I have been a reader of Edgar Allan Poe's works for about five years now(maybe less?) and I absolutely love them. Although I have read most of his well known works and strayed away from the lesser known ones, I would still like to believe that I love him as equally as other Poe lovers do. My friends can attest to this as I have read The Tell Tale Heart to them when I am bored and want an audience.
The first time I had a taste of Poe's works was when I was in seventh grade, I was twelve. A neighboring high school was putting on a halloween production of well known short stories that were acted out. The first one that was shown was The Tell Tale Heart and to be honest, it scared the living daylights out of me because they pretended to dismember someone. After that play we went back to school and my english teacher made us read The Tell Tale Heart itself and I liked it much better.
Wednesday evening I had the opportunity to go to the Chillicothe Library and watch a one man play called The Shadow of the Raven, put on by professional actor Duffy Hudson. He was a really cool guy to say in the least (I even got his autograph!).
This play was portrayed as the last few days of Edgar Allan Poe's life. Duffy acted it out brilliantly. He came in, disheveled and acting as if he was mentally unstable, which is what Poe may have been like in the last few days of his life.
The play completely en-captured me into the life of Poe and I learned some things that I had not known before I had seen this play. Poe was most likely an alcoholic but he never took any kind of drugs except for once after the death of his wife Virginia, who died of consumption. He also may have died from a large brain tumor. We know this now because when his corpse was exhumed twenty-five years after his death, the man doing the exhuming thought he found a rock or a clump of mud in Poe's skull. He shook it around trying to dislodge it and it was too big to come out. They suspect that it indeed was a tumor. The man who put this play on, Duffy Hudson(look him up on google, he is awesome!), was very learned in Poe knowledge and he was a fountain of it. His renditions of The Raven, The Tell Tale Heart, and Annabel Lee(which happens to be one of my favorite poems by Poe) were exactly how I imagined Edgar Allan Poe to have recited them in front of his audiences when he first published The Raven.
Duffy told us that Edgar was most likely bipolar because of his high-highs and low-lows. Because of this and how he grew up he was able to write how he did in which my mom said,"I should start treating you like crap." in which I responded to her,"Things like that don't happen twice mother." He also told us that Poe was a fiery person with an incredible personality. If I had known Edgar Allan Poe, I think I would have been great friends with him. People with fiery personalities tend to be good friends, you can ask any theater person.
That is all I have to say about Edgar Allan Poe until around Halloween but I will post about other things before then.
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