The current resident in FEARnet's Guest House -- award-winning horror writer, editor and critic Darrell Schweitzer -- is helping us celebrate the bicentennial year of Edgar Allan Poe with an in-depth look at the legendary scribe's influence on modern horror...

Was Edgar Allan Poe somehow an early Goth, someone who embraced the darkness of the grave and of death with something like a perverse relish? Was he somebody who, in his heart of hearts, like the Goth caricatures on South Park, enjoyed being miserable, as an act of rebellion against a society that wouldn't or couldn't accept him?

No, it's not that simple.

At this point it may be pedantic, but perhaps also useful, to explain what the term "Goth" actually means. The original Goths – my ancestors, and yours if you are of northwestern European origin – were a bunch of hairy, skin-clad Germanic barbarians who famously sacked Rome in the early 5th century. Admittedly, they were not as badly-behaved as their even more barbaric brethren the Vandals – I mean, nobody is accused of Visigothizing anything these days – but in no time at all "Gothic" came to be synonymous with "barbaric." Medieval architecture – Gothic cathedrals – had nothing to do with Goths, who were long since assimilated into the general population before the first stone of Notre Dame was laid. It was only during the Enlightenment, in the 18th century, when people began to look back on the Middle Ages as wild and uncivilized, that this sort of building, huge and gloomy and covered with gargoyles, came to be called "Gothic."

But the Enlightenment was ultimately too, too polite and witty and rational. It denied the deeper emotions, until ultimately a revolt took place, sparked off in 1765 by Horace Walpole's very spooky and over-the-top novel, The Castle of Otranto, which began what was called -- perhaps because such stories tended to be set a few centuries in the past, in the barbaric Middle Ages rather than in supposedly enlightened modernity -- the Gothic Novel. Gothic novels featured haunted castles, heroines in peril, supernatural menaces (sometimes disappointingly explained away at the end), and, quite significantly, the common figure of the brooding, mysterious, morally ambiguous hero-villain. Gothics were the thrillers and splatter-fiction of their era, most especially M.G. Lewis's notorious The Monk (1796), which is about a clergyman who sells his soul to the Devil and has all manner of outrageous and depraved adventures before coming to a gory end. On a somewhat higher plane was Charles Maturin's Melmoth the Wanderer  (1820), which also involves a deal with the Devil, and a brilliant, powerful, doomed hero who must wander for centuries, unable to escape his curse unless he can find someone else willing to be damned in his stead.

The Gothic novel flourished during the Romantic era, the time of the Byronic hero, when fiction, poetry, painting, and music all gave themselves over to often extreme emotions. It was, in the real world, a terrible time, the period of the French Revolution and the wars of Napoleon, when young people were all too likely to just come to understand what life had to offer, then find themselves staring down the mouth of a cannon on a battlefield somewhere.

Doom and gloom, particularly as experienced by the young, were all the rage. One of the most popular books of the period was Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, the title of which says all.

What has this got to do with Poe? I have not digressed. The Romantic era and the Gothic novel, complete with all that fashionable doom and melancholy, were happening about the time Poe was born. Romantic and Gothic literature were what he grew up on, and what became, inevitably, his models, for all he seemed to reject the more obvious manifestations, as when he famously wrote that "Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul." (As much of this stuff was coming from Germany as from England.) But what we see in Poe is that the wild, Gothic effects were turning inward and becoming symbolic. Terror of the soul indeed. "The Fall of the House of Usher," for instance, has all the classic Gothic trappings, from gloomy and crumbling manse to the hero's sister buried alive in the cellar, and the house itself does come crashing down in the end, but ultimately this is the story of the collapse of a mind rather than of architecture.

There is great sadness in Poe's terror. He is as much the poet and storyteller of mournful sorrow as of dread. He remarked that the most poetical subject you can write about is the death of a beautiful woman. In his essay, "The Philosophy of Composition," which is pretty much of a "How I Wrote ‘The Raven'" article, designed to wring a little extra cash out of the poem that suddenly made him famous, he explains how he consciously chose an effect, and then played upon the emotions with very great deliberation, almost as if applying a mathematical formula.

For all this and other such writings may provide brilliant analysis of how a poem or story works, ultimately Poe's stance is hard to believe. He is denying his own emotions, claiming that everything is just a studied effect, when what he was really doing – and why we still read him today – was pouring his heart out.

The crucial element which forms Poe's writings is not his erudition, or his ear for language, but, ultimately, his sorrow. Likewise, what mattered the most in his life was not how clever he could make people think he was, but that those he loved kept dying on him, most especially his exquisite, china doll of a wife, his cousin Virginia, whom he married when she was thirteen. He worshipped  her, but that is very likely all he ever got to do, because she died slowly and painfully of tuberculosis by the time she was twenty-five. It is alleged that Poe damaged his health sneaking out to her grave on cold winter nights.

We think of stories like "Berenice" and "Eleanora," which are about obsessed lovers who meet, marry, and lose mysterious women. We think of the famous poem "Annabel Lee," which could readily be about Edgar and Virginia. The lovers are very young ("She was a child, and I was a child"), but, because they are perfectly happy for a moment, they incur the envy of angels:

Yes! That was the reason (as all men know
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
And killing my Annabel Lee.

But our hero doesn't give up, even if she is dead:

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride
In her sepulcher there by the sea –
In her tomb by the side of the sea.

Poe's writings about death, loss, and sorrow come across with real conviction. This is not fashionable affectation or mere mathematics. He was writing what he truly saw and felt, even if he himself sometimes denied it. He stared death in the face. He did not flinch. He reported back many things that were hideous, and sometimes he found a kind of beauty too, though a beauty that was terribly, terribly sad.

DARRELL SCHWEITZER is a writer of novels and short stories, many of them quite horrific. You can find many of his books available from Wildside Press. He is an expert in H.P. Lovecraft, and once gave a reading while standing on Edgar Allan Poe's grave at midnight. He is a former editor-in-chief of Weird Tales magazine, for which he receved the World Fantasy Award. His poetry is currently nominated for the 2009 Bram Stoker Award.