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JOURNAL OF MODERN MYTHOLOGY AND POP CULTURE INTRODUCTION PAGE 23
Film director Alfred Hitchcock claimed that he liked making suspense films as a result of reading Poe's tales. During his lifetime Poe emerged in print, art, photography, and stage. Well after his death the adaptations continue in film, radio, TV, comic books, games, and Poe often emerges as a character in other writers' works. His cadenced poetry evokes a pervasive atmosphere, and a stark complex imagery. The Philosophy of Composition (1846) is Poe's method of composing a story or poem, and analyzes The Raven as example. His prose/poem Eureka (1848) is a theory of metaphysics and science.
Left: Caedmon record album, 1977. Right: 1963 Dell Comic Book adaptation of Roger Corman's film starring Vincent Price.
In The Poetic Principle, 1850, Poe pleads for "the poem written solely for the poem's sake." His creation of the independent detective C. Auguste Dupin makes him a great figure in detective fiction's history. Dupin was also the inspiration (along with Dr. Joseph Bell) for author Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's detective Sherlock Holmes. As Julian Symons once noted: "Dupin solves the problems presented to him by pure analytic deduction. Aristocratic, arrogant and apparently omniscient..." As one of The Big Six, Poe helped to bring myth out of the mothballs and back into the mainstream of culture in a number of forms, including: fantastic imagery, an unbridled imagination, science fiction, horror, satire, crime fiction, and the template for Sherlock Holmes, the first Super-Hero of the modern age.
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