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| those sad eyes... |
Maybe it's because I'm coming off a bad headache (which always leaves me emotionally weird before, during and afterward) and the sadness of a very lonely stranger who called into where I work today plus worries about my mother, but I am really feeling this article that showed up in my email today.
Edgar Allan Poe has always interested me, more as a person than a writer, though I do like his poetry and some of his short stories. His eyes always seem to be telling their own tale, his desperation so intense it seemed like a separate entity.
He is so the exact opposite of the stodgy-looking Henry James whom I've read much more of over the years. James once said of Poe: “An enthusiasm for him is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.” I'm not so sure that is true, but then each man came from completely different worlds and I'm super-tired so my thinking cap may be a bit off right now.
This part of the New York Review of Books article struck me hard:
The writer Thomas Wentworth Higginson said Poe had “the look of over-sensitiveness which when uncontrolled may prove more debasing than coarseness.” And he does seem to have been overwhelmed by himself, intolerably sensitive and proud and intolerably brilliant, his drinking and bitterness abetting his discomfitures and humiliations. That said, his strange little household of aunt/mother and cousin/wife, through it all and while it lasted, was always reported to be warm and sweet. He was a strong, athletic man who, through the whole of his career, bore up under his weaknesses and afflictions well enough to be very productive, most notably in the unique inventiveness, the odd purity, of his fiction.
The rest of the it can be read here:
http://www.nybooks.com/articles/archives/2015/feb/05/edgar-allan-poe/?utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=NYR+Poe+the+police+van+Gogh&utm_content=NYR+Poe+the+police+van+Gogh+CID_4edd3542cc7ea2efa47d8fd7b4a20fb2&utm_source=Email%20marketing%20software&utm_term=On%20Edgar%20Allan%20Poe
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