Read Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe (Barnes & Noble Classics Series) for Free Online Page A

competition with cash prizes for the best poem and tale. Poe’s tale “MS. Found in a Bottle” and his poem “The Coliseum” were ranked the winners until the evaluators discovered that both were written by the same person. They decided that the poetry prize would go elsewhere, although Poe asked that they give the other writer the money for the poem but announce that both of his own works had originally been named first’s. Poe’s wish was ignored, the poetry prize going to “Song of the Winds,” by John Hill Hewitt, editor of the Visiter, leaving Poe outraged. The prize selections appeared on October 19, 1833, and Poe’s poem on October 26. Those publications, which were reprinted elsewhere in the United States, brought the young writer his first literary recognition.
    Looming, too, was another experimental venture of Poe‘s, generally known as “Tales of the Folio Club,” a book of interlocking frame narratives. 4 In this scheme, never actualized, a group of writers, the Folio Club, meet monthly for literary reading and critiques. Preceding the readings are substantial suppers accompanied by plenty of alcohol. After each member reads his original “brief prose tale” (a hit at some best-selling author’s typical theme and form), critiques follow. Poe once wrote that these critical interchanges were meant to enliven comedy in the project: Voiced by pretentious would-be authors, each tale is delivered by a first-person narrator, a caricature of an actual popular author represented. Because the author-reader of the worst tale hosts the next meeting, and because one of the group has his works successively targeted, someone in the group eventually becomes enraged, flees to a publisher with the manuscripts, and hurries them into print as an expose, for revenge.
    What doubtless enlivened the overall scheme was that the club members, from the effects of either eating or/and drinking too much, would have articulated corresponding bizarre situations and repetitious language patterns within their tales, imparting zesty humor to those fictions, such mirth given point by the critiques. Had “Tales of the Folio Club” been published, a far different conception of Poe might have emerged early in his career—with what future we may only conjecture. Publishers rejected his manuscript, however, on grounds that the content was far too sophisticated for average readers and sales would not warrant the financial risk. Poe eventually dismantled the collection, brought out individual stories in periodicals, and thereby paved the way for readers’ disagreements that continue to be dynamic even today.
    From the few manuscript leaves that survive, some ideas about the “Folio Club” are plausible. A portion forming a prologue—to an eleven-story version—lists and tersely characterizes the club members. For example, if in its original Saturday Courier form “Metzengerstein,” read by Mr. Horrible Dictu, existed as a “straight” tale of Gothic or “German” sensationalism that, revised for the Folio Club, was improved but remained chiefly serious in import (or indeed if it were read as a Gothic extravaganza), and with its likely position as sixth among Folio Club tales, it might have drawn varied responses from overfed, drunken listeners. First, if it was serious but well done, it might have gained merely a nod from the majority as familiar if unexceptional “German” fiction. Of course, any art in the tale would have eluded inebriated, drowsy listeners. Even if it were intended as a parody of “Germanism,” many could no longer have discerned that possibility. The repetitive phrases and words, the overall incoherence of young Frederick Metzengerstein, the treacherous protagonist, the demonic horse, the suspense and melodrama that surround impending tragedy—all these features might dovetail with an intoxicated reader reading to an intoxicated audience. Nonetheless, in this early tale we find Poe mingling human and