Books
Poe: A Life Cut Short
A great writer and drinker
Peter AckroydChatto, 170pp, £15.99,
Sam Leith on Peter Ackroyd's latest book
Consider his legacy. Auguste Dupin’s role in The Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely regarded as making Poe the inventor of detective fiction, but, as Ackroyd points out, he anticipates the speculative fiction of Wells and Verne too. The modern horror novel owes an enormous debt to Poe, and the novel of psychological horror owes him almost everything.
In poetry he was a sublime prosodist — the music of ‘The Raven’, for example, is so beautifully orchestrated that a sort of exhilaration reaches the reader even through the fug of horror and sorrow. Ackroyd argues unanswerably for the extreme control and deliberation with which Poe shaped his native terrors into art: ‘it is the difference between an inchoate wail and a threnody’.
His aesthetic, Ackroyd says, anticipated and influenced both the symbolists and the surrealists. In the preface to his 1831 Poems, he wrote: ‘A poem in my opinion is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance by having, for its object, an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.’ That’s ahead of Pater and ahead of Swinburne, not to mention the French mob.
Some cosmologists, apparently, even credit him with having anticipated the work of Einstein and the discovery of black holes. This is probably a step too far. Poe gave one sparsely attended, rhapsodic and widely misunderstood two-and-a-half hour lecture about the secrets of the universe. A newspaper review described it as a ‘mountainous piece of absurdity’. Poe, predicting that his work would be properly appreciated in 2,000 years, approached a publisher with his idea for a book ‘of profound importance’ that would put Newton’s theory of gravitation in the shade, and ‘command such universal and intense attention that the publisher might give up all other enterprises’. In this case, he was wrong.
All this magnificent stuff proceeded from an exceptionally miserable life, and one that Poe did nothing to make easier for himself. He gave us the phrase ‘The Imp of the Perverse’, and he lived it.
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Rev. Garet Aldridge
January 25th, 2008 12:16pmMay I also strongly recommend "Private Perry and Mr. Poe" by the late and heroic Major William F. Hecker? This tome gives wonderful insights into the poet's West Point years and, perhaps, further explanation of the discipline with which he wrote.
James Jeffrey Paul
January 25th, 2008 5:55pmPoe's genuis and influence on so many aspects of the literary arts can't possibly be overstated. I look forward to reading Mr. Ackroyd's book on Poe--he's a master of his own art (the biography).
Robert Coates
January 25th, 2008 7:43pmThe concluding paragraph seems to sum it up - if this is the most interesting fare on offer, best to stick to the work itself (which is hardly mentioned in this review at all)
Laurie
January 26th, 2008 3:38amExtraordinary art comes as often from extraordinary lives as from extraordinary talent. It seems strained personal relationships, sexual oddity, substance abuse and financial desperation, in various combinations have powered a majority of literary talent from (at least) Swift, through Dostoevsky to Joyce and Behan. Perhaps that is why so much of the modern fiction produced by graduates of all those creative writing courses, while often interesting and well crafted, appears to lack something essential. The concept of suffering for your art is out of fashion (well in the West at least, pace Promoedya Ananta Toer et al.)