The Rambling Historian: Poe & Pop Culture, Week One

Eight weeks to teach a course on Poe and Pop Culture... it's been a brilliant idea from the beginning and yet less cohesive the more time I spent with it. Primarily a literature class, I expected a bit of reading and multi-media interaction... until the multi-media part crashed and burned in the worst way on this first day of class. Awkwardness is not my thing. This was acute awkwardness. Hmmm, how to fill the time, and then get the links to my students. Oh, hey! A blog. Boom. Nice, tidy links to go with the lecture portion of the class, because who wants all lecture and no play?

I set out to read this in preparing for the class:

And while this was way more than I will ever need, it gave me a bit more insight into his legacy.

This class is a bit of a survey class, and to sum up his life, it was one misery after the next manifested itself in his poetic dirges. The most basic summary of his life I gleaned from this (hey, I have young children):

Poe was born in Boston January 19, 1809, to parents who were stage actors parents, his mother more accomplished and popular than his father, who, after too many negative reviews on his performances turned to heavy drinking and he eventually left the family. Then the misery set in. Basically, every woman he ever loved in any sense died: his mother, his foster mother, and his wife all died of Tuberculosis or as that era called it "consumption". One of his brothers also died from TB. Another mother figure in his younger years died of a brain tumor.

While Poe never made much of a living off his writing, he was as an editor and critic of other writers, garnering the nickname "Tomahawk Man" for his scathing reviews. He made few friends among the literary crowd, but readers of his reviews loved him. Among his works, Poe wrote essays on how to write. Specifically, he wrote an essay (The Philosophy of Composition on how he wrote The Raven in which he states his philosophy is: Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem... Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetical tomes... the death then, of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world-- and equally it is beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.

That sums up Poe right there. Class dismissed. Except for the patterns found later on stemming from his influence. Walt Disney anyone? It's a much better story the mother figure is removed from the story line.

His personal life stayed in disarray and shambles until his end when he was found outside a tavern and completely mad in the head. He was taken to a nearby hospital, but never recovered, dying on October 7, 1849. Problem was that he left his legacy in the hands of Rufus Griswold, someone who was not happy with the reviews he had received from Poe. It's not really known what kind of man Poe really was. Griswold succeeded in his postmortem smear campaign against Poe, making him out to be the vilest of men, lascivious, drunken, drugged, and as psychotic as the characters Poe wrote about. Poe's American popularity waned quickly, but European interest seems to have been steadfast, especially the French and English readership. It took nearly a hundred years and several biographers before Poe was once again back in the graces of American literary genius.

Classified as a writer in the literary era of Romanticism, Poe maintained a vastly different way of writing than most of his contemporaries. His writings are generally categorized in the sub genre of Gothic fiction, combining romance, horror, the supernatural with the intent to freak the reader out. Elements of Gothic fiction are 1) the virginal maiden, 2) older, foolish woman, 3) hero, 4) tyrant/villain, 5) bandits/ruffians, and 6) clergy. I envision the animated Disney film "Robin Hood" as the archetypal Gothic story. Hollywood made bank in its early days with tales like this starring Errol Flynn and Tyrone Power.

Gothic fiction predates Poe by a couple of decades, but he certainly holds a place in their ranks. The most famous works of Gothic fiction being Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (published 1818), A Christmas Carol (Charles Dickens, 1843), Dracula (Bram Stoker, 1897), Les Miserables (Victor Hugo, 1862), The Mysteries of Udolfo (Ann Radcliff, 1794), Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte, 1847), and Northanger Abbey (Jane Austen, 1890). Typically, the male writers wrote from the perspective of "sensibility" also referred to as the "cult of sensibility," which features female characters who were prone to weeping, fainting, needing the use of smelling salts, having reactionary fits of pique, women as genteel characters that need excessive pandering, etc. Female writers, on the other hand, (like Bronte and Austen) used these sensibilities to give female characters power as they used the sensibilities as a staged weakness. Mrs. Bennet from Pride and Prejudice is a fabulous example of the fainting woman character ( and Austen is brilliant in her jibe against those who write female characters as damsels in distress by making Mrs. Bennet ridiculous).

Poe, in many ways, is the literary gift that keeps on giving. Arthur Conan Doyle (author of Sherlock Holmes which was inspired by Poe's The Murders in the Rue Morgue) stated at an event celebrating the 100th year after Poe's death: These tales have been so pregnant with suggestion, so stimulating to the minds of others, that it may be said of many of them that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.

The next seven weeks of classes are focusing on his short stories, and not much will be covered in regards to his poetry. We briefly mentioned The Raven, Annabel Lee, and The Bells. Here are some links that give a modern take on these poems, some are readings and others animated clips.

The Raven