From The Past: March 10, 2008

I am reading Tales of Edgar Allen Poe with an introduction written by Hervey Allen. https://amzn.to/3PeJnjG

I had come to believe by the telling of one person or another that Poe was crazy, however Allen set me straight.

According to Hervey Allen,

“Poe had gathered his writings together, story and verse; he had revised and re-edited them, adding many improvements and correcting minor errors – and then he had left them in the care of his most bitter and relentless enemy – and died. Scarcely was Poe’s body cold before Rufus W. Griswold, his literary executer, was out in the New York newspapers with what, under the guise of an obituary, amounted to a major defamation of the poet’s character, to a subtle sneering at and depreciation of his work.”

Allen goes on to say,

“Rufus W. Griswold was the ablest American anthologist of his time. He had a keen nose for talent but a jaundiced eye for genius, since jealousy was a large item in his personality. Poe had from time to time offended him and also given evidence of genius. Griswold’s revenge was to attack Poe posthumously. He delayed the publication of the material that had been left in his hands, and when he did publish it, he published only part of it, and disregarded many of Poe’s corrections and emendations. All this occurred in the early fifties of the last century.”

Allen has much more to say, but you get the gist of it. Poe was not crazy; he was a mastermind. How many artistic people have we labeled as mad and put on medication or in mental institutions when what they actually needed was an outlet for their creativity?

I am enjoying Poe’s work. There is one last bit I would like to share from Hervey Allen:

“Nothing is more indicative of the true genius of this writer than that his fame survived and continued to increase, despite the enormous difficulty of collecting his work, and, when once something was retrieved, of deciding what was to be the final and “official” text. For Poe put his writing, particularly his verse, through endless revisions, improving it and re-publishing it constantly. It is only in our own day that the research of scholars and the work of textual critics have come to rest in a more or less final agreement as to what is to be the standard version of Poe texts. Thanks to this agreement, this present collection is possible.”

I, for one, am thankful for the scholars who put his works back together.