There has always been a particularly soft space in my heart for Poe. My mom still quotes Annabell Lee sporadically from when she memorized it as a child, and its opposingly optimistic and haunting lines are some of my first memories of poetry. My perception of The Raven will be forever tainted by the memory of Robert Davison's croaking of "Nevermore" in eighth grade, and The Fall of the House of Usher has made me almost ridiculously suspicious of any minor crack in the plaster walls of our farmhouse.
Questions of the author's mental stability aside, Poe remains an emblematic figure in the American literary canon. If anything, his alcoholism and severe bouts with depression and misfortune make his body of work all the more stunning--he was, if anything, writing out of adversity. It makes me a little bit sad that his personal choices so often taint our understanding of his work as the works of a fellow perhaps a little more than mad, but it is rather these tones madness and downright insanity that make the vast majority of his writing so interesting, so I suppose I can't complain too much.
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