Poe’s Great Balloon Hoax – Part 1
This article is an excerpt from Murray Ellison’s VCU MA Thesis on Poe and Nineteenth-Century Science, ©2015 Near the end of his journalistic career, Poe was likely running out of […]
Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part II
Modern Computer Solves Poe’s Last Inscrutable Puzzle Murray Ellison | April 13, 2018 Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015. Poe published several […]
Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part I
Poe’s Cryptographic Imagination – Part I Murray Ellison | February 1, 2018 Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015. Poe continued to demonstrate […]
The Poe & Science Series
Was Poe Convinced that Phrenology is a Science? Murray Ellison | Jan. 8, 2018 Excerpts from Murray’s VCU Master of Arts Thesis on Poe and Science © 2015 Poe continued […]
Poe & Science with Murray Ellison
“M.S. Found in a Bottle:” A Look at Poe’s Skepticism of 19th-Century Science, Part II Murray Ellison | August 31, 2017 By being unobserved, the unnamed narrator of Poe’s, “M.S. […]
Poe’s First Published Story about a Shipwreck Foreshadows Eureka: A Prose Poem (Part I of II)
By Murray Ellison Poe’s first important tale, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” (1833) won the Baltimore Visiter’s first prize for fiction. Poe scholar, Thomas Mabbott calls it a “masterpiece,” contending that […]
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 […]
Poe’s “Oval Portrait: and The Picture of Dorian Gray: the Artist, the Subject, and the Audience*
After reading Oscar Wilde’s, The Picture of Dorian Gray (1890), I was struck by how much his theme about the value of art resembled the one found in Poe’s 1842 […]
Conducting a Comprehensive Study of Poe’s, Eureka: A Prose Poem
First, I am going to propose what a researcher might have to do to conduct a comprehensive study of Poe’s 1848 book, Eureka: A Prose Poem. Then, I am […]
The Critic Who Burned “Fairy-Land”
Editor Nathaniel Parker Willis once burned a manuscript of Poe’s “Fairy-Land.” That seems like pretty harsh treatment from a literary editor; and we wonder why such atmospheric lines as “Dim […]
“Lines on Ale” and Other Misattributed Poems
I recently came across a curious poem in a Poe anthology entitled “To Isadore.” I was not familiar with it, but it certainly sounded like Poe’s voice throughout the stanzas, […]
Poe as America’s Unabashed Critic
Poe was notorious for being a harsh critic-he was nicknamed the “Tomahawk Man,” after all. But are you familiar with these particular criticisms? Check these out: 1) Poe once told […]