/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.654339]

hey /lit/ i need a quick 5 paragraph paper on Poe like a biography of him and his works please and thanks in advanced

[Anonymous No.654343]

Sorry I don't have anything like that and neither does anyone else

[Anonymous No.654348]

Just go to fucking Yahoo Answers and get the fuck out of here.

[Anonymous No.654349]

lolno

[Anonymous No.654352]

Poe was a creepy old man who did the tinkly winkly to his 13 year old cousin.

[Anonymous No.654353]

>>654352
That's your thesis, by the way.

[Anonymous No.654356]

"Edgar Allan Poe" was a pseudonym used by Dr Thomas Holley Chivers, a medical doctor and eccentric in the antebellum American south. Scholars have argued over whether or not "Edgar Allan Poe" was indeed a real person, or if perhaps---as suggested in "Poe's" short story "William Wilson"---the relationship between Dr Chivers and Mr Poe was that of an actual haunting doppelganger. Professor S Foster Damon of Brown University takes the opinion in his lengthy monograph entitled "Thomas Holley Chivers, Friend of Poe" that Poe actually did exist, and that the relationship between Poe and Chivers was cordial and amiable. But strong dissent has been registered by more recent critics, including (most notably) Charles X Kinbote of Miskatonic University.

[Anonymous No.654362]

gtfo of /lit/

[Anonymous No.654368]

Kinbote's theory is that "Poe" was a pseudonym used by Chivers, and that the relationship between the poetry published under the name of "Poe" and the poetry published by Chivers under his own name, represents what Harold Bloom in The Western Canon categorizes as the "heteronymy" of the Portuguese poet and polymath Fernando Pessoa. In other words, the poet adopts a sort of mask or separate persona in order to compose work in a different style. Yet as Kinbote points out, this hardly compares to the realtionship betwee "Poe"---the author of "Annabel Lee"---and Chivers, the author of "Rosalie Lee". All that can be said, in Kinbote's view, is that "Rosalie Lee" was published earlier than "Annabel Lee", and that charges of plagiarism on the part of "Poe" are pointless if one considers "Annabel Lee" to be the better poem, or perhaps suggests Chivers's authorship of "Annabel Lee", on the basis that he began his own career as being so tone deaf as to not notice that "Rosalie Lee" is difficult to pronounce and sounds more silly than "Annabel Lee".

[Anonymous No.654381]

The simple fact is that "Edgar Allan Poe" has been regarded as a great poet by history, whereas Dr Thomas Holley Chivers---if he is remembered at all---is remembered as an inept poetaster, devoid of talent. When the British novelist Graham Greene was writing the screenplay for "The Third Man" and had to come up with a name for a mediocre writer, he immediately settled upon "Holley" for the name of the character played by Joseph Cotten in the film, and Greene admits in the published version of the screenplay that he deliberately selected the name as homage to Dr Thomas Holley Chivers. But was Thomas Holley Chivers merely, as S Foster Damon suggests, "Friend to Poe"? Or is he---as Charles X Kinbote suggests in the forthcoming "The Man Who Was Poe" (2011: Miskatonic University Press)---really the person who perpetrated the "Poe hoax" so successfully that scholars have for over a century assumed that Edgar Allan Poe actually existed? It has also been suggested that for somebody to write Poe-try and be named Poe is so obviously either a case of "nomen est omen" or else so clearly a signpost to an elaborate hoax perpetrated upon the broad but ill-educated readership in America's 19th century that Kinbote's theory must be taken seriously.

[Anonymous No.654393]

>>654356
>>654368
>>654381
Kinbote is a faggot who needs to be deported back to Zembla.

[Anonymous No.654406]

Kinbote posits an elaborate hoax in which an incest-obsessed alcoholic named "Edgar Allan Poe" was discovered by Dr Chivers and refashioned as a "front man" for the publication of lurid practical jokes such as "Eureka", which is published under the name of "Poe" and purports to be a theory of literature. It is, to anyone who has read it, clearly some kind of practical joke. Kinbote adduces the contemporary response of the Boston poet James Russell Lowell, who described "Poe" in verse as follows:

Or Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Two-fifths of him genius, and three-fifths sheer fudge.

Lowell is right to remark that the success of "The Raven" hinged upon the earlier success of a novel by Charles Dickens (Barnaby Rudge) in which the eponymous protagonist is seldom seen without a pet raven perched on his shoulder. But what are we to make of Lowell's reference to "fudge"? Prof Charles X Kinbote makes the convincing assertion that this is a coded reference to "fudge-packing", in other words, the potentially subversive or unspeakable praxis of sodomitical intercourse that may or may not have taken place between Thomas Holley Chivers and Poe himself. Kinbote recalls that, under a Freudian paradigm, both incest and homosexuality depend upon an overdetermination of likeness in the choice of erotic object, and therefore the rumours that Poe married his prepubescent cousin are most likely a smokescreen to disguise the fact that Poe had ghey sex done to him by Dr Thomas Holley Chivers.

[Anonymous No.654433]

In conclusion, Edgar Allan Poe was either an American poet, or a figment of the imagination of Thomas Holley Chivers, but was nonetheless declared by the French poet Baudelaire to be the greatest poet of the 19th century. This says a lot about Baudelaire but not very much about Poe, although in my opinion--if not in the opinion of either S Foster Damon of Brown University or in the opinion of Charles X Kinbote of Miskatonic University---this reveals quite a bit about how easy it is to fool French intellectuals. If Poe had not existed, one could say, Baudelaire would have had to invent him. But if Poe did actually exist, then I would agree with Charles X Kinbote that he probably was nothing more than a pseudonym for Dr Thomas Holley Chivers, quite possibly conducted under the guise of a Freemasonic conspiracy which poisoned President Zachary Taylor and installed Millard Fillmore in the White House, so that the so-called "Washington Monument" could be erected as an unholy obelisk to Priapus, the insane love god of the thousand raging raging boners.

[Storm Petrel !HQmqe0QeaQ No.654435]

Holy shit, it's...

it's like flaming with Pale Fire...

You, Pale Flamer, are my hero.

[Anonymous No.654437]

What this has to do with Poe is indeed anyone's guess, but this certainly sounds to me like the kind of essay that gets written by people who teach in American universities. As Poe himself said--or maybe it was Chivers--in "The Poet's Vocation":

In the music of the morns
Blown through the Conchimarian horns,
Down the dark vistas of the reboantic Norns,
To the Genius of Eternity
Crying, “Come to me! Come to me!”

I could not express this sentiment better myself, although I would gladly refer back to Chivers' own critical assessment (found in his "Preface" to "Eonchs of Ruby") that "as the diamond is the crystalline Revelator of the achromatic white light of Heaven, so is a perfect poem the crystalline revelation of the Divine Idea."

Seeing as Poe quotes this same sentiment with evident approval in "Eureka", I can find no reason whatsoever to disagree with it, or with him, or even with Professor Charles X Kinbote of Miskatonic University, who is my secret internet boyfriend.

The End.

[Anonymous No.654452]

>>You, Pale Flamer, are my hero.

You have no idea how flattered I am by that name. I think I'll start using it.

[Anonymous No.654565]

so OP are u gonna turn in this quick 5 paragraph paper? seems pretty intelligent