In September 1835, Edgar Allan Poe wrote a letter to the editor Thomas Willis White. A year earlier, White had founded in Richmond, Virginia, the Southern Literary Messengera magazine where some of the Poe’s best short stories and essays. The reason for that letter was a full-fledged apology. The writer wanted to be readmitted to the Messenger after having left the newspaper to get married in secret.
White did not hide his doubts. When his employee disappeared, he had had a feeling. Would they find him in a festering alleyway, the victim of an overdose of laudanum? “I shouldn’t be surprised to hear that he has committed suicide,” he even commented.
Finally, upon reading the letter where the writer requested his reinstatement in the Messenger, the publisher agreed. However, he imposed a requirement: Poe had to stay sober. “Someone who drinks before breakfast can’t be trusted,” he warned her. No one can drink and at the same time work properly.”
Despite White’s reasonable fear, the texts that his employee published in the Messenger they are prodigious. Poe’s ability to tell stories or summarize opinions in a brief format is fascinating. Almost more disturbing, though, is his inability to live a life he can be proud of. Actually, His entire biography is an enormous delusion whose only admirable testimony is those stories, poems and articles that he published in media such as Saturday Courierof Philadelphia, the Saturday VisiterBaltimore, magazines Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine y Graham’s Magazinehe Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journalfrom New York, and of course, the Messengerof which he became editor thanks to White’s generosity.
It doesn’t take a catalog of hyperbole to sum up this vital tragedy of Poe’s, and kamikaze romantic, unable to bear the pulse of society and always ready to peer into the abyss.
Do you want more proof? “Edgar Allan Poe has become the very image of the cursed poetof the cursed soul, of the vagabond ‒writes Peter Ackroyd in Poe. a life cut short‒. His was a very hard fate, and his life was almost unbearable. From the moment of his birth, the blows did not stop raining on him ». Gloriously drunk, visceral and shameless by dint of emptying bottles, he thus managed to protect himself from “what tormented him, a mixture of implacable anguish and no less desperate longing.” Which, of course, reveals why he rose to fame at the same rate that he ran out of friends and no means of getting a job.
Poe’s mythomaniacs have idealized an existential disaster that had its correlate in a mysterious death. However, there are angles to his personality that are still unknown. In this sense, the writer’s journalistic work shows a path to understand his unique way of approaching art and society.
For better or for worse, in his articles we sense why and how he dug a ditch in which to bury himself. Above all, when it becomes clear what he thought of the establishment literary. What images does that attitude bring to mind? “Of all the documents I have read,” he wrote Baudelaire‒ I am left with the conviction that the United States were for Poe nothing more than a vast prison that he traversed with the agitation of a being born to breathe in a more amoral world ‒a great barbarism illuminated by gas‒, and that his inner, spiritual life, as a poet and even as a drunkard, was nothing more than a perpetual effort to escape the influence of this unsympathetic atmosphere.
Poe, journalist
For the Spanish-speaking reader, it is easy to imagine Poe as a critic and columnist. One of the consequences of his popularity among us has been, precisely, the continuous reissue of his works, without forgetting those that we catalog within the ‘non-fiction’ catchall.
Until not long ago, when one wanted to imbibe these writings, one could be content with two volumes: essays and reviewstranslated by Julio Cortázar and edited by Alianza in 1987, and Writings on poetry and poeticswith a translation by María Cóndor, published by Hiperión in 2001. If his acquisitive instinct was more moderate, the admirer of Poe used to settle for the unclassifiable essay Eureka (1848). Already in a more minority field, specialists in literary theory limited their search to the composition philosophy (1846), Poe’s instruction manual for not getting lost in the writing process.
The ideas in all these essays seem to connect with each other. Especially when we recognize certain assumptions, oddities and outbursts of rebellion, common in the Boston writer.
This is something that can be appreciated even better in the magnificent edition of the complete essays by Poe who started Páginas de Espuma in 2018. After the launch of the first volume, beautifully translated by Antonio Rivero Taravillothe second one (2021) went on sale, whose translator was Antonio Jimenez Moratowho also signs the Spanish version of the third volume, recently arrived in bookstores.
In this new volume we confirm an impression that was already obvious in the previous two: Poe was a free and incorruptible essayist, vehement to the point of savagery., but with uncommon technical knowledge and an immense arsenal of readings, which include everything from Lope de Vega to the Greco-Latin classics. Throughout these pages, we meet a critic punkreckless enough to enter dangerous territory, without beacons or life preservers, ready to sing the forty to the sacred cows of his time.
In one of these reviews, for example, he rails against the literary cenacles and his “conspiracies to force inanity into public view, obviously at the expense of every man of talent who is not a member of a cabal wielding power.” In another article, despise what we now call editorial marketing: that “methodical assurance” of editors who “have no qualms about keeping on hand an assortment of glowing notes prepared by their men on all the works, and sending these notes to the multitudinous periodicals over which they exert their influence.”
Fearing no offense, he also uses irony and sarcasm to criticize his professional colleagues: “Surely there are few things more ridiculous than the general tone and assumptions displayed in critical reviews of regularly published new books.” ».
Apart from his literary quality, the great difference between Poe and practically all of those who think about literature today is his brutal sincerity. When something seems like a flimsy or embarrassing experiment to him, he says so without mincing words., avoiding the decaffeinated and academic tone that so abounds in cultural supplements. Thus, referring to one of the pieces that he criticizes in the book, he speaks of “a case in which the pertinacity of the effort to deceive, where the obviousness of the attempt to anticipate a trial, in which the exaggeration of that man of Straw, together with the pitiful truism that is ultimately its production, proved too potent a dose even for the well-prepared stomach of the crowd.”
But don’t think he relaxes when it’s time to dish out praise. Poe mixes flattery and causticity like nobody else. Without going any further, when he writes: «The talent, the intrepidity and, above all, the design of this book, will be enough to save it even from that terrible sentence of silent contempt to which the publishers of the whole country, if we are not mistaken much, they will endeavor to confine him.”
Anyway, as you can see, if we notice that they are written by a guy who wore a coat and drank absinthe in the mid-19th century, paragraphs like this seem teleported from the most immediate present.
2023-05-25 01:33:55
#Allan #Poe #views #alcoholic #dreamer
