In my personal opinion, i like stories that have a meaning behind their own, and that is what Edgar Allan Poe brought to his stories. It wasn’t only about that specific killing or gothic meaning. The House of Usher, my favorite of the two, had a deeper meaning than an incestual, short sighted family that went out of their minds. Poe most likely had a deeper story than that that was to be understood once the story was told. When I read it, I had a couple of questions. Why would he write such a story? How was his imagination able to think of such things as burying someone alive, a family who never broke the direct line of decent, or a man who only ever had one friend in his childhood that could call up such a friend whom he hasn’t seen since?
My answers did not seem to add up, although they had their own pros that could have been relatively true and make sense compared to what I know of the man. I think it is easy to say Poe had a fetish for the unnatural. He had family issues until the day he died, hence the distorted Usher family tree. His ability to imagine horrific things most likely procured from a depression, or lack of the company of human beings. Because he was a loner, I bet he sought the company of people, yet he probably thought he would be socially awkward. Although, he was probably right, I wouldn’t want to hang out with someone who wrote mystery and horror for a living.
Also, I wondered if this ability were a talent or a curse. I know that I would not like to have all of these thoughts racing through my mind. I now understand why the people of his time wrote him off as a drug head. However, the people of his time did not stop him from becoming a cultural phenomena we still study today.
snapef13 