The entire genres of horror, science fiction and detective story might be quite different, and not for the better, without Poe’s example. Suffice it to say, if your work has any part in shaping or inspiring authors who make significant contributions to the canon, your status is more than secure.Īrguably, no American figure has influenced as many brilliant - and imitated - writers as Poe. Wells, Jules Verne, Robert Louis Stevenson, Herman Melville, Arthur Conan Doyle, William Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and a trio of tolerably impressive non-Americans: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Oscar Wilde and Sigmund Freud. Perhaps the best way to gain historical perspective on the proper scope of Poe’s achievements and influence is to consider an abbreviated list of legends who stood on his doleful shoulders: French poet Charles Baudelaire (who both championed and translated Poe), H.G. Some might claim Poe gets too much credit for perfecting (if not inventing) the American short horror story and detective story.
With vices and an intensity that would give even a young Charles Bukowski pause, and would have buried the punk rock poseur Sid Vicious, Poe managed to be for literature what Miles Davis was for jazz: he didn’t merely set new standards, he changed the course of subsequent art, perfecting entirely new paradigms in the process. If his work and his life (and most especially his death) seem clichéd, dying young, debauched and with too little money was not yet the career move it would eventually become for other artists.
In any event, Poe was a pioneer in almost too many ways to count. Like others who have done things first, and best, it’s likely we grow more impatient with their imitations than the original. If Edgar Allan Poe - and his writing - has not aged well and seems more than a little passé for 21st century sensibilities, it’s not entirely his fault.
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