Status Updates From Edgar Allan Poe: An Illustr...

The ending is interesting, touches on the feud between Griswold and Poe.

Poe had made the strategic mistake of dying before a man who hated him.

I'm glad I only paid $7 for this.

Now Harry Lee Poe is claiming Bernado Bertolucci's 2003 film The Dreamers was inspired by The Fall of the House of Usher.

I wrote a paper on this film, and Edgar Allan Poe never came up in my research. There's no source or citation for any of this stuff. I'm not saying it's not true, but this is starting to annoy me a little bit

I didn't realize how big of a deal "The Fall of the House of Usher" was -

Claude Debussy became obsessed with the story and spent the last thirty years of his life trying to write an opera based upon it

^This is where I think Harry's bias is coming out. I question using the word 'obsessed.' in reference to Debussy being inspired to write an opera.

Harry Lee Poe is making a big deal out of EAP using unreliable narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher," but I'm wondering how unique of a literary device this really was in that time?

I'm tired of Harry Lee Poe telling me about Edgar Allan Poe and I simply want to read the letters, as a whole. Not little excerpts of them. That would be my main criticism of this.

This is interesting. I did previously have the impression Poe was a tortured soul who lived an isolated, lonely life and here are letters where Poe admits his poems containing horror are not his favorite, he just knows they sell.

This is classic stuff they teach authors. To sell books (or poems, in Poe's case) you gotta find the combination of writing commericial, but also including something original, of yourself in it

p,59

Poe himself thought the poem Berenice "was in bad taste" yet he continued to write simillar tales of horror b/c he recognized other presses who published similar tales sold well.

(letter to White in 1834)

p.46 Poe's thoughts on poetry. Disagreed with Wordsworth

This book is cool, because it has reprinted letters, but idk if this is because I have brain fog from a head cold, but for the life of me I can't make out the cursive. And I actually want to know what's in the letter. I wish the letters were typed out in print on the page. I'm old so I was taught cursive in school, I should be able to read this.

Letters were the source of such drama back in the day.

John Allan, Edgar's foster father, lived a triple life. He had two other families: two mistresses and their illegitimate children.

In 1824 Frances Allan became aware of her husband's extramarital affairs, and Edgar took her side against his foster father.

Apparently after this Edgar and his foster father were at odds, with his foster father starting rumors about Edgar in letters.

Jane Mackenzie, the foster brother of Rosalie Poe, once remarked, "I never saw in him as a boy or man a sign of morbidness or melancholy, unless it was when Mrs.Stanard ('Helen') died, when he appeared for some time grieving and oppressed. Aside from this, cards, raids on orchards, swimming in Shockoe Creek and juvenile masquerades seem to have been the normal order of life."

Jane Stanard died at age 31, when Poe was 15. She sufferred from mental illness and it's assumed she died of suicide.

This episode would leave Poe with a lifelong interest in the mind and mental illness, a theme he would expolore in numerous short stories and essays.

Edgar was popular in school. Good at sports, many friends, but he was denied a leadership position because he was an orphan. He apparently idolized his friend's mother, Jane Stanard. She encouraged him to writtet poetry ~

Poe may never receive justice from popular opinion, but his literary legacy is secure. His works have never gone out of print. Most Americans recognize the line "Nevermore" from his poem, "The Raven." "The Tell-Tale Heart" continues to have the same effect on readers that Poe intended over 160 years ago.

And people still love a mystery.

Most of the popular myth about Edgar Allan Poe comes from the man who edited Poe's complete works after he died. Rufus Griswold is a name lost among all the names of American writers before the Civil War, but his story is forever linked to Poe's b/c of the way he recast him in his edition of Poe's work.

Today, the popular myth of Edgar Allan Poe casts him as a dark figure, cloaked in madness and drug-induced states of wild imagination. Poe's disastrous experience w/ alcohol made him an easy mark when his literary enemies began to spread rumors about him. While he lived, he could sue in court and win, but after he died, he became public property.