grew up.

If you haven’t guessed yet by the clues above. It’s none other than the American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic Edgar Allan Poe. Best known for his poetry and short stories, he’s regarded as a central figure of Romanticism and Gothic fiction in the U.S.

Born Edgar Poe, January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts and finally found rest on October 7th, 1949, ages 40 in Baltimore, Maryland at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground, Baltimore. Edgar Poe’s early life was filled with abandonment, loss, and lack of support.

He published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, while he enlisted in the U.S. Army under an assumed name. Later, he married Virginia Clemm, who passed away from tuberculosis in 1847.

Legacy and Influence

In January 1945, he published the poem he is most known for, The Raven, and it was an instant success.

Poe’s work influenced literature not only in his native country, but worldwide. He was quite famous in Paris. He impacted fields like cosmology, cryptography, and like Jane Austen, modern day literature, movies, and art.

He is an iconic figure and is renowned for his exploration of the dark corners of the human psyche. Poe made important contributions to different types of literature, leaving a lasting impact on the literary world. His writing spanned across short stories, poetry, and literary criticism. Poe’s works are defined by a pervasive sense of mystery, horror, and the macabre. He frequently explored gothic fiction, creating complex and eerie stories with deep psychological themes. Themes such as death, madness, and the supernatural are recurrent throughout his writings, with motifs like the duality of human nature and the inevitability of fate being prominent. Poe’s impact on the development of literary genres is profound; his works laid the foundation for what would become the modern horror and detective fiction genres. His pioneering efforts in these fields not only set the standard for subsequent writers but also inspired generations to come, cementing his legacy as one of the most influential figures in the history of literature.

My Reflections

The most striking memory I have with Poe is reading his The Raven while listening to classical music as I was alone at home on a stormy night. Needless to say, it was the most terrifying experience I’ve had while reading in my life. The only other literary work that has as close is the poem Jabberwocky recited in the 1985 rendition of Alice Through the Looking Glass by Lewis Carroll.

If you want to experience tingles and goosebumps, listen to these voices read The Raven to you.

In college, I wrote an essay about how Edgar Allan Poe’s story, “The Tell-Tale Heart,” showed an understanding of certain psychological disorders, like paranoid schizophrenia, before they were fully understood by specialists.

I would have a larger list of his works that I haven’t read but plan to, so I’ll share the ones I’ve read so far.

The Black Cat
The Cask of Amontillado
The Fall of the House of Usher
The Masque of the Red Death
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Pit and the Pendulum
The Purloined Letter
The Tell-Tale Heart
Annabel Lee
Lenore
The Raven

This towering figure in American literature has inspired me along with so many. His sense of mystery, horror, and the macabre left a mark on me and will continue to do so for the rest of my life. He laid the foundation for what would become modern horror and detective fiction genres.

I can’t wait to chat about these authors and more in this on going blog series.