Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics)
Read Selected Tales (Oxford World's Classics) Online
Authors: Edgar Allan Poe
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Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849.
|Tales. Selections|
Selected tales / edited with an introduction and notes by David Van Leer,
p. em.—(Oxford world’s classics)
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Horror tales, American. I. Van Leer, David, 1949–
II. Title. III. Series; Oxford world’s classics (Oxford University Press)
PS2612.A3 1998 813′.3—dc21 97–39648
ISBN–13: 978–0–19–283224–5
13
Typeset by Jayvee, Trivandrum, India
Printed in Great Britain by
Clays Ltd, St Ives plc
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OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
EDGAR ALLAN POE
Edited with an Introduction and Notes by
DAVID VAN LEER
OXFORD WORLD’S CLASSICS
SELECTED TALES
E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE
. was born in Boston in 1809, the son of travelling actors. Deserted by his father, Poe was on his mother’s death in 1181 taken in by the Richmond merchant John Allan. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826 but despite scholastic success was expelled for gambling debts after one year. To heal the widening breach with Allan, over the next three years Poe served unsuccessfully in the army. In 1831, irrevocably alienated from Allan, Poe left the army and moved to Baltimore. Having already published two small volumes of poems, he there began his publishing career in earnest with a third volume of poems and his first tales. In Baltimore Poe set up house with his paternal aunt Maria Clemm, whose daughter Virginia he married five years later. In 1835 he returned with the Clemms to Richmond to edit the
Southern Literary Messenger
. Despite the success of the journal, Poe left at the end of 1836 to pursue his writing career unsuccessfully in New York and more successfully in Philadelphia. In 1838 Harper and Brothers published Poe’s first book of fiction, the novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
. Over the next five years Poe wrote the tales for which he is best known today—among them ‘Ligeia’, ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and his detective fiction. In 1839 he collected his first stories as
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
. In 1844 he moved his family to New York, where the next January he achieved overnight fame with the publication of ‘The Raven’. But success came too late. Plagued by unrewarding editorial work, Poe was further tormented by the prolonged illness of his wife, who finally succumbed to tuberculosis in 1847. Devastated, Poe seems to have been worn down by his struggles. He courted a number of women, tried without success to found a literary journal, and in 1848 completed
Eureka
and ‘The Poetic Principle’. Shortly before his planned marriage to a former childhood sweetheart, he collapsed in Baltimore, where he died in October 1849.
D
AVID
V
AN
L
EER
has taught at Cornell and Princeton Universities, and is currently Professor of English and American Literature at University of California, Davis. A regular contributor to
The New Republic
on American culture from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, he is the author of
Emerson’s Epistemology: The Argument of the Essays
(1986) and
The Queening of America: Gay Culture in Straight Society
(1995).
A Chronology of Edgar Allan Poe
The Fall of the House of Usher
A Tale of the Ragged Mountains
The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether
Von Kempelen and his Discovery
E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE
is about as famous as an American writer gets. Children encounter him in elementary school, and his stories about mutilated bodies and walled-up corpses are familiar even to those who never read. He long ago passed into US popular imagination as part of the cultural heritage. Classic horror movies spin off from ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’ and ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’; every October that inveterate illiterate Bart Simpson retells ‘The Raven’ for his Hallowe’en special; and Poe’s gloomy portrait broods over a Manhattan coffee bar on the spot where he composed the poem.
Yet Poe is a problem to those who study American literature. Fellow writers turn from him in contempt. Late in life, a forgetful Emerson remembered him as the ‘jingle man’. The essayist Paul Elmer More dismissed him as the poet of ‘unripe boys and unsound men’. The novelist Henry James, himself incapable of levity, warned that ‘to take [Poe] with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one’s self. The anxiety underlying these rejections was best expressed by the expatriate poet T. S. Eliot. Convinced that Poe’s intellect was merely that ‘of a highly gifted young person before puberty’, Eliot quipped that Poe affected no poet except perhaps the limerick-writer Edward Lear. Immediately afterward, however, regretting his harshness, Eliot confessed, ‘And yet one cannot be sure that one’s own writing has
not
been influenced by Poe.’
It is tempting to dismiss such rejections as simple jealousy, the inevitable fate of those who achieve ‘popular’ success in unprestigious literary genres. Yet most adult readers share these writers’ discomfort. The first real author Americans read, Poe is the one we most wish to outgrow. Acknowledging the appropriateness of the poet Allan Tate’s naming Poe ‘our cousin’, literary scholars still have trouble tracing the bloodlines. Poe finds no place in the literary history of mid-nineteenth-century American Romanticism, but is buried in a footnote, with only glancing allusions to ‘the twins story’ or ‘the one with the cat’. His success with young readers is assumed to signal the immaturity of his work. Like other talents not conforming to traditional literary paradigms—Cooper, Stevenson, and (formerly) Hawthorne, Twain, and the Brontës—Poe is conveniently pigeon-holed as a
children’s author, skilful enough but not central to the ‘great tradition’ in American literature.