EAP
Tis the season for Poe I suppose – it being not long after Halloween and the middle of cold November. Ham o’ Bone’s interest in Edgar Allen Poe has stoked my own. (Ham wrote a screenplay of his life.)
While Poe was never a big influence on me, I read in bed & finished Allen Tate’s essay “My Cousin, Mr. Poe” then started his “Poe & the Angelic Imagination” while fighting with my eyelids for control. Sleep kept calling for which I've lately a grudging respect for sleep; occasional insomnia has chastened me against taking her for granted anymore.
Tate is pretty hard on Poe, harder than Chesterton, even though (because? - in the way Augustine was so strict against sexual impurity?) he knew a strain of Poe's tendencies was latent within him. Tate was a more somber fellow than the jolly Chesterton.
One theory mentioned by Tate is that the possibility that Poe was impotent, which would explain how Poe managed decadence without sexuality (unlike Oscar Wilde and other decadent writers of his time).
Poe was always an outsider to the literary establishment and so you it's easy to feel for the underdog, not the least one fighting inner demons as Poe did.
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