About Poe

Post 8:

            One of the best purchases I ever made was The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. This was maybe five years ago, when bookstores still existed. I was wandering around, minding my own business, looking for the elusive white whale that is the attractive intellectual girl that hangs out at bookstores. Actually, white whale doesn’t work there. I’m gonna need a take-back on that one.

            So like I said, I was really into this book about existentialism, when the corner of my eye caught the corner of this golden-filigreed volume. I picked it up. Totally E.A.P. Cost me fifteen bucks.

            Before I get into any recommendations, let’s just have a moment of silence for an entire man’s catalogue being worth fifteen bucks. I get that it’s dated, but I’m going to need more time to figure out the whole antique word market. It’s a confounding subject.

            OK, so here are my thoughts. Find this frigging thing on the internet, buy it, then read it the whole way through. You’ll be surprised. I jumped in remembering the grizzly tales of pits and live burials and haunted houses, but I was blown away by the lesser known poems and stories.

            This is from Ms. Found In A Bottle: “A feeling, for which I have no name, has taken possession of my soul—a sensation which will admit of no analysis, to which the lessons of by-gone time are inadequate, and for which I fear futurity itself will offer me no key.” Sorry to all those Ms. Found In A Bottle enthusiasts out there. I don’t mean to marginalize this fine work. Quite the opposite.

            A few things. It’s a story, but it’s poetry. A lot of people still write like this, but not a lot can make it work. For the most part it’s palatable—you don’t have to apply charts and graphs to get a sense of what he’s talking about. Also, he uses words like futurity. I love words that don’t even sound like words. Guess what? Sometimes they are. Futurity is totally a word. Looked it up and everything. Most of all, Poe makes me believe he gives a crap about every line on the page, whether his heart is full of horror or levity. They both present in his work, as they do in life. This dude is the anti-slouch. Here’s the moron’s version of what he said up there: “so… I can’t figure it out. The past is no good. Future’s no good. I got nothing to go on here. Guess I’m screwed.”

            And he uses a lot of hyphens. Hyphens are cool. To the white whale! See you after.