Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Stories with Selected Essays

This incredibly dense volume has taken me a year to muddle through, partly due to my own easily distracted nature, and partly due to the fact that every time I tried to get through a chunk I fell asleep after a few pages.  In fact, after this happened a few times, I took to reading a bit of Poe whenever I was having trouble falling asleep.  My mind often races, causing me to lie awake, but this has proven to be the easiest over-the-counter cure for that I have found.

There are those who will be incensed by this declaration, but I mean it in earnest.  No other author can put me to sleep the way Poe can.  He just tries so hard to prove himself--that he's smart, or avant-garde, or of a poetical nature.  His word choice and condescending tone consistently leave a bad taste in my mouth.  It is no wonder that he met with but little recognition in his own time.

What is a mystery is that he has such devout followers in modern times.  What is usually familiar of his body of work is often limited to the three or four stories that are not tediously self-conscious.  One that I was pleasantly surprised by was The Mask of the Red Death, which I had read before, but the lovely symmetry and well-crafted structure of which I had not fully appreciated at the time.

And if  his prose is unbearable, his poetry is even more so, containing, as he admitted, "Nothing of much value to the public, or very creditable to [my]self" (Poe, 1845).  This is, of course, an exaggeration.  Certain of his poems have become deservedly famous, but the vast majority are clumsy, unfinished, and boring.  To use his own words again,

...the writer of these lines
 in the mad pride of intellectuality
maintained "the power of words"--denied that ever
a thought arose within the human brain
beyond the utterance of the human tongue ("To Marie Louise" 1-5)

It is exactly this mad pride of intellectuality that infects all of Poe's work, including the few examples from his essays included in this collection.  This is a terrible shame because that cloying frosting of pseudo-intellectualism covers up the ideas behind Poe's work, which, when they peek through, are visionary and poetic in the highest degree.  I just wish he had an editorial-minded friend who could have sat down with him and extracted those things.  I wish some of the truly lovely passages and turns of phrase were not nestled in such glutinous dishes as Poe served.  Some of my favorite examples:

Ours is a world of words: Quiet we call
"Silence"--which is the merest word of all.
All nature speaks, and ev'n ideal things
Flap shadowy sounds from visionary wings

and

Up!--shake from your wing
Each hindering thing:
The dew of the night--
It would weigh down your flight;
And true love caresses--
O! leave them apart!
They are light on the tresses,
But lead on the heart.

Both of these sections are from "Al Aaraaf", which, with a little direction, could have been one of the greatest poems ever written.  Instead, it's a bit of a mess with some lovely pieces poking through, and Poe is definitely remembered for the tidier "Annabel Lee" and "The Raven".

Of course, perhaps is it because of all this, and not in spite of it, that he has found such an audience.  Perhaps it is not even Poe's work that people are drawn to, but his spirit, that of one with deep, even visionary things to say, who couldn't quite seem to get them across--certainly not in his own time.  Who would bother to pick through the work of a living writer to find out what he means, after all?  More's the pity, because many indeed are they who can relate to his sentiment, summed up perhaps best here:

From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were--I have not seen
as others saw--I could not bring
my passions from a common spring--("Alone")