I cannot think of any other author, said Harold Bloom of Edgar Allan Poe, who writes so abominably, and yet is so clearly destined to go on being canonical. But for each writer who has disparaged him, from Henry James to Yeats, D.H. Lawrence to W.H. Auden, there is an array of works that bear his influence: stories and novels not only by horror specialists like H. P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, or by writers of detective fiction such as Arthur Conan Doyle, but by Fyodor Dostoevsky, Baudelaire, Edith Wharton, Thomas Mann, TS Eliot, James Joyce, William Faulkner, Borges, Eudora Welty, Vladimir Nabokov and Bolaño. Like the obsessions that so often lead to the annihilation of Poes narrators, his influence cannot be escaped...
Posted on: Wed, 05 Feb 2014 13:23:45 +0000