Understanding Edgar Allan Poe

Many of Edgar Allan Poe’s characters go through extreme, exhilarating, horrific experiences, and report on them. But how can we trust such reports, as under those circumstances they must have gone out of their minds? Through an all-encompassing, minute analysis of the entirety of Poe’s work, both his fiction and his nonfiction, this book argues that descending into a gigantic whirlpool, or being tormented by the Inquisition or by bloodthirsty natives, are only indications of what it takes to encounter others in everyday life. To understand them, we must in all cases go out of our minds, enter theirs, and sense the horror of what it would be to be lost there. And then, for as long as we are able, stay on the threshold between our world and theirs, suspended, receiving a presage, a summons, from a mysterious destiny that will have no resolution.