Why We Should Care About Poe

One reason we should care about Edgar Allan Poe is that 200 years after his birth he is still so widely read, as well as the fact that he means a great deal to so many people. He still speaks to us, often on a very emotional level. Poe was a true genius, who suffered so much in his life that he was able to tap into the dark side of human nature, as well as our dreams. To quote Dr. Harold Bloom, a Yale Professor and one of the world’s leading writers on Shakespeare, “Poe has an uncanny talent for exposing our common nightmares and hysteria lurking beneath our carefully structured lives."

And there is something for everyone in Poe's works. He writes about joy, passion, happiness, humor, despair, jealousy, and fear - basic human emotions to which we can all relate. In his short life, he showed a command of language combined with an incredible imagination.

Like most of us, the first time I read Poe was in high school, and his complex ideas about existence and death were just not part of my world. When we are teens, it is the mystery and the good scare that turns us on to Poe. When I got back into Poe when I was older, I starting seeing things that I previously completely ignored the first time around – I had a different view about life, and a different view about Poe – there was a lot more substance there than I realized.

Edgar Allan Poe invented several genres that had never even existed previously. He is credited with inventing the science fiction story, the first real detective story, was one of America’s first poets, an outstanding literary critic, and many people feel he was the first person to get the short story right - all this under incredibly difficult conditions.

We live in a time of short attention spans, and are used to having entertainment fast and easy to understand. So we might think that Poe is not easy to understand – he takes work. He was classically educated like Shakespeare, and uses a lot of words that we just don’t use today very much.
Poe demands a lot from the reader, but I guess you get out of something what you put into it.

I would like this end this blog entry by quoting again from Dr. Bloom. In expressing how well Shakespeare understood human nature, Blooms writes “Shakespeare reads me better than I read Shakespeare.” I believe the same can be said about Edgar Allan Poe.