Ya know, I must really agree with you on this one. While Poe has a fingerfull of solid works--I'm especially fond of that tolling bells poem--I don't find his other works, especially his lesser known stories, very profound at all. And yes, I do realize the irony of my inability to give the exact name of "that bells poem," despite it being one of my all time favorites.

I think The Simpsons said it best in their famous Treehouse of Horror episode where they parodied The Raven--"Maybe people were easier to scare back then." And that's got to be a huge contributor. Not necessarily because the human spirit has strengthened or anything, but as unconventional or controversial media becomes the mainstream--hollywood gore is at an all time high and steadily rising--fans and readers have pretty much seen it all. And with over 150 years separating Poe's works from today... well, suddenly a guy going crazy because he believes the body he killed and buried underneath his floor still has a beating heart isn't very scary.

My roomate during my final year of college was a big horror movie buff, and he'd seen a lot of gore. Very little surprised him anymore, and the two of us used to discuss collaborating on writing the goriest movie ever--so ridiculous and over the top it'd shatter all previous "how much fake blood did they use" records, and, should it ever be produced, end up an instant flop--or maybe a cult classic. "Gorgy," would be the title, followed by the sequel, "Gorgy 2: Curse of the Bloodgasm."

Of course, blowing up zombies by shooting them with a hyperbolic rapid fire syringe cannon is easy; writing a good script for such a movie is not. And then, back to the Poe thing you mentioned before; while Poe's "oh man, people get gutted up in this story!" works were new and profound at the time, without lasting character development or an underlying reason for everybody getting killed, the shock value wears off, fast. And there's the rub in authorship; how do you think of something that's never been done before? Or even if you do borrow a story told a million times over, how do you slap a fresh coat of paint on it, market it, and make it loveable, addicting, and profitable for the industry?

 

When I initially read Poe, I was about 13 or 14. I was limited to the selection of stories available in the books at the school library, which were, of course, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Masque of Red Death, The Cask of Amontillado, The Telltale Heart, and Ligeia. There was the poetry as well, and I am sure that everyone who has graduated high school has read at least The Raven, The Bells, and Annabelle Lee. I thought Poe was probably the greatest writer that ever lived based on what I had read.

Unfortunately I happened to pick up the "unabridged complete works" of Edgar Allan Poe at a bookstore when I was in my early twenties, and all I have to say is that it sure could have used a healthy dose of abridging. His work was either really good or utter crap with little falling between the two.

I am sure that some of the horror aspects would have been much better received in his own time, but some of the other stuff he wrote is just plain silly. Silly and boring. And I don't think it would have read any differently a hundred or even a thousand years ago.

One of his stories is about a man who just walks around making sure that people see him. His goal is to always have an alibi. He never does anything that would require an alibi, just walks around making sure he has one (I believe that one is called A Man of the Crowd or something similar). What the hell was the point of that?

In another story, A Succession of Sundays(IIRC), a man won't allow his daughter to marry someone unless three Sundays fall in one week. So the clever young man gets two sea captains to sail around the world in opposite directions. When they arrive back at the starting point, on a Sunday of course, one claims that it is Saturday and the other Monday. Well if that was all it took, why not just pay a couple of bums to make the same claim?

This is all taken completely out of context though. The stories that were published were in periodicals and probably had some relevance beyond what we read today. If people of the day were confused about the international date line, for instance, the latter story would certainly been better than it is today.

That said, the book that I have seems to have every scrap of paper that Poe ever wrote on in it. There are some pages that have only a title followed by a couple of sentences -or no title and a couple of sentences. If any writer today were to fall over dead and have their possessions rifled through looking for anything that they ever wrote, I am sure there would be a lot more crap than literary gold. Maybe best for authors to burn all of the stuff they did as a teen so that it won't be subject to such scrutiny in a couple hundred years?