I do not like Edgar Allan Poe.  I do not like his poems, I do not like his short stories, and I do not like him. I never have.

 “The Bells” always annoyed me; the rhythm, the rhyming (oh, God, the rhyming), the endless repetitions (“From the bells, bells, bells, bells, / bells, bells, bells –” (12-13) Shut up about the bloody bells, already!).  I’ve always thought that if Poe wasn’t insane before he wrote it, and he must have been, then he was certainly insane after.  Just reading it is enough to drive me up a wall, and I didn’t have to write the bloody thing. 

“The Raven” always reminds me of a guy I went to high school with.  He was a big Poe fan.  He used to sneak up on people and start reciting The Raven all creepy like in their ears.  Every time I’m forced to read this poem, I can hear him whispering to me, and I have to check to be sure he’s not lurking somewhere in the room.  I try to avoid it at all costs. 

“The Tell-Tale Heart” gives me the heebie-jeebies.  I mean, the narrator killed the old man he loved just because he had a cataract.  “I was never kinder to the old man than during the whole week before I killed him,” he says (193).  Well, at least no one can say they saw him quarrel with his charge prior to the murder.  I think part of my discontent with this tale is his own uncertainty in his motive.  “It is impossible to say how first the idea entered my brain,” he says (193).  But then he theorizes, “I think it was his eye!” (193)  Initially, he does not know what his motive was.  Then, he puts forth the eye as a possibility.  Then, he proceeds to use the eye as his obvious and definitive reason for killing the old man.  “It was not the old man who vexed me, but this Evil Eye” (193).  This story is told in past tense, in retrospect.  If he knew this during the act of stalking and destroying the eye, why is he showing uncertainty of motive in the exposition?  This, perhaps more than the insanity, leads me to distrust the narrator. 

            As for Poe himself, I have always found it disturbing that he married his thirteen year old first cousin when he was twice her age.  Add to that that for many years they thought of each other as siblings.  He referred to his aunt as “our Mother” and Virginia as “Sis” or “Sissy” (Wagenknecht 183).

            Yet I have learned that Virginia and Edgar loved each other dearly.  I have also learned that Maria Clemm, Poe’s aunt/mother-in-law, was “absolutely devoted” to him and “cared for him with a maternal solicitude” deeper than any he had experienced before.  In return for Maria’s regard, Poe “was closer to Maria than to anyone else he ever knew” and held an “intense emotional attachment” for her (Meyers 60).  In light of such knowledge, I must amend my opinion of his character.  He may have married a child, he may have married his cousin, he may have been a drunkard and a louse, but he had to have had some redeeming qualities for such deep affection to be shared.

            I went home the weekend before the Poe discussions.  While there, I argued with my mother about the dress I will have to wear for my sister’s upcoming wedding.  I stormed away from her, claiming that I had homework to do, though I had no intention of being productive.  But I sat in my room, picked up my Poe book, flipped to “The Tell-Tale Heart,” and read the entire thing out loud, and with élan, to boot.   I poured myself into the reading; “why will you say that I am mad?” I sobbed, feeling every moment of betrayal with the narrator (193).  “‘Villains!’ I shrieked, ‘dissemble no more!  I admit the deed!—tear up the planks!—here, here!—it is the beating of his hideous heart!’” (197) Why, I just felt the stress melt away. 

It was this that showed me that Poe is actually quite likeable in all of his madness.  He grants us the catharsis we cannot reach in our own lives.  As I lived through the experience of killing the old man, my own urges to strangle my mum—or more satisfactorily, my sister—drifted away.

I might even give “The Bells” another read.  Who knows, maybe I’ll come away sane.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Live and Legacy. First. New York: Cooper Square Press, 2000. Print.

Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963. Print.