Hey, I've been thinking about getting into Poe recently, but for some reason he seems almost obscure on Amazon.co.uk. It's surprisingly difficult to find his works there. Also, the problem is I don't want to invest in buying one of the few collections that are available in case I'm not a 'fan'. How do I proceed?
Thanks.
Be prepared for the fairly justified "are you in middle school?" Also, just go to a bookstore, abebooks, or order from American Amazon and import it.
Would that be a case of the extremely tedious
>stop liking what I don't like
mentality or is Poe objectively shit?
I'm on the British Amazon and there are plenty of choices. Just get the Oxford or Everyman edition. Most Poe anthologies come with everything.
The British love Poe, as does the rest of the world. Only in America do we view him as a writer for teenage boys.
As a side note, Poe had a huge influence on French symbolist poets who in turn also were a huge source of inspiration to American and British modernists. He's rarely acknowledged but you can definitely hear Poe in Eliot's "Love Song," just as an example.
Literally anyone that knows anything, knows Poe is an even better read when you're older and have a better handle on meter and close readings
Why should that be? Poe is American after all. Strange.
It's the lack of interest shown by Poe in his work for political and moral commentary.
Does that make his work bad in the eyes of Americans? I'd say not everything has to be an allegory or have some relevance to politics.
I'd say that Poe is a the most popular poet in America. That doesn't mean he's the best, but most high school educated people, even if they don't like poetry in general, will say they liked Poe.
Not bad, per se, he's just perceived as immature, as if all high art must be united towards a moral purpose. This poster is right in saying Poe's the most popular poet As much as critics like to say that Whitman is the most American poet, we actually love Poe but we tend to "outgrow" him in favor of other poets and writers. E.g. the teenage lad who liked Poe might want someone more broadly masculine such as Hemingway and admire the tough-guy morals in his stories.
If you want to understand why Americans are that way, ultimately the blame rests on the Puritans, not that it's altogether bad. Our ethos, no matter what the creed, often matches up with Milton's defense of his poetry "to justify the ways of God to men." It's a good ethos, but it clouds our judgement concerning poets such as Poe who aren't as concerned about preaching a moral code.
I certainly don't think England is exempt from this moralism since obviously Puritanism was born there, but I do think there's more of a balance in English literary tradition because of the notion that there can exist a "low church" and a "high church." Possibly the reason why Poe is outside this moralist strain in American literature is because he was an Anglican and spent part of his childhood in Britain. Most people often forget that he was also a Southerner and not a Northern Yankee and it was the Northerners who had the most distinctly Puritan influence.
Anyway, I suppose the tl;dr would be that America's moralist character in literature comes from the Northern Puritans and Poe did not come from that background. I think that contemporary agnostic/Marxist critics of today have downplayed the religious culture that shaped many of our writers mostly because they don't know jack about the various historical churches.
>read 'the Raven' on the internet
>get a copy of 'Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket'
>enjoy
>buy a complete stories or whatever
I already fapped today
You can literally download a lot of his short stories online free of charge. They're only like six pages long.
>buying public domain works
Stop fapping and start fucking, cuck.
A little unrelated but op D.H. Lawrence has some really neat essays on the classic American authors of the US. Poe being one of them. If you are interested in weird stuff like Poe I recommend it. It has more in common with Thomas Browne and the Old Testament than whatever else people write even in the same era.
Have you all lost your mind in forgetting T.S. Elliot as America's best and most loved poet???
Poe is very good imo.
I adore his prose and his poetry is impecable (not just the bloddy Raven).
Few tales might be not worth the time but others are very beautiful and very deeply felt (and also with beautiful prose).
>the fairly justified "are you in middle school?"
It's not justified at all.
>Only in America do we view him as a writer for teenage boys.
The irony being that Poe is one of the best, and one of if not The quintessential American author(s).
>Your “traditionalism” is absolutely modernist. That is a tragedy, I think. The most important thinkers of the United States, and I consider, for example, Ezra Pound or Edgar Poe to be real American authors; but they finally came to the conclusion that America is something so horrible that they wanted to be finished with it. Because they were Americans, and they understood that it is impossible to be on the side of tradition and to be American, and madness or suicide, or complete collapse of personality is the only way out of it.
try bookfinder.com, you should be able to find a used Complete Stories and Poems for a few bucks
the ending of Pym is one of the best things I've ever read
Oh, so essentially it's just the Americans who hate the idea of anything refined and even slightly less than masculine that dislike Poe? We in the civilized world are okay with showing feelings, e.g. being melancholy etc.
I highly recommend these essays by D.H. Lawrence although there have been some capable rebuttals of his claims since then. Nonetheless, they are a great start for understanding certain American tendencies I spoke of earlier.
Both of those posts were written by me. Eliot is definitely not America's most loved poet, however, I do agree with you that he's arguably the best.
I'm with you there. He also exerted an immense influence on the French symbolists and Anglo-American modernists.
You're reading too much into what I wrote. I used Hemingway as just an example. We also have plenty of melodramas written by benevolent women on emasculate moralist themes such as Uncle Tom's Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Gone the the Wind, etc. There are similar writers in other European countries, such as Victor Hugo and Charles Dickens. Even this board's beloved Dostoevsky is just another moralist.
However, Poe definitely represents a certain breed of writer that I identify as working in a more sublime realm. Melville is one of them, the writers mentioned by him also work in the same vein. There's a bit of it in Coleridge. On the continent you have Artaud, Rimbaud, Novalis, Holderlin. Most of the American modernists were concerned with the sublime. Nonetheless, that doesn't make them popular and I highly doubt the wog masses on the European continent are anymore enlightened. Get off your high horse.
Dostoevsky loved him. So he can’t be too bad.
What are some of the rebuttals to the DH Lawrence essays? I'm interested. If you got some links that would be great.
Yeah, I apologise. I was being needlessly provocative. Anyway, I appreciate your thought out responses. Do you study lit?
At first I had thought I read some rebuttals in the New Criterion but apparently I was wrong. I'm a bit baffled here because I can't find any articles with a quick search online, but I recall the author(s) saying that Lawrence projects a lot of himself in the works he critiques, not that that is unusual for an author. I also recall one bit of criticism that Lawrence misunderstands some of the humor and irony of Franklin with regard to his daily regimens. Maybe the Norton Critical Edition of Franklin's Autobiography would be a good place to start because for some reason I am associating the rebuttal with relation to Franklin.
I'll start a topic on the subject if I don't find anything before this thread dies because I am now intrigued myself.
Not formally in university anymore, but American literature from the Colonial period up to about 1945 has always been a big interest of mine. Now however I spend more time reading the Bible and Milton when I'm not grinding at STEM bullshit.
Speaking of the Bible, I don't know how far you are in your literary education, but you should learn more about the history of Christianity in Britain because it will really help you in ways you'd never thought before in understanding American and British literature. The differences between, say, an Anglican, Catholic, and Nonconformist poet are profoundly shaped by their religion. In the postmodern age we really neglect the influence of the Bible and the competing churches in literature because of our own ignorance of religion. Personally, that was the case for me up until about last year and it's utterly changed the way I read literature now that I understand to what extent church politics influenced Western authors.
I mean, how about simply reading the two Detective Dupin stories ("The Murders in the Rue Morgue" & "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt") and decide if you like them or not? They are considered to be the first detective stories of their kind and apart from that nice to read in my opinion, the prose just flows like you'd expect an early 20th century text to do.
Reading them shouldn't take you much longer than one hour, so I'd just do it. If you don't want to read them online, buy the "Little Black Classics" edition by Penguin, it's like two quid.
are you in middle school?
He's lying because he has an inferirotiy complex about Americans.
It's just a combination of being high school taught and his association with goth culture and depressed kids.
>It's the lack of interest shown by Poe in his work for political and moral commentary.
Makes him more patrician as far as I'm concerned.
>Eliot is definitely not America's most loved poet
Frost?
Whitman?
Are you more interested in his poetry or prose?
Here's a short story collection that ships from UK for 1.84 shillings or whatever that weird symbol is
amazon.co.uk
It's kind of a stupid question since "America" doesn't read poetry for leisure.
Then most beloved American poet
Beloved by whom?
What is this autistic need to superlatize. Rank, rank, rank. There is no solid answer to something as ephemeral as "most beloved."
If you're talking about what poets are most read by Americans, then the answer is fucking Dr. Seuss. and Shel Silverstein.
Fuckoff it's Whitman you idiots not even a question
It's not about ranking. It's uh sociological
Are you in middle school?
I have no inferiority complex about being American. I think we've written the best works in world literature especially starting after World War II with the decline of the British and French.
There's definitely a bit of this too in Poe.
Indeed. Poe is one of the few authors from that era of American literature operating in more of a Classical than Romantic vein.
Not Whitman. This is a heresy perpetuated by the universities. Not that I dislike Whitman, he's actually one of my favorites, but the average Joe with a high school education is more likely to own a volume of Poe than Whitman. Frost is also relatively popular. Contrary to what the academics tell us, Americans still prefer traditional meter and rhymes.
That's true to some degree, but it's a question worth asking for those of us who do read poetry. And your characterization here of us reading only those silly Jews is completely off the mark.