Classical Music, Poetry and stuff

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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Indeed he was a poor angry sot but I fail to see how his work promoted hate.

Immigration to the US in Poe's time was practially non-existent.

Poe had opportunity in life a wealthy foster father, he studied abroad in Scotland and London he served in the US military attaining the rank of Sergeant Major and attained an appointment to West Point which he duly cast aside in pursuit of his "career" in publishing.


Please explain how it is possible to cobble together elaborate tales (an oxymoron if I've ever read one)?

Additionally please explain how Poe used his work to promote hate?

Poe: A Dream Within A Dream

Take this kiss upon the brow!
And, in parting from you now,
Thus much let me avow-
You are not wrong, who deem
That my days have been a dream;
Yet if hope has flown away
In a night, or in a day,
In a vision, or in none,
Is it therefore the less gone?
All that we see or seem
Is but a dream within a dream.

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand-
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This poem was published in 1849 the year of his death.

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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But does that lessen his works?

Indeed I wish I were able to "cobble together" such poetry and literature.

Mind you we had our own poet occasionally accused of some racism who slung together a few decent plays including Hamlet an Macbeth.

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Originally Posted by Jericho

But does that lessen his works?

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Yeah, exactly. No artist is perfectly politically correct by our modern standards.

HP Lovecraft was pathologically fixated on miscegenation, desperately feared being overrun by the "lower orders" and likely had serious issues with his sexuality as well. None of that diminishes his work...though in a way it does make it more interesting. But without Lovecraft, there would have been no Richard Matheson, Stephen King or Thomas Ligotti.

I have admired Poe for years, he was a pioneer of the short story and has few equals in the genre. In a way he was a modernist before modernism, creating a literature of displacement and anxiety, of threat and despair wrapped up in the surroundings of enormous houses crammed with furniture, antiques curios and odd people unable to connect to the outside world. Perhaps that is why he was so popular among Baudelaire, Mallarme and other modernists and symbolists. Poe himself was born in New England and when his acting parents died he was displaced to slave-state Virginia and then England and then Virginia again, perhaps he never felt truly at home anywhere and was always searching for the balance, the peace of mind he never achieved. He described democracy as 'mobocracy' and saw universal suffrage as a con whereby the rich and powerful got the poor and powerless to maintain them in office year after year. But as far as I know he never endorsed slavery.

THE FALL

Parallel rills
Of rain
Ripple through the sheet of water slipping down
My pane
And shimmy downward toward the rotten sill
To cascade over the drop and spill
Loudly into the chill
And shimmering pools
That leak into the pores and crevices
Of the hollow ground.

Were these heavenly inhabitants thrilled
To trade their potential
For the wild kinetic plummet
To their splashing success?
Or would they have preferred
To fall onto the soft green grass,
Miles away from my peering eyes,
Absorbed unobserved by the thirsty dirt?

__yours truly

Very nice Trish

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Originally Posted by Helvis2012

Poe was a drunken, poor, degenerate racist, obsessed with the decay of America due to the influx of immigrants and idea of free blacks. Those are the main ideas he masks in his Gothic fiction: the decay of a society dominated by whites. His work is OK but pretty ugly if you look into in the deeper meanings.
In reality, he was a angry fellow. A poor white who saw himself as some kind of an aristocrat regardless of his poverty and addictions....but I suppose that's the kind of mind of that it takes to cobble together elaborate tales to promote hate.

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Poe was a rascist?

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Originally Posted by Birgitta

Poe was a rascist?

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It was the 19th Century.

There weren't many who weren't racist--or at least white supremacist, which is almost the same thing--by modern standards.