American Masters

True, nervous - very very dreadfully nervous - I have been, and am, but why will you say that I am mad? The narrator grabs you right in the first sentence - something like, "Mad? You think I am mad? You know, people say I'm mad - I'm not mad." And then he's clearly mad, and yet he's telling you this story that's mad and sane at the same time. Poe is talking about the subject that makes it so universally interesting. Except for sex, you can't get anything more human and fundamental than fear. Poe wanted Americans to understand what was strange about their own culture. He saw that strangeness - the strangeness that most people didn't see. I scribble all day and read all night so long as the disease endures. I intended to put up with nothing I can put down. To be appreciated, you must be read. Most of the people that Poe loved died of consumption. It is the sad tragedy of human existence in nineteenth-century city. How melancholy an existence. Once Upon a midnight dreary while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore... in C. Auguste Dupin, Poe invents the detective that we've been living with ever since. Holmes is a rip off of Dupin and so is pretty much everybody else - so is Hercule Poirot, so is House, on television. It seems very strange that a man like Edgar Allan Poe could just vanish but that's exactly what happened for about five days. Who was the real Edgar Allan Poe? I feel like he slips further away from me the more I know about him.