I read for You:The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe...how wrong was I all along!??

Towards the end of December 2013, I went out and purchased?The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe?(published by Barns and Noble and edited by Benjamin Fisher).?I read most of the book.??If anything, I wish I did that more than twenty-seven years ago.?As a literature major, I have been a fan of neither English poetry nor American literature.?Conversely, I have been a big fan of the classical Arabic poetry, especially of its cadence and lyricism.?Also, I have always?loved to read western novels and plays more than the ones written in Arabic.?Nonetheless, American literature has always received my cold shoulder (both poetry and prose).??

As discarding the American poetry mirrors my lack of interest in any poetry written in English, my apathy towards the American literary prose was perpetrated through my subscription to the snobbish viewpoint of my professors during my undergraduate study.?They unanimously deemed the American literature worthless. The only exception they seemed to have been ready to make was to exempt T. S.?Eliot’s work from such a verdict.??

Their reasoning was that America never hosted any literary movement.?Subsequently, the European literary movements have always influenced the American literature.?To them, this defeated its originality. I now find such a persuasion no less erroneous than calling the?Middle Ages?“the Dark Ages.”?Unsurprisingly, the nexus between the two subscriptions is lucid.?They are both Eurocentric.??

Reading Poe’s tales has caused me to almost experience a paradigm shift.?Not only was I fascinated by his uncanny ability to bring me into his?“anti-transcendentalist camp”?but also to make me ready to believe in myth.?He was able to get me sold on metempsychosis while reading?Metzengerstien.??He almost swayed me to feed Arthur Conan Doyle’s?Sherlock Holms?to the fire as I reviewed?The Murders in the Rue Morgue,?and to throw?The Treasure Island?out of the window to make room for?The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym?on my bookshelf.???Although an author of a dark bent, Poe enlightened me on what I have missed under blind faith. Maybe it is not too late to like English poetry through reading his.??