Edgar Allan Poe's literary influence

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Edgar Allan Poe's works have had a broad influence on American and world literature as well as in specific genres such as detective fiction and science fiction.

Contents 1 American literature 2 Influence on French literature 3 Other world literature 3.1 Britain 3.2 Russia 3.3 Argentina 3.4 Other countries 4 Detective fiction 5 Gothic fiction and horror fiction 6 Science fiction 7 See also 8 References 9 Sources

[edit] American literature

It has been widely said that Poe was not recognized or appreciated in his own lifetime.^[1] Poe's literary reputation was greater abroad than in the United States, perhaps as a result of America's general revulsion towards the macabre. Rufus Wilmot Griswold's defamatory reminiscences did little to commend Poe to U.S. literary society. However, American authors as diverse as H. P. Lovecraft^[2], William Faulkner, and Herman Melville were influenced by Poe's works. Nathanael West used the concept and black humor of Poe's "The Man That Was Used Up" in his third novel, A Cool Million.

Flannery O'Connor, however, who grew up reading Poe's satirical works, claimed the influence of Poe on her works was "something I'd rather not think about".^[3] T. S. Eliot, who was often quite hostile to Poe and described him as having "the intellect of a highly gifted person before puberty",^[4] professed that he was impressed, however, by Poe's abilities as a literary critic, calling him "the directest, the least pedantic, the least pedagogical of the critics writing in his time in either America or England".^[5]

Walt Whitman praised Poe's writing, saying he belonged "among the electric lights of American literature, brilliant and dazzling", though he criticized his lack of didacticism.^[6] Mark Twain was also a sharp critic of Poe. "To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austen's", he wrote in a January 18, 1909, letter to William Dean Howells.^[7]

[edit] Influence on French literature

In France, where he is commonly known as "Edgar Poe," Poe's works first arrived when two French papers published separate (and uncredited) translations of Poe's detective story "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". A third newspaper, La Presse, accused the editor of the second paper, E. D. Forgues, of plagiarizing the first paper.^[8] Forgues explained that the story was original to neither paper, but was a translation of "les Contes d'E. Poe, littérateur américain." ("the stories of E. Poe, American author.") When La Presse did not acknowledge Forgues' explanation of the events, Forgues responded with a libel lawsuit, during which he repeatedly proclaimed, "Avez-vous lu Edgar Poe? Lisez Edgar Poe." ("Have you read Edgar Poe? Read Edgar Poe!") The notoriety of this trial spread Poe's name throughout Paris, gaining the interest of many poets and writers.^[9]

Among these was Charles Baudelaire, who called Poe "the most powerful writer of the age".^[10] Baudelaire translated almost all of Poe's stories and several of his poems into French. His translations quickly became the definitive renditions of Poe's work throughout Europe; it has been suggested that Baudelaire even improved upon the original works.^[11] His excellent translations meant that Poe enjoyed a vogue among avant-garde writers in France while being ignored in his native land. In Poe, Baudelaire saw a kindred spirit,^[11] and that connection is reflected in Baudelaire's own poetry, as can be seen from Baudelaire's obsession with macabre imagery, morbid themes, musical verse and aesthetic pleasure. In a draft preface to his most famous work, Les Fleurs du mal, Baudelaire lists Poe as one of the authors whom he plagiarized. Baudelaire also found in Poe an example of what he saw as the destructive elements of bourgeois society. Poe himself was critical of democracy and capitalism (in his story "Mellonta Tauta," Poe proclaims that "democracy is a very admirable form of government—for dogs" ^[12]), and the tragic poverty and misery of Poe's biography seemed, to Baudelaire, to be the ultimate example of how the bourgeoisie destroys genius and originality. Raymond Foye, editor of the book The Unknown Poe, put Baudelaire's and Poe's shared political sympathies this way:

Poe's anti-democratic views persuaded Baudelaire to abandon his socialism, and if these two men shared a single political preference it was monarchy. But each was a country unto himself, a majority of one, an aristocrat of the mind. There is arrogance here: the arrogance of loneliness.^[13]

Poe was much admired, also, by the school of Symbolism. Stéphane Mallarmé dedicated several poems to him and translated some of Poe's works into French, accompanied by illustrations by Édouard Manet. The later authors Paul Valéry and Marcel Proust were great admirers of Poe, the latter saying "Poe sought to arrive at the beautiful through evocation and an elimination of moral motives in his art."

[edit] Other world literature

[edit] Britain

From France, Poe's works made their way to Britain, where writers like Algernon Swinburne caught the Poe-bug, and Swinburne's musical verse owes much to Poe's technique. Oscar Wilde called Poe "this marvellous lord of rhythmic expression" and drew on Poe's works for his novel The Picture of Dorian Gray and his short stories.^[14]

The poet and critic W. H. Auden revitalized interest in Poe's works, especially his criticism. Auden said of Poe, "His portraits of abnormal or self-destructive states contributed much to Dostoyevsky, his ratiocinating hero is the ancestor of Sherlock Holmes and his many successors, his tales of the future lead to H. G. Wells, his adventure stories to Jules Verne and Robert Louis Stevenson."^[15]

Other English writers, such as Aldous Huxley, however, were less fond of him. Huxley considered Poe to be the embodiment of vulgarity in literature.^[16]

[edit] Russia

Poe's poetry was translated into Russian by the symbolist poet Konstantin Balmont and enjoyed great popularity there in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, influencing artists such as Vladimir Nabokov, who makes several references to Poe's work in his most famous novel, Lolita.

Fyodor Dostoevsky called Poe "an enormously talented writer," favorably reviewing Poe's detective stories and briefly referencing "The Raven" in his novel The Brothers Karamazov. It has been suggested that Crime and Punishment's Raskolnikov was inspired in part by Montresor from "The Cask of Amontillado", and that the same novel's Porfiry Petrovich owes a debt to C. Auguste Dupin.^[17] Dostoevsky in particular helped popularize Poe in Russia, helping him become an often-read American author there; between 1918 and 1959 about 900,000 copies of Poe's works were printed in the then Soviet Union.^[18]

[edit] Argentina

Argentinian author Jorge Luis Borges was a great admirer of Poe's works and translated his stories into Spanish. A few of the characters from Borges' stories are borrowed directly from Poe's stories, and in several of his stories Poe is mentioned by name. Another Argentinian author, Julio Cortázar, translated Poe's complete fiction and essays into Spanish.

[edit] Other countries

Poe is often ranked as one of the world's greatest writers in countries ranging from Japan to parts of South America and Europe.^[10] Poe was also an influence for the Swedish poet and author Viktor Rydberg, who translated a considerable amount of Poe's work into Swedish. German author Thomas Mann, in whose novel Buddenbrooks, a character reads Poe's short novels and professes to be influenced by his works. Friedrich Nietzsche refers to Poe in his masterpiece Beyond Good and Evil, and some have found evidence of Poe's influence on the philosopher.^[19]

Poe is one of the main topics in Zettels Traum, the 1,334-pages novel of Folio format by Arno Schmidt, type-written between 1962 and 1970. Trying to infer missing facts of Poe’s life by a subliminal reading of the work, Schmidt at length expounds an extremely extravagant – and humoristic – overall theory about Poe’s life and works.^[20]

Edogawa Rampo, a pioneer author of Japanese detective stories in the early 20th century, acknowledged Poe as one of his major influences.

[edit] Detective fiction

Poe is often credited as inventing modern detective fiction with his fictional detective C. Auguste Dupin, who first appeared in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841).^[21] He inspired mystery writers who came after him, particularly Arthur Conan Doyle in his series of stories featuring Sherlock Holmes. Doyle was once quoted as saying, "Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed.... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"^[22] Though Poe's Dupin was not the first detective in fiction, he became an archetype for all subsequent detectives, and Doyle acknowledged the primacy of C. Auguste Dupin in his Sherlock Holmes story, A Study in Scarlet, in which Watson compares Holmes to Dupin, much to Holmes's chagrin.^[23] Many other later fictional detectives, including Hercule Poirot by Agatha Christie, were also inspired by Poe's character.^[24]

Poe's influence in detective fiction is reflected by the Mystery Writers of America, an organization which has named its annual awards for excellence in the genre the "Edgars."^[25]

[edit] Gothic fiction and horror fiction

Though Poe's first horror story, "Metzengerstein" (1832),^[26] was originally written to satirize the popular horror genre,^[27] he is regarded as the foremost proponent of the Gothic strain in literary Romanticism along with Mary Shelley. Death, decay and madness were major themes in Poe's work and his often nightmarish work greatly influenced the horror and fantasy genres. Horror fiction writers including H. P. Lovecraft claimed to have been profoundly influenced by Poe's works.

[edit] Science fiction

Poe had an influence on science fiction as the genre was developing^[28] because of his responses to emerging technologies such as hot air balloons in "The Balloon-Hoax".^[29] Author Jules Verne, who discussed Poe in his essay Poe et ses œuvres, was inspired to write a sequel to Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Le sphinx des glaces (The Sphinx of the Ice Fields).^[30] H. G. Wells, in discussing the construction of his own science fiction works The War of the Worlds and The First Men in the Moon, noted that "Pym tells what a very intelligent mind could imagine about the south polar region a century ago".^[31]

Renowned science fiction author Ray Bradbury has also professed a love for Poe. He often draws upon Poe in his stories and mentions Poe by name in several stories. His anti-censorship story "Usher II", set in a dystopian future in which the works of Poe (and some other authors) have been censored, features an eccentric who constructs a house based on Poe's tale "The Fall of the House of Usher".

[edit] See also

• Bibliography of Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe in popular culture, Poe as a character
• Edgar Allan Poe in television and film, Poe's oeuvre adapted for the screen
• Edgar Allan Poe and music, musical adaptations of his works

[edit] References

[edit] Sources

• Frank, Frederick and Anthony Magistrale. The Poe Encyclopaedia. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1997. ISBN 0313277680
• Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992. ISBN 0815410387
• Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. ISBN 0060923318.