Edgar Allan Poe’s Birthday: I Hated the Poems and Loved the Movie

The Man Who Built Two Genres

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, and he’s among the most influential writers America ever produced. He wrote poetry, short stories, and criticism, and he built two whole genres on his own.

He’s the father of the modern detective story. His character C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant amateur who solves crimes by pure reasoning, came decades before Sherlock Holmes and gave Arthur Conan Doyle the entire template. Every detective who reasons their way to the truth is Dupin’s descendant. The Mystery Writers of America call their top award the Edgar, after him. He also helped invent modern horror as we know it, the psychological kind, where the terror comes from inside a narrator’s cracking mind.

The Tell-Tale Heart, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, and of course the poem The Raven, with its “nevermore,” are burned into the culture two centuries later.

His own life was as dark as his work. Orphaned young, often broke, he was one of the first Americans to try to make a living purely by writing.

That nearly killed him with poverty. He died in Baltimore in 1849 at just 40, under circumstances still argued about today. He was, by any measure, a giant.

Watch: Tragic Life of Edgar Allan Poe | Full Documentary | Biography, Biography

And I Could Not Stand Him

I met Poe the way most American kids do, in grade school, where a teacher handed us his poems and told us to read them. And I didn’t like any of it. Not the poetry, not the stories, not one bit of it. It left me cold.

I’ve thought about why, and I think the delivery was to blame.

There may be no faster way to make a kid resent a writer than to assign that writer in school. You strip out all the discovery and the fun, you turn art into homework, you make a thirteen-year-old dissect “The Raven” for a grade, and you pretty much guarantee a chunk of the class walks away hating it. That was me. For years, Edgar Allan Poe was just the boring stuff they made me read.

I’m telling you this because it matters for how we think about reading and writing. The way you first meet a writer shapes everything. Meet them through a worksheet and a quiz, and you may never go back. The work can be brilliant and you’ll still resent it, because the brilliance never got a chance to reach you. That matters for anyone trying to bring people to books.

Then a Movie Got Me

So how did Poe finally land for me. Through a gloriously campy horror movie.

The film is The Raven, the 1963 version directed by Roger Corman, and it’s barely Poe at all.

It takes his famous poem and spins it into a comedy horror romp about three rival sorcerers. The cast is the real magic. It stars Vincent Price, Peter Lorre, and Boris Karloff, three legends of classic horror, all clearly having a blast. And it has a very young Jack Nicholson in one of his early roles, playing Peter Lorre’s son, long before he was a household name.

It hooked me. I’ve probably watched it a dozen times. It’s an awesome movie, funny and gothic and goofy and packed with old pros chewing the scenery, and I love every minute of it. I see the irony. I couldn’t get through Poe’s poem in school, but I’ll happily watch a campy film built on top of that poem over and over for the rest of my life.

What This Says About Meeting Writers

There’s a real lesson buried in my contradiction, and it applies to more people than me.

An adaptation can be the doorway, even when the original leaves you cold.

The movie didn’t make me love Poe’s poetry. But it made me understand why Poe mattered, why his images and his mood and his characters were strong enough that filmmakers were still building on them more than a century later. You don’t always come to a great writer through their own pages. Sometimes you arrive sideways, through a movie or a comic or a song that borrowed from them, and that side door is just as valid as the front.

That’s why I never sneer at people who discover classics through pop culture.

The kid who finds Poe through a horror movie, or Dracula through a video game, or Sherlock Holmes through Robert Downey Jr., has found a real door in. It might lead them back to the source eventually. It might not. Either way, the writer’s ideas got into them. Influence doesn’t care which door you used.

Poe Never Left the Screen

The funny thing is that my side door into Poe was a well-worn path. Filmmakers have been raiding his work for over a century, because his stories are pure mood and his images are unforgettable, and that’s what a camera wants.

That 1963 Raven was the fifth of eight Poe-themed movies Roger Corman made in the early 1960s, most of them starring Vincent Price, a whole little factory turning Poe’s tales into gothic films. The Fall of the House of Usher, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of the Red Death, all of it Corman and Price mining the same vein. And it never stopped. Poe’s fingerprints are on horror movies, episodes of television, songs, comics, and cartoons right up to today.

The Baltimore Ravens, an entire NFL team, are named after his poem.

That’s the mark of a writer whose ideas outran his own pages.

You can dislike the assigned poems, like I did, and still be surrounded your whole life by things that exist because Poe wrote first. The atmosphere he invented became part of the air. Most of us breathed it in long before we ever sat down with the original. That’s its own kind of immortality.

What can writers learn from Edgar Allan Poe?

For all that I bounced off him personally, Poe is worth studying, and the lessons are real.

The first is that one good idea, executed perfectly, can build an entire genre. Poe didn’t write hundreds of detective stories.

He wrote a handful, did them brilliantly, and that was enough to father a form that’s produced thousands of books and still dominates television. You don’t need volume. You need to crack something open first and do it well.

The second is mood. Nobody builds dread like Poe. He understood that horror isn’t about what jumps out at you, it’s about the slow tightening of atmosphere, the narrator you can’t trust, the sense that something is wrong before anything happens. That control of mood is a skill worth studying line by line, even by a writer like me who couldn’t stand the poems at thirteen.

So on January 19, read some Poe if you love him. Or, like me, put on a ridiculous old horror movie built from his bones and enjoy it without guilt. Both count. The man’s work is strong enough to reach you either way, two hundred years on. Quoth the raven, and so on.

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