Jeffrey Meyers on Edgar Allan Poe, Gothic Horror, & Halloween

[00:00:00] Alisha Searcy: Welcome back to the Learning Curve podcast. I’m your host, Alisha Thomas Searcy, and happy to be joined today again by Dr. Jocelyn Chadwick. Welcome back, Jocelyn. How are you?

[00:00:31] Jocelyn Chadwick: I am fine, Alisha. It’s so nice to be with you again. I so enjoy working with you.

[00:00:37] Alisha Searcy: Same here. And we’ve got a fun show today, right? In celebration of Halloween that is quickly approaching.

[00:00:45] Yes. Yes, absolutely. Very interesting show, so stay tuned, but before we get there, we’ve got to talk about our story of the week, and I’m really excited about this one. It’s entitled, Reading is Rare, Bright Spot in Louisiana Education, Lawmaker Says We’re Winning. So this is a story by Patrick Waltz, and It is about the great work that’s happening in the state of Louisiana around the science of reading.

[00:01:16] And I’m sure many folks have heard about all of the states. It’s more than half of the states in the country who have adopted science of reading legislation policies in their state. The question is whether or not they are being implemented properly. And so this story talks about the state of Louisiana and really highlights an interesting guy who is A sitting state representative, a Republican lawmaker, but also leads an education organization.

[00:01:47] focused on reading. It’s called the Center for Literacy and Learning, and it’s actually a national nonprofit that’s based in Louisiana. And so the story is about the success that Louisiana has seen so far. In 2022, they were called the state that leads the nation in reading growth. That is humongous. We know that reading is such a fundamental skill that students need to have.

[00:02:13] And to my point a couple of seconds ago, there are a number of states, again, that have Adopted reading policies, science of reading in particular, Justin, they’re not putting in the resources when it comes to training teachers, when it comes to having the right screeners in place to identify kids with dyslexia, and concerns like that.

[00:02:34] They’re not putting enough money into the resources or making sure that they’ve got the right curriculum. And so I want to give kudos to Louisiana, kudos to state representative Weibel, I believe his name is, and others in the state who are doing great work to ensure that students can read at high levels.

[00:02:53] We have to make sure that these policies are in place and that we’re holding adults accountable, right, for making sure that students can read. So I’m glad to read this article and glad that this work is happening in Louisiana, and I hope other states reach out to this representative and this organization.

[00:03:09] And I think for those who also follow education policy, Excel and Ed has a really good tool where you can log on, find out how your state is doing in terms of the science of reading, and what else needs to be done. So that’s my story for the week. Justin, what do you have

[00:03:24] Jocelyn Chadwick: going on today? Well, what I have going on for today is, as usual, I wanted to find a quote from Poe, and there’s an essay he wrote about the philosophy of composition, and you’re talking about the concept of reading and, of course, writing, and teachers need to be trained on how to teach reading and how to teach writing, and very few times do we have authors who actually let us.

[00:03:52] have a little eye view of how they think in terms of their writing. And so I have a quote from the philosophy of composition on how Poe thought about creating effect. And so here’s his quote. I prefer commencing with the consideration of an effect. Keeping originality always in view, for he is false to himself who ventures to dispense with so obvious and so easily attainable a source of interest.

[00:04:20] I say to myself in the first place, quote, of the innumerable effects or impressions of which the heart, the intellect, or, more generally, the soul is susceptible, what one shall I, on the present occasion, select? Having chosen a novel first, and secondly, a vivid effect, I consider whether it can be best wrought by incident or tone, whether by ordinary incidents or peculiar tone, or the converse, or by peculiarity both of incident and tone, afterward looking about me, or rather within, For such combinations of event or tone as shall best aid me in the construction of the effect.

[00:04:59] I mean, that would be great for pre service teachers and for us veterans to understand how these authors whom we teach, how they think about writing. And this is cause and effect, and it would be a great activity for kids, particularly Halloween, right? Cause and effect and to use this, this idea of a quote and ask students, now think about what would you do?

[00:05:20] You know, thinking about how Poe is thinking of effect and creating tone or whatever. Let’s have an experiment and try with that and have Halloween as a theme. So.

[00:05:29] Alisha Searcy: I love it. So I want people to stay tuned because we have a very special guest today, Jeffrey Myers, who’s one of the 12 Americans in the British Royal Society of Literature and the author of 54 books, including Edgar Allan Poe, His Life and Legacy.

[00:05:46] We’ll be right back.

[00:06:00] Geoffrey Myers is one of 12 Americans in the British Royal Society of Literature and the author of 54 books and 980 articles on art, film, and modern American English and European literature.

[00:06:19] Joseph Conrad, Ernest Hemingway, Robert Frost, F. Scott Fitzgerald, George Orwell, Somerset Maugham, D. H. Lawrence, and Samuel Johnson, among others. His work has been translated into 14 languages and published on six continents. He has received a grant from the Guggenheim Foundation and an award in literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters honoring exceptional achievement.

[00:06:45] Meyers earned his undergraduate degree at the University of Michigan and his doctorate at the University of California, Berkeley. Welcome to the show. Mr. Myers, you’re among the most acclaimed literary biographers of the last 40 years. Would you briefly share with us how you became interested in researching and writing about celebrated literary figures, as well as provide us an overview of your biography?

[00:07:09] of the brilliant, troubled 19th century American poet Edgar Allan Poe.

[00:07:14] Jeffrey Meyers: I was always interested in getting a deeper understanding of the lives of the authors I was reading and teaching and writing about. In fact, anybody I ever met, if they seemed like an interesting person, I was immediately curious about their lives and asked them about it and tried to find out about them.

[00:07:31] My early books, A Fever at the Core and Married to Genius, had biographical chapters and eventually I wrote lives of five of the nine writers in Married to Genius. So those chapters opened up eventually into full length biographies. I loved the archival research, that is to say the unpublished material in university libraries, because I found something startling and new discovery every single day that I was working, plowing through this huge amount of papers and looking for material that I could use in the book.

[00:08:05] And even more interesting were the revealing interviews with the people who knew my subject. And Poe’s case, of course, it didn’t work because he died in 1849. But all my other biographies, except for Samuel Johnson, were about modern writers. And I met their family, their children, their wives, their friends.

[00:08:27] Their business associates, their publishers, their editors, and everybody I ever met, sometimes under the most bizarre circumstances, in the same asylums, in hospital deathbeds, in hostile situations where the interviewer said he wasn’t going to cooperate, and then after him. Blasting me for a few minutes, he eventually did cooperate.

[00:08:49] So, in Poe’s case, I was particularly interested in his disastrous year at West Point, because he had been the only American writer who went to West Point, and his suicide attempt. And oddly enough, West Point Emerged again a year or so ago when I was writing a book out this year on James Salter, who was a friend and who was a professional Army pilot.

[00:09:11] And Salter went to West Point too, and unlike Poe, who got kicked out in his first year because he didn’t really want to be a soldier, Salter finished and had a very distinguished career in the Army Air Force. So, it’s interesting that something I did a long time ago on Poe comes back even this year. on James Salter through the West Point connection.

[00:09:32] As far as Poe’s early life, he was scarred by the tubercular deaths of his young actress mother, and he was married to a very fragile, delicate, doomed teenage wife, and both died. The mother when he was a child, and the wife when she was still very young, right after he had married her, which led to a kind of strange relationship with his late wife’s mother, not Sexual but emotional.

[00:10:02] In other words, a substitute mother, a substitute wife. Anyway, these deaths gave him a morbid outlook that appeared in his gothic works about ghosts and ghouls and graves that keep recurring. And in a story called, A Premature Burial, He portrayed, with vivid morbidity, the fear of being trapped in a coffin and buried alive.

[00:10:27] This sounds unlikely, but in fact, in the 19th century, when Poe was living, expensive coffins were actually supplied with electric alarm buzzers. People were afraid of being buried alive, and they felt if they had a buzzer and were still alive, they could press the button and they’d be dug up again. The other thing was they always had to have their feet.

[00:10:49] Punctured by a knife before, and these ghoulish things still happen. Just the other day, I read that a man who was declared dead in a hospital and was about to have his organs removed to be given to another person, showed signs of life just in time, started blinking his eyes and breathing again. And what could be more Poe like than coming back from the near dead just as they’re about to cut you open while you’re still alive?

[00:11:17] Anyway, that’s all Poe.

[00:11:19] Alisha Searcy: Thank you. It helps us to understand his early life and how that contributed to some of his Gothic fiction writing. So in 1827, Poe published his first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems. Can you talk about the major themes of these poems and the formative Intellectual influences that shaped his early poetry and literary works.

[00:11:43] Jeffrey Meyers: Poe has survived his notorious personal reputation, we’ll get to that later about his drinking and the way he died, and survived the vicissitudes of taste during the last 175 years, and as I suggested earlier, And I think I’ve asked it a moment ago, he remains our contemporary. The themes are universal.

[00:12:00] He always appeals to basic human feelings and express universal themes common to all people and all languages. Dreams, loss, love, grief, mourning, alienation, terror, and insanity. Disease and death. I mean, these are themes that pervade all kinds of serious and even unserious literature. His major literary influence, and there were many, was a spooky German short story writer, E.

[00:12:26] T. A. Hoffman. I’m not sure he’s read very much anymore, but he was very popular at one time, and he used, his dates are 1776 to 1822, and he did write stories that Poe imitated in some ways.

[00:12:41] Alisha Searcy: So Poe switched to writing prose and worked for literary journals, and he became known for his sharp literary criticism, and it even earned him the nickname from his enemies, the Man with the Tomahawk, which forced him to move around to several cities, including Baltimore.

[00:12:58] So can you tell us about his literary criticism and maybe give some examples of his caustic style and discuss the linkages between his complicated personal life and his prickly writing?

[00:13:09] Jeffrey Meyers: Well, that’s a good example of how his personal life impinged on his writing. He was bitter, as many people would be, but maybe he more than others because he was kind of hypersensitive.

[00:13:23] succeeded when he failed. He failed often, not because of the quality of his work, but because he couldn’t get along with the editors who were trying to publish his works. He’s a very quarrelsome fellow, drunk a lot of the time, big chip on his shoulder, angry. His most notorious conflict, literary conflict, he condemned Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

[00:13:48] Who was a sentimental and didactic writer, but very popular, very well respected. And he called the older poet an outright literary thief, which is pretty strong stuff. Eternally overworked and underpaid, so he was struggling with poverty and ill health all the time. He resented Longfellow’s comfortable life.

[00:14:11] He had a chair at Harvard. He was married to a wealthy woman. He was super respectable in a way that Poe was super notorious, and I’m not sure there was any substance to his criticism of Longfellow. It didn’t hurt Longfellow’s reputation any, it hurt Poe’s reputation in a way, as you said in the question.

[00:14:35] The Tomahawk Man. But anyway, that’s a good example of life and writing coming together to Poe’s disadvantage.

[00:14:43] Alisha Searcy: It definitely explains a lot. So I have one more question before I turn it over to Jocelyn. Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it? Wrote Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes.

[00:14:58] And C. Auguste Dufim is a fictional character Poe created who made his first appearance in the 1841 short story. The murders in Rue Morgue, widely considered the first detective fiction story. Can you share with us how Poe developed this character and established the detective mystery genre?

[00:15:19] Jeffrey Meyers: The murders in the Rue Morgue, and the date is 1841, was the first detective story, and it had an immense impact and changed the history of world literature.

[00:15:30] A sharp logical analysis, precise details, brutal ferocity. A crime no human hand could commit, and an ape armed with a knife, who had escaped from the zoo. The criminal did not, as the title implies, murders. He did not commit a sequence of murders, but was responsible for two hideous deaths at the same time.

[00:15:56] The murderer was undoubtedly inspired by the huge, hairy, red orangutan. that was exhibited before astonished crowds in Philadelphia in 1839. The way Poe influenced later detective writers was first this brilliant idiosyncratic detective hero who always outwits the police. The police are sort of plodding along behind him and not getting it.

[00:16:22] He has a rather dim assistant who asks The right questions, the Dr. Watson type. He’s always puzzled, and he’s also, he’s saying how remarkable, how extraordinary, how amazing, you know, he’s always impressed by Holmes discoveries, and it, he contains an unusual, intriguing crime. Something like, you know, why did the dog not bark in the night?

[00:16:49] Yes, that’s exactly what we want to know. And then, Colin Doyle dressed up. Sherlock Holmes with idiosyncratic qualities, a deer sock or hat, a cape, a curved pipe, an opium addiction, a violin playing, and speed, everything, he’s always racing around after someone. So, Conan Doyle was right in giving tribute to Poe, because of these examples that I just gave.

[00:17:15] It’s really terrific, the idea that he invented something like that. And a good friend of mine called Nicholas Meyer, who wrote the 7 percent Solution, about how Freud, this is fiction, how Freud can Helped Sherlock Holmes overcome opium addiction. So the people are still using Sherlock Holmes. There must be a zillion movies about him.

[00:17:36] And, and of course, Basil Rathbone in the movies makes you think of what Sherlock Holmes looks like. Very tall, very thin, angular, sharp nosed, sharp witted. It all comes out of prose. You have to give him that.

[00:17:50] Jocelyn Chadwick: This is Jocelyn now, Professor Myers. I have several of your books, and when you talked about Hoffman, Hoffman, unfortunately, is not often read too much right now.

[00:17:59] But there is something that you said earlier as we get into the Telltale Heart and just Poe himself. He was a tortured soul, but his work was amazing. And he just never seemed to be able to get that equilibrium. And you so addressed that, and I thank you for it. So my first question is the Telltale Heart.

[00:18:19] is an 1843 post short story. The unnamed narrator tries to convince the reader of his sanity while describing his murder of an old man with a pale blue, quote, vulture eye, unquote. It describes the detailed calculation of murder dismembering the body and hiding it under the floorboards. Ultimately, the narrator’s guilty conscience is tormented by the sound of a dead man’s beating heart.

[00:18:45] Please talk about this classic short story and its enduring significance as gothic horror grounded in fear and haunting.

[00:18:54] Jeffrey Meyers: Well, the Telltale Heart is one of the most famous and Best stories, and it pulls you into the story immediately with this fabulous opening. You already feel the narrator is going around the bend.

[00:19:07] True! Nervous! Very, very dreadfully nervous! I have been unarmed! Why would you say that I am mad? When somebody says that, you really get interested in the story. Dostoevsky in Notes from Underground writes something very, very similar to this and pulls you into that, because his Notes from Underground hero is really, and the hero is really a madman, too.

[00:19:30] And it comes right out of Poe. So we have in a telltale heart, a deranged narrator confesses the repulsive unmotivated murderer of an innocent victim, a harmless old man. He doesn’t even know him. He just decides to kill him. The motive of the crime is provoked by the man’s evil eye. The killer takes great pains to conceal the body, and stands right next to the corpse as the suspicious but imperceptive police search the premises, as another example of a police not quite getting it.

[00:20:03] Driven by remorse and conscience, that is to say, he’s a murderer, but then he feels bad about murdering, he confesses and gives himself away. What he thinks he hears, a supernatural accusation, the dead man beating of the tell tale heart. It gets louder and louder and louder and finally he can’t stand it anymore and shows the police the man that he killed.

[00:20:27] He didn’t have to do that, but that’s his conscience. Driving him mad and causing his execution, really, because he could have gotten away with it if he had just shut up, but he, but he couldn’t.

[00:20:39] Jocelyn Chadwick: It’s one of my favorites, and students love it, and I have to tell you, here in Massachusetts, every Halloween, there is always going to be, just at our home, we generally have literally over 100 kids and their parents, and there is always going to be at least three or four Edgar Allan Poe story Costumes.

[00:20:58] So, it’s pretty cool living here and Poe is with us in that sense, too. It’s the equivalent of Christmas carols at

[00:21:05] Jeffrey Meyers: Halloween.

[00:21:07] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yeah!

[00:21:07] Jeffrey Meyers: Get a little better at your Poe.

[00:21:10] Jocelyn Chadwick: That’s

[00:21:11] Jeffrey Meyers: very good.

[00:21:12] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes. I have to remember that. You’re right. It is brilliant. That’s very good because that’s spot on. Yeah. I have to remember that one.

[00:21:22] The Raven. Every high school around the country requires The Raven. So Post’s most famous work is The Raven, a supernatural narrative poem first published in 1845. It uses folk, mythology, religious and classical references, telling of a distraught lover lamenting the loss of his love, Lenore. The raven taunts the broken hearted young man, sits on the bust of the Greek goddess of wisdom, Athena, and repeats the word, quote, nevermore, unquote.

[00:21:54] Could you talk about the raven, how Poe crafted it, and its wide literary fame?

[00:22:01] Jeffrey Meyers: The Raven gained initial fame after it was published when Poe, dressed in his usual mournful black, brilliantly recited the poem in public with his soft, mellow, melodious voice, so effective, in fact, that some sensitive listeners actually fainted.

[00:22:20] It was too strong. The Raven portrays the monomaniacal obsession of a melancholy man who’s hovering on the edge of madness, like the tell tale heart man. As his self torturing anguish intensifies, the hopeless, suffering narrator is forced to realize that there will be no reunion after death with his beloved Lenore.

[00:22:40] He begs with repetitive internal rhyme, and let me read a few lines from this fabulous poem. Prophets that I sing of evil, Prophets still of bird or devil, By that heaven that bends above us, By that God we both adore, Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, Within the distant Aidan, it shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore.

[00:23:04] Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore. Quoth the raven, Nevermore. There’s no hope of consolation. The bird of ill omen conveys a mournful mood, and demands fantastic terrors. And by the way, the word, the name Lenore, is a very useful rhyme word in English, as you can see just from these lines.

[00:23:28] I also want to read, at this moment, another great gloomy, moody poem, Ululum, which James Mason recites in the film Lolita, because Humbert is influenced by Poe, very obviously, and just let me read a few lines just to give you the sense of Poe’s power as a poet. In fact, these are even better than The Raven, I think.

[00:23:53] The skies they were ashen and sober, the leaves they were crispet and sear, the leaves they were withering in fear. It was night in the lonesome October of my most immemorial year. It was hard by the dim lake of Arbor, in the misty mid region of Weir. It was down by the dark Tarn of Arbor in the ghoul haunted woodland of Weir.

[00:24:17] It’s really very powerful stuff, and you can see how, how effective this would be if it was well read.

[00:24:23] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes, and that’s one of my favorite points, and one of my favorite short stories is the Cascava Montelado. And so with this particular short story, it’s another famous story that is taught around the country in all the curricula still, published in 1846, and told again from a murderer’s perspective.

[00:24:44] The story, set in an unnamed Italian city at Carnival, is about a man thinking revenge on an insulting friend by burying him alive in his family’s wine cellar catacomb. Would you tell us about this short story and the events in Poe’s life that inspired him to write so chillingly about revenge?

[00:25:04] Jeffrey Meyers: The interesting thing about this The many interesting things is the little catch in the story is we’re talking about connoisseurs of sherry, so this is a very arcane and racier shape.

[00:25:15] Subject that brings you, this is like the Sherlock Holmes unusual detail. The other thing is, the narrator is saying, you like sherry? Okay, fine, you can be buried in the sherry vault, and then you really be with your sherry for all time. There’s a kind of ghoulish comedy about that. Montresor commits the perfect crime in the story.

[00:25:38] Avenging himself with impunity, here he has some genuine grudge against the victim and manages to escape detection like the telltale heart man. Until he gives himself away. He tempts Fortunato by appealing to his vanity, inciting his jealousy of a rival connoisseur who knows more about Sherry than you do, and soliciting opinion about whether or not the rare Sherry is genuine.

[00:26:02] There are furious vibrations and shrill screams. The murderer is coldly methodical. Yet also governed by tormenting conscience, just as in the telltale heart these guys give themselves away. They don’t get away with the crime. The story expressed Poe’s own desire for revenge against the enemies who had insulted and injured him.

[00:26:24] So this goes back to the quarrel with people like Longfellow. Poe is just sort of trying to strike back at all these people who had injured him. And some of the injuries were real, but some of the injuries, many of them, I think, were self inflicted.

[00:26:40] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes, yes, I totally agree with that. I would love to hear your comments about an essay that Poe wrote that I absolutely love, The Philosophy of Composition, written in 1846.

[00:26:54] He outlines his theory about how good writers write, and as you know, very few times do we really get insights into how the authors whom we admire and teach, how their writing sense works. So, he makes the assertion. That, quote, the death of a beautiful woman, unquote, is, quote, unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world, unquote.

[00:27:18] Please talk about the relationship, and you have been discussing it, but would you mind doing a deeper dive about the relationships with women that helped him draw his literary conclusion as well as what aspiring young writers can learn from this essay?

[00:27:33] Jeffrey Meyers: Death, as we’ve seen, plagued Po’s early life. The death of a woman, of a beautiful woman, has always been deeply moving in many works of art and literature.

[00:27:44] It’s just a universal theme that goes from the classical to the modern period. The idea that a beautiful woman is more precious than anything else, and that her beauty is cut off while she’s still young. And the tragedy somehow is intensified. Poe’s essay was the first one to give a detailed account of how a work of art was conceived and composed.

[00:28:09] This is a fascinating subject. I mean, you could give this to all the creative writing courses that are given all over the country. Because it will tell people just what they want to know. How do you write something that you want to write and make it really good? It influenced the contemporary fascination with the creative process in modern books.

[00:28:27] And I’ll just give one example of a book that I particularly like. Thomas Mann’s The Making of Dr. Faustus. Dr. Faustus is a late, very great novel in my opinion. I think it was published in 1947. And it’s very complicated and very difficult, so you’re absolutely delighted to get Thomas Mann writing a whole book explaining this novel, which demands explanation and cannot really be understood on the first reading.

[00:28:54] Alisha Searcy: Yes.

[00:28:55] Jeffrey Meyers: So I just want to talk a moment about Poe’s influence. which is part of the question. He’s extremely popular in France. Charles Baudelaire, who’s probably the greatest poet of the 19th century in France, translated Poe, spent years translating Poe. And he said, well, they said, why are you spending so much time translating Poe instead of writing your own poetry?

[00:29:15] He said, well, Poe is me and I am him. And I’m just really translating myself. He’s a kind of, of course, they never knew each other. The great painter Edouard Manet. Illustrated pose works, and if you remember Manet’s greatest painting, Olympia, this nude woman on a couch, and there’s a black cat. Just kind of walking out of the edge.

[00:29:37] And that’s Kim Poe, for sure. That’s the Black Cat. That’s his tribute. And another very important French poet of the 19th century, Stéphane Mallarmé, wrote poems about him. So where do we talk about his influence? He invented the horror and detective stories. He influenced writers from Nietzsche and Kafka.

[00:29:56] Ken Abokov, you’ve mentioned Abokov in the Lolita film, and D. H. Lawrence in Studies in Classic American Literature, a very, very important book, praised Poe for revealing what Lawrence called the disintegration processes of his own psyche out of modern neurotic man. So Poe portrayed love as subtle, secret, and all consuming, and founded the horror and the warning of his own doom, so that the beautiful women who were dying were a condiment extension of Poe himself.

[00:30:29] Because the women he loved died young, and he self destructively died young. In the 40s, you see these beautiful women portrayed in painting, and very often they are killing themselves, being killed, or even in the case of, say, Samson and Delilah, killing a stronger man. So, the beautiful woman attracts immediate interest, because she’s the counter perfection of the race.

[00:30:56] Jocelyn Chadwick: Excellent. Thank you. And for the final question, and a final question, Favorite passage. Your Poe biography describes him as the quote, prototypical self destructing American writer, which you’ve been discussing throughout this session. As we celebrate Halloween, would you close by talking about this giant literary figure’s mysterious death, his enduring legacy shaping Gothic horror, and what you hope teachers and students will appreciate about his tortured life?

[00:31:27] And towering genius, as you just outlined, all the different genres that he literally birthed before his death.

[00:31:34] Jeffrey Meyers: Well, Poe had a horrible death, very much like his own fictional characters. He collapsed in the gutter, was confined in a prison like room with barred windows that resembled the grim cells, chambers, vaults, and tombs of his most lurid stories.

[00:31:50] So he’s really acting out a Poe story in his own horrible life. He suffered hallucinations. He experienced a tremor of the limbs, an act of delirium, and a frantic conversation with spectral and imaginary objects on the walls. He died from excessive nervous frustration and what the contemporary doctors called the affection of the delicate membranes of the brain, so it was a kind of brain disease in some ways.

[00:32:16] I’d urge students to explore his tormented and fascinating life and to read his short stories and short poems. It’s not a long read, but a short, intense, pleasurable read for the interest and the joy that they would provide. It’s still extremely readable. Now, I have a paragraph to read if you’d like.

[00:32:38] Jocelyn Chadwick: Oh, please do.

[00:32:39] I would love to hear it.

[00:32:41] Jeffrey Meyers: This is the fall of the House of Usher. We haven’t talked about this story, but it’s one of his best.

[00:32:47] Jocelyn Chadwick: It is.

[00:32:47] Jeffrey Meyers: Yes. Okay. And my In my biography, the fall of the House of Usher synthesizes, in an extraordinarily effective way, post quintessential elements. Gloomy landscape, crumbling mansion, somber interior, sorrowful atmosphere, Taravard narrator, Neuroscenic hero, Tubercular heroine, Opium dreams, Arcane books, Premature burial, Oppressive secrets, Tempestuous weather, Supernatural elements, Return from the grave, and Apocalyptic conclusion.

[00:33:22] There, very briefly, is the essence of Poe. The mournful cadence of the opening sentence, and he’s really very good at opening sentences, which mentions the dying year, the heavy sky, the isolated narrator, and the deathly darkness that surrounds the mansion, sets the mood of the story, and foreshadows the gloom of the family.

[00:33:41] Here’s how it starts. Same paragraph. During the whole of a dull, dark, and timeless day in the autumn of the year. When the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone on horseback through a singularly dreary tract of country, and at length found myself as the shades of evening drew on within the view of the melancholy house of Usher.

[00:34:04] You can see the beginning of Frankenstein, so when the traveler knocks on this horrible mansion and, you know, is led into the house of this mad scientist, Dr. Frankenstein. So to continue the paragraph, So unnerved by the desolate setting, the narrator notices the eye like windows that personify the house, as well as the barely deceptible fissure in the wall.

[00:34:27] And the lurid tarn that reappears significantly at the end of the story. That’s another masterpiece.

[00:34:37] Jocelyn Chadwick: It is. And I want to thank you so much because I, as I have been listening to you and with your answers with Alisha as well, I have relied on several of your biographies for my own work. And so I just wanted to thank you and having just to listen to you, it’s been brilliant.

[00:35:04] Alisha Searcy: Well, Jocelyn, that was riveting, fun, spooky, scary, and all of the things.

[00:35:12] Jocelyn Chadwick: Yes, it was fun. A lot of

[00:35:16] Alisha Searcy: fun. That absolutely was. Well, before we go, I want to do our Tweet of the Week. It’s about the Pioneer Institute. A new research paper on learning loss in Massachusetts. Massachusetts students are still facing severe pandemic learning loss with the slow recovery and federal funds running out.

[00:35:35] So a new pioneer study offers sustainable policy solutions to help students regain lost ground. Make sure you check this out. I might be a little bit biased, but I know it’s really, really good. So, again, thank you, Dawson, for joining us this week. Very excited to have you. Great show. Happy Halloween.

[00:35:53] Jocelyn Chadwick: Happy Halloween, Alisha, and I’m always happy to participate with Pioneer.

[00:35:57] It’s always an adventure, so thank you. Indeed. Be sure

[00:36:00] Alisha Searcy: to join us next week. Our guest is Helen Baxendale. She’s the Chief of Staff and Vice President of Strategy at Great Hearts Academies, a rapidly expanding network of classical liberal arts charter schools. Take care.