Mark​​​​ Canada, Ph.D.​

All stories require us to use our minds—I call this newsletter Mind Travel, after all—but Poe’s tales of ratiocination, unlike other kinds of stories and novels, present an explicit mystery, drop little clues in front of us, and give us the opportunity to solve the mystery before the master detective explains it to the befuddled narrator (and, by extension, all of us).  It’s a brilliant idea, one that has kept untold millions of us glued to our pages and screens.

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How are you at whodunnits — Poe's or anyone else's?  I’m terrible.  All of my study of Poe has done me little or no good.  I’ll never be a Dupin or a Holmes—or even a Columbo, although I am pretty good at losing things in my jackets.

2. He shaped the course of the short story.

It’s one thing to tell a story; it’s quite another to craft one.  Along with his contemporaries Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville, Poe crafted some of the first well-known examples of the form that would become known as the “short story” (although he used the term “tale” in, for example, the title of his first collection, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque).  Poe went beyond writing masterpieces in this form, however, and wrote about the genre, providing guidance on what a short story should be.  In a review of Hawthorne’s collection Twice-Told Tales, he made a case for the value of brevity in fiction.  At that point, novels had been around for a century or so and were well-known literary forms, but the problem with a novel, as Poe saw it, is that one typically cannot read it in one “sitting.”  As a result, it is impossible for a novelist to achieve what the writer of a tale can achieve.  He explains:

As it cannot be read at one sitting, it deprives itself, of course, of the immense force derivable from totality. Worldly interests intervening during the pauses of perusal, modify, annul, or counteract, in a greater or less degree, the impressions of the book. . . . In the brief tale, however, the author is enabled to carry out the fulness of his intention, be it what it may. During the hour of perusal the soul of the reader is at the writer's control. There are no external or extrinsic influences — resulting from weariness or interruption.

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In this same review, Poe made a famous pronouncement about the crafting of the short story, saying, "In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design."  Some people who do not write creatively may think of fiction as something inspired, but Poe was describing a highly deliberate process.  (He made a similar case for the deliberate craft of writing poetry in his essay "The Philosophy of Composition.")  Fellow writer Ray Bradbury said, "Poe was more influential than any writer of his time in leading the short story away from the formless, casual episode toward a higher art of more formal organization."  Bradbury added, ". . . Poe's influence on the modern short story is unmatched in English and American literature.  He gave it style, organization, dignity, and meaning and set it on the road to becoming one of the most challenging forms of fiction a writer can attempt."

1. He influenced just about every writer who followed him.

There's no escape.

That sounds like the terrifying scenario of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” where the narrator finds himself tied below a pendulum that swings closer and closer to his body.  Poe is a lot like that pendulum.  He’s tough to avoid.

During his lifetime, he was not a particularly successful writer, at least in terms of sales and notoriety.  It’s been observed, in fact, that he was better known as a critic than as a creative writer.  Things got better after his death.  (Well, his reputation got better anyway.  Whether things got better for Poe himself is impossible for us among the living to know, but I hope so.)  

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Poe’s biggest fan actually was a contemporary who never met him.  Charles Baudelaire, a Frenchman, read some of Poe’s work and felt a powerful kinship.  "The first time I opened one of his books," he said, "I saw, to my amazement and delight, not simply certain subjects which I had dreamed of but sentences which I had thought out, written by him twenty years before."

As others have noted, other French poets, notably Stephen Mallarme and Paul Valery, came under Poe’s spell, as did the Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky, France's Jules Verne, England's H. G. Wells and Rudyard Kipling, Argentina's Jorge Luis Borges, and Japan's Hiram Taro, who actually took on the pseudonym of Edogawa Rampo, which is how Poe's name would be pronounced in Japanese.

Serious writers, like serious painters and musicians, know the masters of their craft.  Many of them probably grew up reading Poe, as director Alfred HItchcock said he did, but even writers who have never read even a word of “The Raven” or “The Cask of Amontillado” (if any such writers even exist) would know Poe on some level because they have read other writers who almost certainly did read Poe’s work.  Poe transcends the six degrees of separation; he’s at most one or two degrees away from just about all of us.  At least in the Western Hemisphere, if you don’t know him, you almost certainly know someone who does.

In short, few writers have had more impact on other writers.  Rather than trying to identify all of those who have felt his influence, it might be better to ask, as author Joyce Carol Oates has said, "Who has not been influenced by Poe?"

It's clear that Poe has had an immeasurable impact on literature, but what are we to say about his impact on individual readers?  That's a topic for next week's column: "2 Sides of Poe's Brain."