| Issue No.2, Vol.1

Edgar Allan Poe: The Best Horror Poet Who Ever Lived

by Michael Lohr

Edgar Allan Poe is to horror poetry what Bram Stoker is to horror fiction; the preeminent legend of the field. His voice is staggering. 150 years on it will still send shivers down the spine. His sense of displacement, remoteness from society and the pain of alienation come across no better than in his 1830 poem “Alone”

 

“From childhood's hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw”

 

This sense of desperation and despair seeps through most of Poe’s works. In his poem “Ulalume” written in 1847, he anguishes over a lost love, and is tormented by the ghost of past memories;

 

“But were stopped by the door of a tomb-
   By the door of a legended tomb;
And I said- "What is written, sweet sister,
   On the door of this legended tomb?"
   She replied- "Ulalume- Ulalume-
   'Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!”

 

Poe usually painted a bleak scene in almost all his works. It was as if the land, like the majority of characters in Poe’s poems and stories, was deeply permeated by misery and desolation. No better example exists than at the beginning of “Ulalume” – just reading that first stanza makes you feel like the icy cold, creeping fingers of death have touched your shoulder.

 

“The skies they were ashen and sober;
   The leaves they were crisped and sere-
   The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October”

 

In my opinion the one of the greatest poems of all time and THE greatest horror poem of all time is Poe’s “The Raven.” Nothing else even comes close to this masterpiece. Has there ever been a better poem written that narrows the heartbreak of loss down to a lethal arrow more than “The Raven”? In Poe’s essay “The Poetic Principle” he said that that the ultimate goal of poetry and art is the aesthetic. Written in 1845, this poem exemplifies the beautiful darkness like no other;

 

“Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
   Eagerly I wished the morrow;- vainly I had sought to borrow
   From my books surcease of sorrow- sorrow for the lost Lenore-
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore-
                 Nameless here for evermore.”

 

It worries me a little that three of my all time favorite writers; Ernest Hemingway, Hunter S. Thompson and Edgar Allan Poe all essentially committed suicide. Where Thompson and Hemingway did themselves in by worshipping at the altar of the blunt steel god of the industrial revolution known as the gun, Poe might have drank himself to death. But the real cause of his demise is still a mystery, though he did attempt suicide once by overdosing on laudanum. On the morning of October 3, 1849 he was found aimlessly wondering the streets of Baltimore. He was in such an incoherent and agitated state that he was taken to the hospital immediately. He died there four days later, never regaining lucidity.

 

There have been many rumors as to his cause of death; alcoholism, brain disease, diabetes, various types of enzyme deficiency, syphilis and rabies. No one is for certain. Some even say that he was poisoned. At the time he was attempting to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman. It is well known that Miss Whitman’s mother seriously disliked Poe, as did the rest of the Whitman family. They saw Poe essentially as a gold digger looking for a sugar honey to help fund his cavorting exploits. Could one of them had Poe murdered to protect Sarah or the Whitman fortune?

 

I myself don’t have a suicidal bone in my body, though I do like to go traipsing about the globe searching out thrill-seeking, heart pounding adventure, as did Hemingway. Maybe I am engaged by these writers the same way I am drawn to horror and darker fiction. Maybe it’s the sense of the macabre that keeps me interested, that dangerous chaos that swirls about like ripping tides swallowing lost sailors in the darkness.

 

Simply stated when it comes to the fields of horror poetry and fiction, Poe was God, all be it a feeble, disenfranchised one. It has not gone unnoticed by me that I write this on Poe’s birthday, which was actually a coincidence. Here’s a toast of Martel Cognac to you old boy.

 

<<Serial Spiders

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Michael Lohr is a professional, international journalist, writer and poet. His work has appeared in such diverse magazines as Rolling Stone, Esquire and The Economist, to name a few. He also happens to fancy genre fiction and poetry in particular horror, science fiction and adventure.