![]() The idea that he missed her so deeply that “And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side/ Of my darling-my darling-my life and my bride,/ In her sepulchre there by the sea-/ In her tomb by the sounding sea.” Was her tomb really next to the sea? Did he really go and lie down next to it at night? Whether he did or not, this stirred my imagination, they were like Romeo and Juliet. ![]() In fact, my mother brought me to visit Poe’s Cottage in the Bronx for my twelfth birthday.Īt that age the over-the-top portrayal of his love for her (“But we loved with a love that was more than love”) thrilled me. I read this poem for the first time when I was a young romantic pre-teen. I don’t advocate marrying one’s 13 year old cousin, but I have been deeply moved by Poe’s love poems to his wife Virginia, especially one written after her death, probably his most famous poem, Annabel Lee. Auguste Dupin who solved crimes in Paris before the word “detective” had been coined.Įdgar Allan Poe invented some of the major characteristics we know and love in mysteries today-the bumbling police sergeant representing the by-the-book authority figure as opposed to the creative, eccentric but analytically brilliant detective, the first-person narrative by a friend (Watson to Holmes), and the gathering of the suspects together to announce the identity of the murderer that we love so much when Poirot calls everyone to the drawing room. He said, “Each is a root from which a whole literature has developed….Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” Poe originated the detective genre in his short story “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” with the character C. ![]() Yeats and Huxley both reportedly called him “vulgar” and upon reading “The Raven” Emerson said, “I see nothing in it.” But Arthur Conan Doyle got him. Some of my favorite writers and thinkers dismissed Edgar Allan Poe. He was the first major American writer to attempt to make a living at writing, and he invented the detective story genre. Because Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and short stories pervade pop culture and are taught in middle school they are considered by some to be among the lower rungs of the literary canon.
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