Edgar Allan Poe — "In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful coloured into the ho…"
In the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful coloured into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical. You may say all this is bad taste. ... But whether the articles of which I speak are, or are not in bad taste is little to the purpose. To be appreciated you must be read, and these things are invariably sought after with avidity.
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American Gothic poet and short-story writer who invented the detective story (Murders in the Rue Morgue) and shaped horror literature.
Closely associated with
Nathaniel Hawthorne (fellow American Gothic) and Charles Baudelaire (his French translator and torch-bearer).
For an intellectual contrast, see
Ralph Waldo Emerson, Transcendentalist optimist of self-reliance — Poe wrote essays attacking the entire Transcendentalist circle as didactic and intellectually thin — he derisively called them 'Frogpondians' and treated their cheerful mysticism as the literary opposite of his macabre realism.
