The Permanence of Poe

R E V I E W The Permanence of Poe Peter Ackroyd. Poe: A Life Cut Short. Ackroyd’s Brief Lives. New York: Doubleday, 2008. x, 205 pp. $21.95 cloth. Susan Amper. Bloom’s How to Write about Edgar Allan Poe. Bloom’s How to Write about Literature. New York: Infobase Publishing, 2007. 240 pp. $45.00 cloth. Michael Connelly, ed. In the Shadow of the Master: Classic Tales by Edgar Allan Poe and Essays by Jeffery Deaver, Nelson DeMille, Tess Gerritsen, Sue Grafton, Stephen King, Laura Lippman, Lisa Scottoline, and Thirteen Others. New York: William Morrow, 2009. 416 pp. $25.99 cloth, $14.99 paper. Benjamin F. Fisher. The Cambridge Introduction to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge Introductions to Literature. Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 2008. 146 pp. £32.00 cloth, £11.99 paper. Kevin J. Hayes. Edgar Allan Poe. London: Reaktion Books, 2009. 192 pp. £10.95 paper. R ecent headlines: “Poe’s Tamerlane set to fetch record price in NY auction”; “Poe descendants wait to decide writer’s home”; “Baltimore has him; Philadelphia wants him.” There is probably a steadier stream of “news” about Edgar Allan Poe than there is for any other American writer, at least ones no longer living. The public appetite for all things Poe-esque appears to be insatiable, and with last year’s celebrations of the bicentennial of the author’s birth, pundits, journalists, and scholars alike all seemed to have something to say about this most enigmatic of literary figures. Were Poe alive today, he surely would bask in the reflected radiance of our omnipresent media. There is no question about Poe’s staying power and the permanence of his place in the American popular consciousness. The question is, what image of Poe is most recognized by the masses? Is it the innovator of new forms of writing, like science fiction and the detective story? Is it the savvy magazinist and editor of periodicals? Is it the trenchant literary critic, sometimes disposed to fling his tomahawk at substandard literature ? Or is it the poet of Halloween, whose black bird has lent its name to taverns, rock bands, and even a football team? Rather sadly, I think most often it is the latter, and as a result many myths and misconceptions still abound. Surfing the internet recently, I was pleased to come upon a piece by novelist Matthew Pearl, author of The Poe Shadow and The Dante Club, debunking the “top five myths about Edgar Allan Poe” [Huffington Post Online, 28 October 2009, http://www.huffington C  2010 Washington State University 104 P O E S T U D I E S , VOL. 43, 2010 R E V I E W post.com/matthew-pearl/top-five-myths-about-edga b 334742.html]. Outside academia, however, this seems to be the exception rather than the rule. This review-essay gathers recent titles on Poe that all in one way or another address the persisting question of Poe’s reputation and public image. Some of the studies are intended for that elusive abstraction publishers like to refer to as the “general reader”; others are more academically focused volumes pitched at the classroom market. But all have in common the implied sense that if one writes about Poe, one must take sides. Each author promotes and defends a view of Poe’s talent. The results are useful to contemplate. Two of the books are brief, entry-level studies of Poe, but the portraits of Poe that emerge in them are about as different as a 3-D movie is from a chiaroscuro drawing. Kevin J. Hayes’s Edgar Allan Poe is a measured, perceptive, and multilayered study of the tortured life as it reveals itself in the poems and tales. Peter Ackroyd’s Poe: A Life Cut Short, by contrast, perpetuates many of the tired legends about the author as a dark, degenerate alcoholic. As editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe and author of Poe and the Printed Word, as well as numerous critical articles on Poe, Hayes brings to this book a vast storehouse of knowledge about his subject. The Cambridge Companion is a sophisticated look at the author through both...