American Icons: The tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Studio 360 with Kurt Andersen

PRX

Arts

4.6 • 675 Ratings

🗓️ 31 October 2019

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Edgar Allan Poe’s stories are so familiar they’ve become part of our cultural wallpaper. A raven croaking “nevermore?” An enemy bricked up in a cellar? A heart beating under the floorboards? These images are the stuff of our collective nightmares, but Poe dreamed them all up first. For better and worse, Poe’s themes and obsessions continue to crop up throughout pop culture. He showed us the dark side of the American dream, and that’s something we can’t unsee.

American Icons is made possible by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities.

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Transcript

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0:00.0	From PRX.
0:07.0	Villains dissembled no more.
0:09.5	How old were you when you first read Edgar Allan Poe?
0:12.4	Twelve-year-old's reading.
0:13.9	He's, you know, slicing the head off and bearing it in a wall.
0:17.6	What do we really know about who he was and how he died? There's the rabies theory.
0:23.4	There's the alcohol theory. I like to say that Poe's biography starts with his death, not with his
0:29.5	birth. And why does his legend just keep growing? Suddenly there comes Poe like a breath of fetid air.
0:36.6	It tells us dark things about our own souls.
0:39.3	Blowing from some dark European cellar.
0:42.7	He is appealing through the monster inside of us.
0:45.3	It's like the asterix on the American dream.
0:47.6	The monster in us responds.
0:49.4	And Poe is becoming the Santa Claus of Halloween.
0:52.5	Today on Studio 360's American icons,
0:55.1	I admit the deed, tear up the blanks.
0:58.2	The tales of Edgar Allan Poe.
1:00.3	It is the beating of his hideous heart.
1:08.9	This is Studio 360.
1:10.8	I'm Kurt Aniston, and I'm sitting on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
1:13.8	This first level of garden.
1:15.1	This is Thomas Jefferson's vegetable garden.
	...

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