That poe ask reminded me! What exactly do you not like about Poe? I’m suddenly so curious – I know too many people (especially women) who like his work, and I haven’t met anyone who dislikes him yet.

sespursongles:

I just think he was a ridiculous jerk and it oozes through his writing in a much more blatant way than you’d see in other male writers. Most of whom were awful in their own way but you can sometimes ignore it while Poe always makes sure you can’t forget that he is the worst. The only writer I can think of whose ridiculous jerk-ness is similarly a constant background noise in his books is F. Scott Fitzgerald, I hate his writing. And by ridiculous jerks I don’t mean the fact that the latter was horrible to Zelda or that the former married his 13yo cousin—it’s hard to describe, Poe just has the exact kind of mediocre-yet-smug, mean-spirited, hypocritical personality that repulses me and his personality is laid bare in the way he writes.
Some examples of Poe’s ridiculous jerk-ness that I could somehow feel on a gut level while reading him:

• Called The Raven the greatest poem that ever was written and became angry with a poet friend who merely called it “uncommonly fine”, and insisted to him that it was the greatest poem that ever was written
• [Editing to add that I completely do not believe the ridiculous claims he made in The Philosophy of Composition about having written the poem “backwards” and I’m disappointed in Baudelaire for buying it; and I’m also reminded that this is the essay in which Poe said that “the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.”]
• In his review of the serial version of Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge, boasted to everyone that all of his predictions had been completely correct, and that Dickens had sent him an admiring letter about it. No such letter seems to have existed and only 1 of his 5 predictions about the novel turned out to be correct, which Poe then blamed on Dickens’ inconsistency as a writer.
  [But for all of Dickens’ flaws as a writer, it sure was a good thing that Barnaby Rudge featured a talking raven, huh? I don’t count this as plagiarism, esp. compared to what’s to come, but I thought I’d mention it.]
• Straight-up copy/pasted entire passages of John Herschel’s Treatise on Astronomy, published in 1834, in his Hans Phaall written the next year.
• Also drew heavily on other stories featuring a trip to the Moon, and instead of acknowledging these authors he drew inspiration (and sometimes entire sentences…) from, made sure to disparage their works in his appendix to Hans Phaall to highlight the fact that his was so superior and the first quality story of a trip to the moon (he called one of these works “utterly meaningless”, another “a naive specimen”, a third one “not altogether contemptible”.)
• Also lifted entire sentences of Abraham Rees’ Cyclopædia. And, I mean, I highly support writers doing scientific research before writing a science-fiction story, but if you are a self-proclaimed genius and the author of the Greatest Poem That Ever Was Written, surely you can find a way to do it without copying tel quel hundreds of words and interspersing them with “I suppose”, “my ideas on the topic are,” etc to make it look like you came up with them?
• Please don’t think Hans Phaall was an exception; in The Journal of Julius Rodman Poe similarly copy/pasted entire sentences from other books, including the journals of Lewis & Clark—while, that same year, berating Longfellow for allegedly stealing a poem by Tennyson, due to Longfellow having, like Tennyson, used the figure of a dying old man to personify the year and the passage of time. Which Poe called “bare-faced and barbarous plagiarism, too palpable to be mistaken”. He also ranted about how plagiarism harms the original author, is much worse than mere imitation, is a moral failing, is thievery, malice, censure, and “the quintessence of meanness”, and said about himself “I am but defending a set of principle which no honest man need be ashamed of defending”
• I don’t know what to say!!! Fuck you! Here’s a paragraph John Herschel wrote in 1834: “From [the barometer’s] indications we learn, that when we have ascended to the height
  of 1000 feet, we have left below us about one thirtieth of the whole
  mass of the atmosphere:—that at 10,600 feet of perpendicular elevation
  … we have ascended through about one third; and at 18,000 feet
  (which is nearly that of Cotopaxi) through one half the material, or, at
  least, the ponderable body of air incumbent on the earth’s surface.”
• Here’s a paragraph Poe “wrote” in 1835: “From indications afforded by the barometer, we find that, in ascensions from the surface of the earth we have, at the height of 1000 feet,
  left below us about one-thirtieth of the entire mass of atmospheric
  air; that at 10,600 we have ascended through nearly one-third; and
  that at 18,000 which is not far from the elevation of Cotopaxi, we
  have surmounted one-half the ponderable body of air incumbent
  upon our globe.”

Back when I was but a novice Poe hater I didn’t know any of this but as I read more stuff about him, not by him, I kept getting this satisfying feeling of “ha, I knew I hated you for a reason.” Actually that was my entire motivation for reading stuff about him. Poe fans often find flimsy excuses for him, mostly blaming everything on his alcohol problems or saying stuff like “copyright infringement is completely different from plagiarism!” but come on. Poe’s favourite hobby was writing utterly scathing literary reviews (another critic called his reviews “a tissue of coarse personal abuse”) in which he ridiculed authors, put them down, called them names (pigs, baboons, asses, stupid quacks, etc), all the while believing himself to be a paragon of virtue and moral principle even as he plagiarised from novels, scientific texts, newspaper serials, and proclaimed himself the greater writer on Earth and felt outraged when his friends didn’t agree emphatically enough. I hate him. I get that there were vicious literary feuds at the time and it’s not a crime to get back at your fellow writers by writing (sometimes hilariously) scathing reviews, and it’s not a crime to believe yourself to be an unparalleled genius and it’s not a crime to plagiarise (wait! it is) but this combination of all three gets on my last nerves.