Somewhere in there, I think, is the seed of his continued popularity. Indeed, in a CNN interview given last year, John Cusack (yes – that John Cusack) talked about Poe as representing “some sort of collective sorrow.” His work couples the melodramatics of a surly teenager with the unyielding grief you might expect in the lone survivor of a car wreck. It’s not hard to understand why Poe’s writing draws such strong reactions. In life he struggled to feed himself, but in death he’s universally acknowledged as the father of a somewhat obscure literary genre called detective fiction – maybe you’ve heard of it? Arthur Conan Doyle calls Poe’s stories “a model for all time,” while Ralph Waldo Emerson summarily dismissed “The Raven” in a single sentence: “I can see nothing in it.” In his day, he was respected (or at least feared) as a critic, but as a writer he was every critic’s favorite whipping boy. (He was also my middle school’s namesake – go Ravens!) In the canon of American literature, though, Poe cuts a more protean figure, as equally beloved as he is derided. His stories are strange and rich his poems are satisfyingly moody. I’ve always had a hazy kind of affection for Edgar Allan Poe.
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