“What’s the big deal?”  All the hullabaloo surrounding Poe does not have to do so much with the man, but his legacy--the lineage of artists, writers and filmmakers who have contracted and spread Poe’s particular strain of dreaming. Nothing better describes Poe’s vision than the

alchemy of beauty and deformity, and it is underneath the suspense and terror encountered in Poe’s work where a diligent aesthetic festers.  Not only are there elements of morality, beauty and psychosis, but pieces of biography as well.

It is well known that Poe married his 13-year old cousin, Virginia, when he was 27, only to spend the decade of their marriage watching her cough herself to death from tuberculosis. Virginia was not the only woman Poe watched die.  From birth, he watched those he most adored waste from the same illness:  his mother, his foster-mother and his brother.  Amidst all this misery, Poe sought

refuge in romanticism and learned how to climb out of the dismal verities of life with a ladder made of words.  Torn between logic and dreams, Poe devised a world where he could both analyze life’s horrors and transform them into poetry.

What has made Poe so appealing over the centuries is his meticulous cause to an ambiguous effect; work carefully plotted but painted with sensuous imagery that leaves the story open to other possibilities. Poe enthusiasts dwell on Poe because of his potential.  This potential hooks the susceptible “pure Imagination” and sends the enthusiast into the first fevers of Poe’s plague.

The Poe Bug

By: S.J. Chambers

Have you experienced these following symptoms:  soaring soul, existential exigency, speaking in cryptically symbolic metaphor, vertigo caused by sublimity, vision heightened by chiaroscuro, dead-dwelling or head-swelling?  Do you suffer from daydreaming reflex with reveries that include black birds, scents of an unseen censor or aberrant alliterative applications?   If you have answered yes to more than one of these, you may be suffering from Poepathy.  A terrible disease of the soul, characterized by the affectation of the imagination and its degenerate interaction with the secular world, Poepathy is derived from continual contact of the reader’s imagination with that of nineteenth century American author, Edgar Allan Poe.

With his bicentennial this year, the States are becoming exposed to the Poethogen again with an outpouring of celebrations, movies and books celebrating Poe’s life and work.  With celebration comes evaluation and there will be many doubters wondering