EDGAR ALLAN POE Review of My Two Books By Prof. Tom Graves Editor, Blog Scarriet & Prof. Lesley University, Cambridge, MA, US 1.The Haunted Palace I have finished your book. It is an admirable study---mostly for its focused and sober affirmation of Poe's principles of "unity, limit, and intensity" within the mingling realms of the "ratiocinative, arabesque, gothic, satiric, burlesque" trailing along the liquid borders of "poetry, tale, essay," and novel amidst gloomy and glorious "rhythm, incident, and tone" by fine degrees. I did enjoy your take on Hans Pfall and the balloon hoax. Poe always slips in extra symbols in case we don't have enough! As an added bonus, you give a calm and thorough overview of Poe's critical reception in a calm manner--- mine is the over-excited approach; I sneer and yell at Poe's detractors (they were legion) whereas you take a more measured position which is fitting for scholarship. Winters and
SHADOW SONNETS IN MEMORY OF KEATS I am compiling a BOOK OF SONNETS in all its timeless glory and variety right from earliest days in Italy to its present day spread across the globe. Poets have loved it, written it, often in sequences, quarreled with it in their love, flirted with it teasingly, shunned it, played with its form and shape - yet always succumbed to its mystical charm. I, myself, a drop in that vast ocean of lyricism, have tried to dabble with its traditional form, preferring the mould that Shakespeare chose for his 'Dark Lady', and experimented by stealing the opening lines of some of the sweetest of them and creating my own form of 'Shadow Sonnets' - or often 'Echo Sonnets', in which only the idea and some phrases, and not the opening lines are taken. . The sonnet is the most feminine of poetic forms with all the titillating traits of just the right measure of ornamentation, metrical suppleness and alluring harmony - with necessary curves, rise