The unique subject matter required an inversion of his usual approach. In his final major work, Eureka – A Prose Poem (1848), he took his fascination with nature beyond the human world and crafted a chronicle of the Universe itself. Even among that diversity, though, one piece stands out. His amateur interest in science lends his tales a measure of credibility that makes them all the more horrific.ĭespite his relatively brief life, from 1809 to 1849, Poe applied his style to an astounding range of genres, from supernatural horror to detective stories. As if he were a journalist reporting a maritime calamity, Poe describes each stage of the devastation in riveting detail. In the short story ‘A Descent into the Maelström’, for instance, a sea voyage turns into sheer mayhem when a fierce vortex hurls the vessel toward its briny doom, shattering it into splinters. He was particularly captivated by the natural world’s ghastly capacity for destruction. Nature’s power enthralled the American writer Edgar Allan Poe, and galvanised some of his most memorable works. – From ‘A Descent into the Maelström’ (1841) by Edgar Allan Poe I must have been delirious – for I even sought amusement in speculating upon the relative velocities of their several descents toward the foam below. Looking about me upon the wide waste of liquid ebony on which we were thus borne … I now began to watch, with a strange interest, the numerous things that floated in our company.
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