Wednesday, February 2, 2022

Edgar Allan Poe & the Mask of the 20th Century

David Gosselin at The Imaginative Conservative.

"Living in a young nation which was still in the process of forging its identity as a sovereign nation, Poe recognized the revolution was not over: America still needed its own classical culture, as that of every great civilization. ...

"Poe understood the importance of having a culture capable of expressing the concept of the Beautiful and True; he knew that if a population was not in a disposition to receive beautiful and impassioned conceptions in the realms of the arts, they could never pursue them in the real world."

See Poe, "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Masque of the Red Death", Gateway to the Great Books (10 Vol., 1963) volume 2.

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