One crisp Sunday afternoon in October 1987, tour guide Tom Rowe led a group of students across the Poe Museum’s garden to show them the treasure sitting on the pedestal in the Poe Shrine. Pointing toward the shadow recesses of the brick pergola, he announced, “And here’s the bust of Poe made by Edmond T. Quinn.”
Only after a couple kids asked, “What bust?” did Tom take a second look at the empty pedestal. The Poe Museum’s priceless sculpture was missing.
Sculpted in 1908 by Edmond Thomas Quinn (1868-1929), the white plaster bust was the original model for a bronze copy unveiled in New York ...
The Poe Museum Blog
Madwomen in Nineteenth-Century Literature
Nineteenth-Century Gothic Literature has often used themes of women held back or locked up in rooms and attics while attempting to make valiant stands and statements in support of their rights to artistic and intellectual expression, and social equality. These ideas are thoroughly supported and explored in Sandra Gilbert and Susan Gubar’s book, The Madwoman in the Attic (Yale University P, 1979), as well as in many other literary discussions of fictional works written during this period. Mary Shelly’s, Frankenstein, was one of the first examples in literature expressing this theme. In 1818, ...
Private Perry is Mr. Poe
John Limon argues that Poe was one of the first American writers who was important both to the fields of literature and science because he engaged in literary mediation, or “negotiation with science.” Limon notes that Poe’s works provide abundant examples that he anticipated forecasted several future developments in technology, e.g., exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, and the forensic sciences. He wrote about these technical subjects in imaginative ways that captured the public’s interest and concludes that lay writers like ...
The Imp of the Poeverse
Which story does Poe scholar Thomas Ollive Mabbott deem as one of Poe's "great stories, although not one of the most popular?" There may be many obscure stories coming to mind; however, this particular story falls under the category of Horror and may give us insight into the development of the psychological thriller sub-genre, as well as allow us to further study the psychology of Poe's mind, if even briefly.
In July of 1845, Poe's horrific tale, "The Imp of the Perverse," was published in Graham's Magazine. According to American critic Benjamin De Casseres, "We've all got that 'imp' in ...