Edgar Allan Poe: Die Dichtung, Band XLII

Hanns Heinz Ewers, the German master of the macabre who dabbled in the occult and the forbidden, turns his gimlet eye onto America's own prince of darkness in this 1916 study. What emerges is not mere biography but something closer to a séance, with Ewers channeling Poe's tortured genius through the fog of decades and linguistic distance. He traces the arc from the orphan's early losses through the disastrous romance with his child-bride Virginia, onto the drinking binges and the mad last days in Baltimore's gutters. But Ewers, himself a figure straddling rationalist Berlin and the supernatural beyond, understands that Poe's demons were not weaknesses to be lamented but the very furnace in which his singular art was forged. The macabre landscapes of Poe's fiction, Ewers argues, were cartography of his own shattered psyche. This is essential reading for anyone who wants to understand how the darkness of the man illuminates the darkness of the stories.