The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe

Revising my essay on “The Black Cat” has led me to Scott Peeples’ The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe, a book that I read from cover to cover yesterday. (It’s that good and that well-written.) Basically, it’s a survey of Poe’s “afterlives,” or, as Peeples puts it, “a description of the most influential and widely debated ways of seeing Poe, a general survey of Poe studies from Griswold’s obituary to the year 2002.” Embracing the most academic of treatments to the campiest of horror films, Peeples’ study is a terrific trip through how Poe has been read and interpreted.

Here’s a good sampler, a fantastic quotation from a 1930 Aldous Huxley piece: “‘The substance of Poe is refined; it is his form that is vulgar. He is, as it were, one of Nature’s Gentlemen, unhappily cursed with incorrigible bad taste. To the most sensitive and high-souled man in the world we should find it hard to forgive, shall we say, the wearing of a diamond ring on every finger. Poe does the equivalent of this in his poetry; we notice the solicism and shudder….It is when Poe tries to make it too poetical that his poetry takes on its peculiar tinge of badness’” (qtd. in Peeples 64). (There’s a wicked little parody of Huxley doing Poe doing Paradise Lost, too.)

Anyway, a couple of pages later, Peeples adds, “Poe does wear his rings on every finger, which may be why Homer and Bart Simpson are among the most successful interpreter of his most famous poem” (66). That’s just good stuff.

Work Cited

Peeples, Scott. The Afterlife of Edgar Allan Poe. Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004.