Tuesday, April 21, 2009

News at Eleven: "My whole existence has been the merest Romance,"

[Edgar Allan] Poe wrote, the year before his death, "in the sense of the most utter unworldliness." This is Byronic bunk. Poe's life was tragic, but he was about as unworldly as a bale of cotton. Poe's world was Andrew Jackson's America, a world of banking collapse, financial panic, and grinding depression that had a particularly devastating effect on the publishing industry, where Poe sought a perch.

from The New Yorker: The Humbug

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