Edgard Allan Poe the peotic Principle
Professor Doug Collins Student Philippe Bodi Edgar Allan Poe: The Poetic Principle In my research work “Creativity in Art and Science”, I came upon the personality of Edgar Allan Poe, an intriguing figure. ... Poe was a perfect illustration of my thesis about the interrelation between art and science, exemplifying the “poet-scientist”. ... Poe was in positive way crazy in love with science. ... Poe could be taken as a good example of the Maker and the Influencer in the same time. While approaching Poe from a more classical literary perspective, let us keep in mind Poe’s extraordinariness. An American writer we will note in the first place for his eclecticism, Edgar Allan Poe, although his celebrity is due to several fantastic tales, few detective novels and many poems, has proved himself in all the literary genres: critique, essay, tale, roman, poetry, dialogues and philosophical treatises. ... Poe’s challenge to moralistic, puritan censures against literature and his sardonic critical style gained him many enemies. Many readers identified Poe with his insane narrators, borderlining personalities who walk by the yawning chasm and where they can fall at any moment. ... Readers also felt under the influence of some biased biographers as Reverend Rufus Griswold, who for some personal reasons started his own crusade against Poe. The misrepresentations he develops in his biting memoir, published just after Poe’s death, plunged the poet into discredit and contributed to the creation of “Poe legend”. Griswold’s portrait is a mixture of half-truths (half-lie), falsehoods and calumnies about Poe’s personal dispositions and behavior, tarnishing almost irreversibly the poet’s fame. The rediscovery and rehabilitation of Poe started in France. The reckoning shown for Poe’s work in France since Baudelaire put all his efforts to translate it and to comment it still constitutes in the eyes of many Americans one of the most astonishing mysteries of the history of literature. In his “new notes on Edgar Poe”, Baudelaire develops his idea of the “misunderstood poet” or “le poete maudit” that is the accursed poet while in the same time exposing a stinging account, full of prejudices and preconceived ideas about the American society he does not really know. By the way, this is a side of Baudelaire’s rediscovery of Poe that is neglected, that is Baudelaire as the precursor of the anti-American obsession characteristic for the French intellectual circles.