HOME The Horror Of It All

I don't like Edgar Allan Poe's writings. The tortured intensity of his sentences at crisis points in his stories, and his rambling, dead prose, makes them seem, at times, like a bad translation of some minor Russian writer. As he wallows around in his gothic mires, and the mind goes numb, trying to work out what it is all about, one fact becomes clear through the graveyard vapour: Mr Poe has no earthly interest in his characters. They are merely pieces of a story, or a verse, that he battered into place with a lump hammer.  I haven't read a great deal of him, of course, but, because of his reputation, I made the effort on several occasions, and found that he is definitely not the kind of author you can relax with. It's always a sign of a bad writer when you notice the writing, and you have no help, but to notice it with Poe, for his High Society form of constructing sentences is more interesting that the plot he is trying to put together. Then, again, he commits the cardinal sin, in writing, of using too many words to say too little. He does not know when to stop, or how to be sparse. An idea must be worried, like a dog at a bone, until every last shred of it is analyzed. His books are prime canditates for condensation, only The Book Of Numbers, in the Bible, repeating facts more often, to a point of nausea.  How he has attained classical status is beyond me to understand. His The Raven, for example, after building up the expectation at a slow, meandering pace, with many purple gothic phrases, simply stops when the author runs out of things to say. And there it stands, abandoned forever to the mists of time. El Dorado is another piece of verse which irritates me. It's three verses read like an allegorical ballad, yet no conclusion is reached at the end of it. The narrator never tells us if the knight ever finds El Dorado, or if, with all the discouragement he meets, he simply gives up looking for it.  If Poe's fiction and verse can produce mental indigestion, then his articles and reviews could give you a brain tumour, if you tried to read one from beginning to end, without a break. Writing about other writers is a sign that you have no fresh ideas of your own. (Why do you think I am writing about Poe?) It is glorious self-indulgence to dissect another writer's works, to point out gleefully the mistakes you never make yourself, to wonder, why, in the name of God, people are paying money to read this unconstructed tripe. In his articles, Poe's delight in rummaging about among antique words and awkward phrases, is evident. He is a slave to grammar, forgetting that correct grammar does not automatically produce clear, understandable writing.  Poe is a minor writer, not a major one, although, because of his continuous profile in the 20th century, it begins to look as if he has now become part of the background of literature and will remain there, like a stone beside which gems look more glorious, or a weed that brings out the beauty of flowers.