YMMV / Edgar Allan Poe

• Genius Bonus: In "The Masque of the Red Death". While most readers can probably tell that Prince Prospero's name is a Shakespeare Shout-Out, comparatively few people probably noticed that the story's entire premise is a subtle Shakespeare Shout-Out as well: it was inspired by Caliban's line "The red plague rid you for learning me your language!" in Act I, Scene 2 of The Tempest.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: Poe has traditionally been very popular in France, where he was taken seriously as a writer much earlier than in America. What their love for American horror writers says about the French is a topic for another day. His poetry was translated by Charles Baudelaire, one of their most eminent poets at a time when he was forgotten in America. Of course, he eventually achieved widespread popularity in both countries (and elsewhere), but only after his death. Poe's international fame even reached Russia, where Fyodor Dostoevsky (who as a Great Russian hated the West, and that included America), admired his writing and praised him as a great talent.
• Harsher in Hindsight:
  • "The Masque of the Red Death" is about a particularly nasty disease that causes people to die in agony, sweating blood. This was and still is all very fine and creepy, standard for Poe. This plague's symptoms superficially match those of Ebola, discovered more than a century after Poe's death.
  • "Berenice" tells the story of a man who is about to marry his cousin, who is suffering from an unspecified incurable illness which gradually causes her to wither away and eventually die. Poe himself married his cousin one year after that story was published. A few years later she contracted tuberculosis, which was incurable by the means of the time. The illness was also called "consumption" for how it very gradually eats away at the patient, slowly causing their physical condition to decay over a long period of time, potentially years, until finally they die. Which is what happened to Poe's cousin.
• Narm: "The Oval Portrait" comes across as this if taken literally. Knowing Poe's background removes some of the incredulous aspects, as readers can easily interpret it as a fevered dream of a guilty conscience.
• Nightmare Fuel: Poe was a grandmaster at this, rivaled only by H. P. Lovecraft. He was the first writer to elevate the horror story to classic literature.
• No Such Thing as Bad Publicity: Griswold's attempt at ruining Poe's reputation after his death did absolutely nothing to Poe's popularity despite the wide acceptance of his outlandish claims. People were thrilled at the idea of reading the work of an "evil" man.
• Older Than They Think: Detective Dupin is the direct literary precursor of Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes.
• Once Original, Now Overdone: Poe almost single-handedly invented the suspense and psychological horror genres. As a consequence, a lot of his work can seem relatively tame, if you read it after reading the writers that he inspired.
• Values Dissonance: "The Murders in the Rue Morgue": It's pretty safe to say that the Sailor would not have been considered "innocent" in any modern court. Rather, the charges would simply have been changed from murder to reckless endangerment, and animal cruelty. The prosecutors could probably also find something to charge him with for failing to tell authorities that there was a dangerous animal on the loose.
  • Also, the orangutan would probably be put down.
• The Woobie: Many of his characters in his poems and stories; what makes this worse is the circumstances that inspired them, as Poe did not live a happy life.

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