Poe’s first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, appeared in 1840. It contained one of his most famous work, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘ In the story the narrator visits the crumbling mansion of his friend, Roderick Usher, and tries to dispel Roderick’s gloom. Although his twin sister, Madeline, has been placed in the family vault dead, Roderick is convinced she lives. Madeline arises in trance, and carries her brother to death. The house itself splits asunder and sinks into the tarn.
The tale has inspired several film adaptations. Roger Corman’s version from 1960, starring Mark Damon, Harry Ellerbe, Myrna Fahey, and Vincent Price, was the first of the director’s Poe movies. The Raven (1963) collected old stars of the horror genre, Vincent Price, Peter, Lorre, Boris Karloff, who mostly played for laughs. According to the director, Price and Lorre “drove Boris a little crazy” – the actor was not used to improvised dialogue. Corman filmed the picture in fifteen days, using revamped portions of his previous Poe sets.
In Poe’s Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) the secret theme is the terror of whiteness. In the novel Poe has invented tribes that live near the Antarctic Circle. The strange bestial human are black, even down to their teeth. They have been exposed to the terrible visitations of men and white storms. These are mixed together, and they slaughter the crew of Pym’s vessel. The Argentinean writer Jorge Luis Borges has assumed that Poe chose the color intuitively, or for the same reasons as in Melville explained in the chapter ‘The Whiteness of the Whale’ in his Moby-Dick.
Later the ‘lost world’ idea was developed by Edgar Rice Burroughs in The Land That Time Forgot (1924) and other works. During the early 1840s Poe’s best-selling work was curiously The Conchologist’s First Book (1839). It was based on Thomas Wyatt’s work which sold poorly because of its high prize. Wyatt was Poe’s friend and asked him to abridge the book and put his own name on its title Page – the publisher had strongly opposed any idea of producing a cheaper edition. The Conchologist’s First Book was a success.
Its first edition was sold out in two months and other editions followed. The dark poem of lost love, ‘The Raven,’ brought Poe national fame, when it appeared in 1845. In a lecture in Boston the author explained the topic telling that he had thought about English phonetics and decided that the two most effective letters in the English language were o and r – this inspired the expression “nevermore”, and because a parrot is unworthy of the dignity of poetry, a raven could well repeat the word at the end of each Stanza.
Lenore rhymed with “nevermore. ” “With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence: they must not – they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind. ” (from The Raven and Other Poems, preface, 1845) Poe suffered from bouts of depression and madness, and he attempted suicide in 1848. In September the following year he disappeared for three days after a drink at a birthday party and on his way to visit his new fiancee in Richmond.
He turned up in delirious condition in Baltimore gutter and died on October 7, 1849. Poe’s work and his theory of “pure poetry” was early recognized especially in France, where he inspired Jules Verne, Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867), Paul Valery (1871-1945) and Stephane Mallarme (1842-1898). However, in America Emerson called him “the jingle man. ” Poe’s influence is seen in many other modern writers, as in Junichiro Tanizaki’s early stories and Kobo Abe’s novels, or more clearly in the development of the19th century detective novel.
J. L. Borges, R. L. Stevenson, and a vast General readership, have been impressed by the cryptograms and mysteries of the stories which feature Poe’s detective Dupin (‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’, 1841; ‘The Purloined Letter,’ 1845) and the morbid metaphysical speculation of ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Waldermar’ (1845). Thomas M. Disch has argued in his The Dreams Our Stuff Is Made Of (1998) that it was actually Poe who was the originator of the modern science fiction. One of his tales, ‘Mellonta Taunta’ (1840) describes a future society, an anti-utopia, in which Poe satirizes his own times.
Another tales in this vein are ‘The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Sceherazade’ and ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom’. However, Poe was not concerned with any specific scientific concept but mostly explored different realities, one of the central concerns of science fiction ever since. In his supernatural fiction Poe usually dealt with paranoia rooted in personal psychology, physical or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, the damnation of death, feverish fantasies, the cosmos as source of horror and inspiration, without bothering himself with such supernatural beings as ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and so on.
Some of his short stories are humorous, among them ‘The Devil in the Belfry,’ ‘The Duc de l’Omelette,’ ‘Bon-Bon’ and ‘Never Bet the Devil Your Head,’ all of which employ the Devil as an ironic figure of fun. – Poe was also one of the most prolific literary journalists in American history, one whose extensive body of reviews and criticism has yet to be collected fully. James Russell Lowell (1819-91) once wrote about Poe: “Three fifths of him genius and two fifths sheer fudge. “