A thoughtful new short survey of Poe in the comics, “Edgar Allan Poe: Immortality Is But Ubiquity in Time”. Though in its opening paragraphs, in seeming to follow only the elite academic sentiment on ‘reputation’, it overlooks the huge popular grassroots upswell of interest across America. I’m no expert on Poe, but from reading around Lovecraft I get the impression that Poe was hugely popular at the grassroots from roughly 1909 to 1929, after which many tastes changed and interest was dampened by the onset of the Great Depression.
The same comics blog has an amusing “Tentacle Tuesday” feature-post, in which tentacles from long-gone comics are on display. It’s worth plugging into your RSS news reader, though be warned that some pictures are “Not Safe for Work” in terms of nudity and tentacular probing / politically correctness.
Thanks for your kind words, David! I assure you it wasn’t my intent to channel the American academic elite in my little survey. It was, as you said, a short survey, there’s so much more I could have covered!
I suppose my perspective on Poe’s renown and appreciation is a francophone one, having discovered Poe through Baudelaire’s translations in the fourth grade. My reading of “Le puits et le pendule” was my first experience of truly immersive reading. I was no longer in a library full of grade-schoolers, I was in dank, silent pitch darkness… aside from the shuffling of the rats and the hum of the swinging pendulum. I’ve never forgotten it.
I expect we’d be on the same page in lamenting America’s lack of a widespread appreciation of the weird tale, or what the French and Belgians call “Le fantastique”. Given Weird Tales (the magazine)’s ever-precarious finances and the time it took Derleth and Wandrei to sell their 1,268 copies of The Outsider… I’d say the grassroots were barely sufficient… but their tenacity paid off in time.
Hi RG, thanks for that. Yes, the answer on this probably sits somewhere in S.T. Joshi’s vast output. He must have, somewhere, a good reliable survey of the popular vs. academic reception of Poe in America in the early 20th century. Though I’ve never encountered it, as yet. Then, as you rightly say, there are also the French to consider.
Part of the problem for Derleth was not America per se, but the especially unimaginative cultural moment in time in which he was setting up. He was sandwiched between two especially fertile milieus – the pulp 1920s and 30s and the counter-culture of the late 1960s and early 70s. So it’s partly about tenacity, but also about realising that the ‘cultural mood’ will eventually shift strongly, if one can wait 15 or 20 years.