Strolling through the American Cultural Garden [Part 6]

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) came from a family of traveling theater performers. He was orphaned at a young age, his parents dying of tuberculosis. In his works as well as in his life, he was always haunted by his mother's death and possessed a mystical, pessimistic mood, with a tendency to seek the unusual, the supernatural, the fantastical, and the horrifying.

The writer Edgar Allan Poe.

At the age of two, he was adopted by the wealthy merchant couple John Allan and his wife. He lived with them in England from the age of six to eleven, then went to school in America. At fourteen, he wrote his first collection of poems as a gift to his lover, the mother of a friend. At eighteen, he dropped out of school because his adoptive father considered him lazy.

He funded the publication of his collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), at the age of 18. At the age of 27 (1836), he married his 13-year-old cousin. During the years 1831-1833, he lived in poverty but wrote prolifically, contributing criticism, editorials, short stories, and poems to magazines.

The story "The Gold-Bug" (Le Scarabée d'or or Gold-Bug, 1843) has led Edgar Poe to be considered the father of modern detective fiction.

The name of the yellow ladybug is used to name a series of detective novels published in France after the Great War. The main character is Legrand, a pessimistic entomologist living alone with his black servant Jupiter on a deserted island. One day, he catches a very strange-looking ladybug. That evening, a friend comes to visit. Sitting by the fireplace, Legrand draws the ladybug for his friend; unexpectedly, the drawing of the ladybug turns into a skull. This is simply because he accidentally drew on a very thin piece of old parchment paper that he found on the seashore, near where he caught the yellow ladybug. The skull drawing, made with a chemical ink, became visible near the fire. Legrand held it closer to the fire, and a line of numbers and secret symbols appeared.

From then on, Legrand was always pensive, like a man possessed. About a month later, he had Jupiter invite his friends over. The three of them organized an expedition on the island to find a treasure trove of gold buried by a robber. Legrand used his reasoning skills to deduce the secret of the code. They came to the foot of a large, ancient tree. Following his master's orders, Jupiter climbed the tree and found a human skull. From the tree, he followed his master's instructions and released a golden ladybug through the left eyehole of the skull. From the point where the ladybug fell to the ground, Legrand used the code to calculate and find the location of the buried treasure.

The Raven appears in a collection of poems, and is perhaps Edgar Poe's most famous poem. It is the first in the author's last collection, published when he was 36 years old under the title The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The poem creates a gloomy, deathly, mystical, and heavy atmosphere. Edgar Poe uses carefully considered techniques in his writing: the refrain "nevermore" has a melancholic, despairing tone; With its resounding syllables and sobbing rhythm, the crow in folk imagination is a bird of ill omen and mourning, associated with images of shattered flesh and broken bones, desperate love for the deceased, the separation of life and death yet love remaining in the afterlife... Due to the technical intent, the poem is somewhat overly dramatic, and the symbolic intentions are quite obvious, so the poem lacks the innocence and purity of some simpler poems, such as "To One in Paradise" (1833), mourning a deceased lover, and "Annabol Li" (1849), which also deal with the same theme.

Edgar Poe created the quintessential detective character in literature, particularly in *The Murders in the Rue Morgue* (1841), where an orangutan kills two people. He also created macabre stories like *The Fall of the House of Usher* (1839), which tells of a castle and its inhabitants, shrouded in a fantastical atmosphere. These stories are included in *Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque* (1840). Or *The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym* (1838), which depicts the sea adventures of a young man (a rebellious sailor, a storm, encountering a ship carrying corpses, ghosts...).

In 1847, his wife died after 11 years of marriage, and he wrote a tribute to her, Annable Lee. As a critic, he fiercely criticized Longfellow, for example, calling him a "copycat," thus creating much animosity. Alcoholic, mentally unstable, suffering from epilepsy and paranoia, and lacking consistent income, he lived a miserable life, deeply saddened by his wife's death, seeking solace in some female companions, contemplating suicide... and dying after getting drunk in the street.

Assessments of Edgar Poe varied considerably after his death, despite his recognition as a great author. Generally, Anglo-American critics were somewhat reserved, viewing Poe's work as more of a masterful display of artistry than a sign of extraordinary genius.

Conversely, some French poets such as Baudelaire, who translated most of Edgar Poe's works, Mallarmé, and Valéry highly praised him. The French Symbolist school of poetry considered itself a disciple of Poe, and this school, in turn, influenced the Anglo-American movement that emphasized imagery in the years 1909-1917. English poets such as Swinburn, Wilde, Rossetti, and Yeats also revered Poe.

Psychiatrist Freud and his disciples noted the deathly and pathological elements, sometimes far removed from the intended purpose, in Poe's works. Some of Poe's stories also foreshadowed existentialism. In literary theory, Poe advocated "art for art's sake."

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