From start to finish, he existed on (and sometimes over) the edge of catastrophe, breakdown, rejection and dereliction.Ĭhild of a couple of strolling players - very young, semi-destitute, both already incubating TB - the infant Edgar was farmed out first to grandparents and later to a nurse who dosed him and an infant sister with laudanum and gin. Excess, uncertainty, imbalance were for Poe the basic ingredients of both art and life. That was precisely where Poe aimed to be: 'The ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque,' he wrote, defending his rule of deliberate 'bad taste' to an editor who complained that he went too far. Even Peter Ackroyd rarely quotes his subject's actual writing, presumably because so much of it teeters on the verge of bathos. French translation somehow manages to veil sentiment and phrases that remain in English trite or trashy. Charles Baudelaire said that, whenever he read Poe, he came across 'not just subjects I had dreamed of, but sentences which I had thought out, written by him 20 years before'. Verlaine, Rimbaud, Mallarme and Valery admired him. He is one of those writers, like Charles Morgan and Lawrence Durrell, revered far more by French than by Anglo-American intellectuals. This was the core of Poe's subsequent appeal for both Symbolists and Surrealists.
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