Show Summary Details

Page of

Printed from Oxford Research Encyclopedias, Literature. Under the terms of the licence agreement, an individual user may print out a single article for personal use (for details see Privacy Policy and Legal Notice).

date: 15 February 2025

Poe, Edgar Allanlocked

Poe, Edgar Allanlocked

  • Thomas Wright

Extract

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century, Stephen King and Isaac Asimov, acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century, such as Peter Ackroyd's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy (1999) and Mark Z. Danielewski's House of Leaves (2000), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges, whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom, for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé

Subjects

  • North American Literatures

You do not currently have access to this article

Login

Please login to access the full content.

Subscribe

Access to the full content requires a subscription