Master Poe's 208th birthday.
Today, January 19, Edgar Allan Poe meets 208 years. Very few. He has all left in his eternity as one of the greatest writers of all time. It does not matter the genre, the time and the centuries let them go through his work. It was one of the best and will continue to be until the world sinks into the darkness of its curse. Like the Usher house.
Impossible to write more about him or that huge and spectacular work. So that? The important thing is to read it. Sooner or later, as a child, as an adult, whenever. But read it. Let's just celebrate this day. Two centuries ago and not long since the cold city of Boston she saw the most illustrious, great, and doomed of her children born. What can we choose from those stories and stories? It can? I do not think so.
Black cats, gold beetles, haunting crows, haunted houses, portraits of death, tell-tale hearts, red deaths, killer gorillas, infallible detectives ... Impossible to list so many concepts, images, sensations and feelings. So much madness and terror. So much fear and fright. So much fantasy and reality. So much good. Our whole part of romantic, gothic, mysterious, fearful, passionate or deranged spirits vibrates with every word from Poe's pen.
His gaze, his outburst (induced or not by their ghosts and weaknesses), their mastery to narrate hells and ravings, to invoke the darkest imagination, exceeded all limits. As he did with his own existence, he became a fascinating and tragic character, as admired as he was compassionate. As idolized as he is disowned. Because, as with everything, there are people who do not like Poe. Understandable (or not). Acceptable too.
A genius or a drunkard. A disturbed or a disturber. A weakling or a hero. What difference does it make. He wrote stories that transcended themselves. He scrutinized the deepest and darkest abysses of human nature like no one else. Perhaps because he wanted to access them of his own free will. And he achieve it. His stormy life experience or simply his vision of the world around him, of that life. What was said. Does not matter. It was enough with that and with being carried away by his imagination.
Our left indelible names in memory of and influence a thousand and one writers and artists marked by their trail of love and terror in equal measure. Influences and subsequent recreations that, over the years, have been made of his work.
Whoever was able to write "Plague King" ceased to be a human being. For his sake, and moved by an infinite pity towards such a lost soul, we like to give him up for dead.
That's what he wrote Robert Louis Stevenson in an essay on Poe. What Stevenson didn't know is that Poe, or himself, would never die anymore. This is what happens when what you do in your life manages to leave its mark on all humanity that reads you through time. And that today a large part of that humanity would like a Poe to be born every day. Or what it was precisely he who returned from those darkness and hells that he knew so well to describe. More than one even paid, I'm sure.
Berenice, Arthur Gordon Pym, Prospero, Ligeia, Madeleine Usher, Augusto Dupin… And so many more names. So many chills and curses, shipwrecks and tragedies. OR Annabel lee, that name of the protagonist of one of the most sublime poems there is, and that have not been written again, nor will they be written. Love in a pure state of despair and hopelessness, of defeat and abandonment, of passion and pain without limits.
No day like today to celebrate this birthday becoming the gift of read even just one line de The well and the pendulum, The crimes of the rue Morgue, The case of Mr. Valdemar or from Tamerlane.
Or no day like today for see one of the hundreds of adaptations of his works in the cinema. In particular, those shot by the also immortal British producer Hammer, with the director Roger Corman to the head. And nothing better than seeing and hearing the best faces, figures and voices that breathed life and death into their characters and stories. Vincent Price and Christopher Lee they are for me the most ideal narrators and interpreters of Poe's work. But there are a thousand and one versions, like the ones interspersed in this article.
Congratulations, Mr. Poe. In the most terrible hell or the most glorious paradise. We will all meet you again one day. In either of the two places.