If any reader knows anything about Edgar Allen Poe hanging out with Jesuit seminarians near New York City, I'd appreciate any information you might have. In Googling for that info I found Chesterton's thoughts on Poe here:
For the reader who wishes that Chesterton had written a book about Edgar Allan Poe, the wish is fulfilled in this book about Stevenson. But a book is not needed. Chesterton sums up Poe in one paragraph.Elsewhere on the 'net, Joseph Pearce writes:Dark wine, dying lamps, drugging odours, a sense of being stifled in curtains of black velvet, a substance which is at once utterly black and unfathomably soft, all carried with them a sense of indefinite and infinite decay…The point of Poe is that we feel that everything is decaying, including ourselves; faces are already growing featureless like those of lepers; roof-trees are rotting from root to roof; one great grey fungus as vast as a forest is sucking up life rather than giving it forth; mirrored in stagnant pools like lakes of poison which yet fade without line or frontier into the swamp. The stars are not clean in his sight; but are rather more worlds made for worms. And this corruption is increased, by an intense imaginative genius, with the addition of a satin surface of luxury and even a terrible sort of comfort… This dark luxury has something almost liquid about it. Its laxity seems to be betraying more vividly how all these things are being sucked away from us, down a slow whirlpool more like a moving swamp. That is the atmosphere of Edgar Allan Poe; a sort of rich rottenness of decomposition, with something thick and narcotic in the very air.
"Certain things are accepted in a lump by all the Moderns," Chesterton complained in a review of a book by Noyes, "mainly because they are supposed (often wrongly) to be rejected with horror by all the Ancients." Taking the example of Edgar Allan Poe, Chesterton remarked that the moderns hijacked their favorite ancients, bestowing honorary modernity on them. Poe had been "set apart as a Modern before the Moderns," whereas he was "something much more important than a Modern . . . he was a poet."More Chesterton on Poe:
Moreover, it is worthy of remark that when a poet really was morbid it was commonly because he had some weak spot of rationality on his brain. Poe, for instance, really was morbid; not because he was poetical, but because he was specially analytical. Even chess was too poetical for him; he disliked chess because it was full of knights and castles, like a poem. He avowedly preferred the black discs of draughts, because they were more like the mere black dots on a diagram. Perhaps the strongest case of all is this: that only one great English poet went mad, Cowper. And he was definitely driven mad by logic, by the ugly and alien logic of predestination. Poetry was not the disease, but the medicine; poetry partly kept him in health. He could sometimes forget the red and thirsty hell to which his hideous necessitarianism dragged him among the wide waters and the white flat lilies of the Ouse. He was damned by John Calvin; he was almost saved by John Gilpin.
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