Friends, surely, you will have enjoyed as readers or spectators of horror or police stories that do not know that Poe's contributions have their origin. In this post I will try to introduce you to the contributions of this writer. This brings me back to the great issue of the development of modern literature.

While modernity was gaining ground in Europe with romanticism, in America, specifically in the United States, two figures, with their particular writings, were also driving the birth of the modern age in literature: Edgar Allan Poe and Walt Whitman. This article is dedicated to the first (in the next issue we will talk about the second).

Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, 1809 - Baltimore, 1849), being for some critics and scholars, the most important writer given to us by the USA, is the initiator of literary modernity in this part of the planet, which will affect the whole West. His work includes diverse genres: poetry, narrative (stories and novels), essay, literary criticism, journalism. His influence goes beyond the strictly literary sphere of his time and of future ones, and even reaches the plastic arts, cinema and comics.

It is not my intention to present a biography of the author; there are many; the most famous is perhaps the one written in 1856 by the poet Charles Baudelaire, who was the first translator of much of his work in France (and from there to the whole of Europe). Baudelaire - the greatest promoter of modern poetry - values Poe as "one of the greatest poets of this century", referring to the 19th century. His biography: Edgar Poe, his life and works is not only a great tribute to one of his greatest influences (Octavio Paz said: "Baudelaire discovers his fellow man in Poe"), but also a way to delve into Poe's vital tragedy.

Let's look at some basic facts and features of his life and work before moving on to develop the theme of the post.

_{Daguerreotype of Edgar Allan Poe in 1848 (at the age of 39, one year before his death), taken by W. S. Hartshorn Source}

Edgar Allan Poe had a life marked by the drama of abandonment and death since his childhood: abandonment of the father and death of the mother when he was barely three years old; adopted by a couple, with his stepfather, a well-to-do merchant (from whom he took his surname: Allan), he could never get along at all; subjected to difficult circumstances of life with his brother, who died while Poe was still very young. He was continuously constrained to debts and very hard situations by the economic market, lamentable state that will be maintained during his life.

In 1827 he published his first book, a poetry booklet entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. In order to earn a living, he devoted himself to journalistic collaborations, which included his own literary creation. In several magazines and newspapers for which he worked, he left stories, poems in verse and articles on various subjects. He is said to have been the first known American to try to live exclusively by writing. In 1833 he had his first literary success with his short story "Manuscript Found in a Bottle. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who died of tuberculosis in 1847. Some biographers conjecture that the marked presence in his poetic and narrative work of a woman's death could be related to the loss of women in his life (mother, stepmother, wife).

_{His wife, Virginia Poe, watercolor painted after her death in 1847 Source}

In 1838 he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, a fantasy adventure novel; in 1840 his book Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which would be published in Baudelaire's translation as Extraordinary Tales; and in 1845 his poem "The Raven", which became a great popular success.

The life of economic, family and other calamities had led him to gambling and alcohol, suffering states of depression and physical health, accentuated by the death of his wife.
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found in the streets of Baltimore in a state of delirium. He was taken by a friend to the hospital, where he died on October 7. It is said that on his death he uttered these words: "May God help my poor soul! Even today the exact cause of death remains a mystery.

To close this synthesis, it is worth quoting the well-known intellectual Marshall McLuhan, who in an essay about Poe pointed out: "(...) he never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Long before Conrad and Eliot, he dedicated himself, along with Baudelaire, to exploring the heart of darkness. Poe himself in a letter synthesized: "My life has been caprice, impulse, passion, longing for solitude, mockery of the things of this world; an honest desire for the future.

_{Ilustration of Manet Source)}

His poetry includes the poems "The Raven", "Ulalume", "A Dream Within a Dream" and "Annabel Lee". His complete story has been classified by one of his best connoisseurs, the writer Julio Cortázar, in: Terror Tales; Supernaturals; Metaphysics; Analytics; Anticipation and Retrospection; Landscape; and Grotesque and Satirical, which indicates the richness of his narrative work. They can be named here: "Manuscript found in a bottle", "The fall of the House Usher", "William Wilson", "The crimes of the street Morgue", "The well and the pendulum", "The oval portrait", "The beetle of gold", "The black cat", "The heart of the informer", "The stolen letter", "The truth about the case of Mr. Valdemar", "The barrel of amontillado".

Among his essays and critical texts: "Philosophy of composition", Eureka, "The fundamentals of verse", "The poetic principle", "Charles Dickens", "Hawthorne", Marginalia.

What are the features of Edgar Allan Poe's work that make it the root of literary modernity?

We often do not know where certain ideas, styles, inclinations, characteristics in artistic manifestations come from, which we can even practice. Poe's contributions and influences are various and of a certain complexity, which we will try to expose with the support of specialized studies (recorded in the references at the end).

_{Charles Baudelaire, stories by Edgar Allan poet, illustrated by Louis-Aug.-Mathieu Legrand Source}

Although Poe had been influenced by European romanticism (he appreciated Hoffmann, Lord Byron, Shelley, Coleridge), and some of that influence can be seen in his work, which would already be part of the modern trend, he goes further, as he distances himself from romanticism by introducing a controversial trait that will dominate modernity to the present day: the separation between the empirical person (that is, each one of us) and the written work. Poe points to what will later be proposed as "depersonalization" in the text of literary creation, with Baudelaire and much of the modern and contemporary poetic line.

In his case, it is based on the rejection of sentimentalism that a certain decadent romanticism had propagated as a function of an awakened fantasy. As Friedrich says: "Outside France, Poe was the one who most decisively separated the lyric from the heart".

In this distancing from romanticism, he dispenses with mystical and metaphysical intentions, to prioritize attention to the literary text and its inherent demands, thus approaching the aesthetic vision of "art for art's sake.

1. It develops the inclination towards death and the supernatural (obviously Poe's non-original feature; the influence of earlier Gothic writings is known), an essential aspect of modern literature, through the identification and promotion of the French poets of the time, pillars of modernity (Symbolism, which we will deal with later).

We find this trait both in his poems and in his stories. It reaches its greatest manifestation in Poe's poem par excellence: "The Raven", which presents the visit of a raven to a lover afflicted by the death of his beloved, Leonora. The black raven, standing on a bust of Palas Atenea, repeats the phrase "Never again".

(To be continued)

Bibliographic references

Cuéllar, Carlos (2009). El artista como musa: La influencia de Edgar A. Poe en el arte. Ars Longa, num. 18, 2009
Friedrich, Hugo (1974). Structure of modern lyric. Spain: Edit. Seix Barral.
Riquer, Martin de and Valverde, José M. (1979). History of Universal Literature (Volume III). Spain: Edit Planeta.
https://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe