Tales of Mystery and Imagination (Classics Library (NTC)) (Classics… (edition 1999)

Edgar Allan Poe is the savior of Gothic literature: not only is he largely responsible for salvaging the Gothic imagination from a deeply stagnant mire of clichéd melodrama, over-rehearsed motifs, and unreservedly bad writing, he is also the father of two genres that, in essence, did not exist before he put pen to paper: the detective story (chiefly) and what we refer to today as the ‘psychological’ horror story. His use of Gothic devices, though, insured that the mode did not entirely disassemble: rather, it took on new shapes and meanings—new colors: without Poe, there would be no Stoker and no Lovecraft, no Turn of the Screw or Picture of Dorian Gray; it can even be argued that, without Poe, there would be no Melville or Conrad—no Heart of Darkness, no Moby-Dick. Our literary debt to this one central figure is so incredible that, a century and a half after his death, he remains one of the most widely-read and influential of all American authors, both here and abroad (particularly in France, where he was the father of Baudelaire, and hence the Decadence). This is no small feat for a man whose common leitmotifs include premature burial, decomposition (of both body and mind), mourning, insanity, and a general disavowal of the more common Romantic applications of allegory and moral. Much of his reputation in his own day relied as much upon his poetry, numerous satires, humor pieces, and scathing critical reviews as upon his ‘tales of the grotesque and arabesque,’ but I will limit this review to the latter.

How does one who has been touched by the influence of another properly, objectively, offer an opinion on this other’s work? She doesn’t—she responds with reaction, not the critical eye. To that end, the work of Poe which has most prefigured and cast its crimson shadow upon my own is his remarkable ‘Masque of the Red Death.’ An early example (perhaps the first example) of Decadent literature, the familiar comeuppance of ‘happy and dauntless and sagacious’ Prince Prospero at the hands of the dreadful plague he had sought to avoid through reclusion can be viewed as a sort of A Rebours in miniature. Those seeking an allegory or final moral in this profoundly symbolic piece will find none: it is a fable, but it owes very little to Aesop. In common with Poe’s other out-right horror-work (‘The Pit and the Pendulum,’ ‘The Black Cat,’ ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,’ and the remarkably gruesome ‘Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’), ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ is more an examination of the limits of the psyche: and these limits, in ‘The Masque of the Red Death,’ are examined, chiefly, through a reader’s inability to refrain from attaching any ultimate ‘meaning’ to the story presented. To this end, Poe demonstrates what is, perhaps, the totality of his vision: that ambiguity itself can become a theme in literature, particularly when this ambiguity mirrors its own content (as in ‘The Assignation,’ ‘Silence,’ ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ or the mingled horror/humor of ‘King Pest,’ which Poe claims contains an ‘allegory,’ but which, of course, contains none at all). For Poe, symbolism can exist outside of allegory—this was what Baudelaire and the Decadents responded to most intensely: a scent can have a color, a sound a feeling. Poe invented this system of correspondences, even as he distanced himself from the idea of ‘correspondence.’

At the other end of the spectrum, Poe’s detective stories—he deemed them tales of ‘ratiocination’—remain among his most immediately influential: without Poe, as in so many other cases, there would be no Arthur Conan Doyle, and hence no Sherlock Holmes; nor would there be an Agatha Christie or Hercule Poirot. Poe initiated the movement, featuring his ingenious C. Auguste Dupin, with the widely-read ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ alongside its sequel, ‘The Mystery of Marie Roget,’ and ‘The Purloined Letter.’ Poe tried his hand at other tales of this nature, as in ‘The Gold Bug,’ but his creation of the central detective character—with all his justified arrogance, clarity of vision, and near-inhuman skill—was to have the greatest impact of all Poe’s literary inventions.

Poe was famously haunted by the recurring theme of ‘the death of the beautiful woman.’ His characters, though, so often taken to a particularly poisoned state of mourning, behave in dramatically different ways: the narrator of ‘Morella,’ with his near-hatred for the lost ‘love,’ stands in striking contrast to that of ‘Ligeia,’ whose intensely unhinged state (the product of both opium and sorrow) is responsible for an ending that can be viewed as either dream or reality, depending on the reader’s interpretation. In further contrast is the narrator of the horrifying ‘Berenice,’ whose obsession eventually centers upon one, solely physical, feature of his cataleptic lover, with gruesome results. Catalepsy is a recurring motif in Poe’s work, but premature burial itself was less a particular obsession of Poe’s than a general, widespread paranoia of Victorian audiences as a whole. Poe helped to crystallize the idea: our notion of premature burial is, today, less based on actual incident and more on the trappings of Poe’s fictional musings: chiefly, this is due to the fevered detail of ‘The Premature Burial,’ but the motif is also present in ‘Berenice,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ and others. Alongside his theme of mourning, this preoccupation with the macabre remains one of the strongest links between the work of Edgar Allan Poe and the subject of Death as an abstraction.

Remarks on Poe’s poetry, essays, and only novel (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym) will demand further entries in this journal. By way of conclusion, some personal reflection: Edgar Allan Poe was the first author I discovered as a child: a collection titled The Poe Reader was both my first exposure to his work and the first adult book I ever owned, purchased at the tender age of nine. My immediate obsessions centered on ‘The Masque of the Red Death’ and his enchanting poem ‘Ulalume,’ and to this day they, more or less, remain there. As I grew older, I discovered the more famous pieces and some strange odds-and-ends, like his treatise on interior design, ‘The Philosophy of Furniture.’ Further exploration yielded the gorgeous, otherworldly pen-and-ink drawings of Harry Clarke, some of which are interspersed throughout this review (note: see the illustrated review at threalmoftheunreal.blogspot.com). More than any other author I have encountered, with the exception of Gustav Meyrink, Poe has impacted my thought processes, particular obsessions, and even the direction of my life: for without Poe I would never have been led to the literature of the Gothic or the Decadent, and my academic life would never have taken shape under the influence of those two movements. More importantly: without Poe, I would not write.

In the end, it seems, Poe—the precursor of so many others—is both the father of my muses and the muse himself. ( )

"An artist is usually a damned liar, but his art, if it be art, will tell you the truth of his day." D.H. Lawrence.

Burying people alive, ghosts, macabre deaths of usually delicate and young women, dark magic, effects of inebriation and hallucination, torture, whirlpools sucking people out of their time, fatal plagues, torture, abnormal psychological states, obsessional behaviors... William Blake in prose.
If D.H. Lawrence was any close to right about his predicament I wouldn't have liked to be in Mr.Poe's skin, such horrors!
That Poe lead a tormented and dysfunctional life is no secret. Haunted by the death of her mother when he was barely a toddler and later by the long illness and ultimate death of the love of his life(his cousin Virginia)whom she married when she was only thirteen, Poe struggled to keep afloat between the feelings of abandonment and loss and his growing ill-health and addictions which eventually killed him in mysterious circumstances at the age of 40.
Whether this gloomy life served him as inspiration or he released his pain into his work, the extremeness of his imaginative creations managed to capture attention, if not acceptance.

The sickness-the nausea-
The pitiless pain-
Have ceased, with the fever
That maddened my brain-
With the fever called "Living"
That burned in my brain.

Considered the father of the short story, Poe manages to control the soul of the reader, nothing intervenes or distracts once you are engulfed in one of his curious and terrifying tales, you feel pulled down by an inexplicable and exotic sort of nostalgia which catches at your breath and prevents you from stopping to read. But make no mistake, Poe plays with you, giving you hope in a futile attempt to search for the truth and offer a plausible explanation for the unaccountable, even though you know deep inside that the end will be doomed from the start.
His literary quality is irrefutable, he borrows from the European Gothic tradition and adds elements of detective stories, creating a new register which seeks for the horrendous truth, for the paincuts into your soul, although sometimes a rare kind of beauty oozes from the text, whether conscious or unconsciously I can't say:

Then silence, stillness, and night were the universe

But mainly, Poe appears as a ruthless, crude and pessimistic voice who wants to put order amid the chaos, who wants to explain the inexplicable to elevate the name of the artist; offering an alternative to the newly born optimism, complacency and materialism of his age, and asking for nothing in return. He didn't seek for approval and often had to endure rebuke, few of his contemporaries valued his work at the time and being considered an oddball he was banned from society (or he excluded himself willingly).
It is through the anguish and torment expressed in his poems and short stories that it is plausible to imagine his existence rather miserable and that he suffered from a precariously balanced state of mind. But then, once again, I ask myself the same question which always arises when I try to link the real life of a writer with his work, was it his eccentricity that made his works so special? Were they the product of a genius or a deranged mind ? Or both?

The truth is, I am heartily sick of this life, and of the nineteenth century in general. I am convinced that everything is going wrong. Besides, I am anxious to know who will be President in 2045. As soon, therefore, as I shave and swallow a cup of coffee, I shall step over to Ponnonner's and get embalmed for a couple of hundred years.

In any case, although his haunted mind offered no respite, Poe's lucid writing managed to push the scales of reality and redefine the artistic world of beauty and lyricism towards a new daring approach where the probability of terror and darkness prevailed and where the motto could be summed up as to deny what is, and explain what is not .

As it usual happens in real life, neither black nor white, just a blurred smudge of indistinct grey. ( )

Great book! It contains the seeds of all modern narrative of this style. The ilustrations are great. ( )

Spiral down dimly lit streets liined with madmen and their black deeds, through cold twists of catacombs, and across a sea that strikes with tight, angry fists. From the tortured mind of Edgar Allan Poe, three tales--"The Cask of Amontillado, " "The Black Cat, " and "The Fall of the House of Usher"--speak to the hidden places within us all. ( )

5 stories of famous writer, Edgar Allan Poe.
These are not fun,but just horrible.
I like ''the Fall of the House of Usher'' best .
I was scarced of it very much.

If you are not interested in horror ,I don't recommend this. ( )