As an English teacher, what I am about to say might be considered sacrilege but I promised to always be truthful in these post. I have never gotten the works of Edgar Allan Poe; hear me out. I appreciate his utterly unique darker perspective on the human experience, his ability to terrify and awe his audience in so few pages is remarkable and I was always jealous of his ability to create such vivid and detailed settings and characters in a few lines, but I just dont get his stories.
I tried ridiculously hard in high school and then in college to fall in love with the brilliant mind behind The Fall of the House of Usher and Ligeia but when I read these stories I would just get confused by the poetry of his words and then after the fifth time through I would get sad realizing that Roderick buried his sister alive and that Ligeia comes back from the dead to kill the narrators wife. I always left the story feeling like the sun had been sucked out of the sky. Everything about Poe made me feel for this man who had such a dark and depressing look on life. In every picture I have seen of him he looks like he has no reason to live and I just want to give the poor guy a hug.
I wish my stubborn optimism didn't get in the way of me enjoying the great works of this brilliant poet. I wish I could just sit in a chair reading Poe until the sunset and the stars came out, I wish I could understand the deeper message without googling it, and I wish I could marvel at his stories without getting depressed but I think I am cursed to never be able to blindly fall in love with the works of Edgar Allan Poe.
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