Skip to main content

Edgar Allan Poe

Raven vs. Crow

"Quoth the Raven, ‘Nevermore.’” Quoth the raven. Why not quoth the curlew? Quoth the grackle? Quoth the—well, the crow?

 

"The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel," By Jerome McGann

Defending ‘The Jingle Man’

December 2, 2014

  The Poet Edgar Allan Poe: Alien Angel. By Jerome McGann. Harvard, 2014. 256p. HB. $24.95. I hadn’t read any of Edgar Allan Poe’s verse in decades. So when Jerome McGann’s new book landed on my desk, I decided to reacquaint myself with [...]

Following The Following

February 20, 2013

The Fox Network claims to have a new hit TV show on its hands called The Following, starring not some run-of-the-mill actor six degrees of separation from Kevin Bacon, but Kevin Bacon himself. People in Charlottesville might be curious about this show, because it deals with a university in Virginia and regularly refers to Edgar Allan Poe.

Truth About Poe

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. By Arthur Hobson Quinn. D. Ap-pleton-Century Company. $5.00. Arthur hobson quinn is on the right side of the Poe question; that is, on the side of truth, jus-tice, and conformity to facts. This associates h [...]

Nazi Literature in the Americas

In 1917 she met the rancher and entrepreneur Sebastian Mendiluce, twenty years her senior. Everyone was surprised when they announced their engagement, after only a few months. According to people who knew him at the time, Mendiluce thought little of literature in general and poetry in particular, had no artistic sensibility (although he did occasionally go to the opera), and his conversation was on a par with that of his farmhands and factory workers. He was tall and energetic, but not handsome by any standard. There was, however, no disputing his inexhaustible wealth.

Our Edgar

Edgar Allan Poe, that strange genius of a hack writer, lived in such a narcissistic cocoon of torment as to be all but blind to the booming American nation around him, and so, perversely, became a mythic presence in the American literary consciousness.