The authors of cosmic creepiness mentioned in the previous piece, “Cosmic Mojo Part 1”, were English, for Lovecraft was an anglophile of the first order. That being said, though, his idol was not a Brit but the New Englander, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). In his long essay, The Supernatural Horror in Literature, HPL writes of Poe: “In the 1830s occurred a literary dawn directly affecting, not only the history of the weird tale, but that of short fiction as a whole and indirectly moulding the trends and fortunes of a great, European æsthetic school. It is our good fortune as Americans to be able to claim that dawn as our own, for it came in the person of our most illustrious and unfortunate fellow-countryman, Edgar Allan Poe. Poe’s spectres thus acquired a convincing malignity possessed by none of their predecessors and established a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror. The impersonal and artistic intent, moreover, was aided by a scientific attitude not often found before, whereby Poe studied the human mind rather than the usages of Gothic fiction and worked with an analytical knowledge of terror’s true sources, which doubled the force of his narratives and emancipated him from all the absurdities inherent in merely-conventional shudder-coining.”
Read the rest:
