Word: poe
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...Poe-pourri: "Hop-Frog," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Cask of Amantillado," "The Raven," and "The Bells," in any good anthology, Edgar Allan Poe. By the Master of Disaster, the Big Daddy of the Supersonic P-P-Pulse Rate. Each piece is guaranteed to knock a couple years off any poor pup's life. And "The Bells," especially, is a terrific way to round off your Poeportion. Find yourself getting sleepy? Little weak? Sorta drowsy? Recite "The Bells" aloud into a tape deck, pop your recording into an industrial strength ghetto blaster, and let 'er rrrrrip, full volume, for dozing...
...quickly dominated the field. Their very names suggest creaking Victorian stairways, forbidden rooms and disembodied spirits: Montague Rhodes James, J.S. Le Fanu, Eden Phillpotts, Algernon Blackwood. In the U.S., an alcoholic and sickly journalist led readers down dark corridors that still echo in American and European fiction. Edgar Allan Poe was, wrote D.H. Lawrence, "an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul." He told of disintegrating bodies (The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar), accusatory objects (The Purloined Letter) and doomed homes (The Fall of the House of Usher) -- all now standard...
...Poe was the quirky father of modern horror, its uncle was the sobersided James, who was strongly influenced by the terrors that afflicted his family. His brother William, the pragmatic philosopher and investigator into the varieties of religious experience, recalled one of his most terrifying moments: "Suddenly there fell upon me without any warning, just as if it came out of the darkness, a horrible fear of my own existence. Simultaneously there arose in my mind the image of an epileptic patient . . . a black-haired youth with greenish skin . . . That shape am I, I felt, potentially." This was the image...
...down into the subconscious. But the man or woman who writes horror stories has a pipeline that goes further, maybe . . . into the sub-subconscious, if you like." King's sub-subconscious started working overtime when he was scarcely out of infancy. In an eerie resemblance to his spiritual ancestor Poe, King was also deserted by his father in infancy. At the age of four the lonely boy walked home pale and unspeaking. A neighborhood friend had inexplicably vanished. "It turned out," King later recalled, "that the kid had been run over by a freight train while playing on or crossing...
...almost 210 years, the U.S. has muddled along without an official poet laureate. This lack did not noticeably hinder the work of such natives as Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Stevens, Frost and Robert Lowell. But it bothered Hawaiian Senator Spark Matsunaga, an avid reader and sometimes writer of poems, including one called Ode to a Traffic Light ("Impartial traffic cop/ That blushingly speeding cars do stop...