A great writer and drinker

When Edgar Allan Poe bumped into a friend in New York in 1845, according to Peter Ackroyd’s brisk new life, the following exchange took place. ‘Wallace,’ said Poe, ‘I have just written the greatest poem that ever was written.’ ‘Have you?’ said Wallace. ‘That is a fine achievement.’ ‘Would you like to hear it?’ said Poe. ‘Most certainly,’ said Wallace. Thereupon Poe recited the verses of ‘The Raven’.

This lovely little cameo — halfway to being a sketch from The Fast Show — is all the funnier for the fact that the joke is not entirely on Poe. Though maybe not the greatest poem ever written, ‘The Raven’ really was pretty spectacular. Poe knew it. Beset though he constantly was by gloom and despair, his claims for his own art were not small — and were not on the whole misguided.

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’.

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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.’