Untitled - Sexey's School Moodle

according to Johnson, “discolored by passion, or deformed by wickedness” and for not
“teach[ing] the means of avoiding snares which are laid by Treachery for Innocence…”
(“Rambler” 464). In addition, his contemporaries considered much of his writing, and
particularly his short fiction, as primitive, vulgar, and subliterary. Consequently, his
work was widely marginalized and he was deeply disliked by many of fellow countrymen
such as T.S. Eliot, who considered his intellect to be that of “a highly gifted young man
before puberty” (qtd. in Carlson 212). On the other hand, Victorian writers such as Dante
Gabriel Rossetti, Algernon Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson claimed they were
eternally indebted to him while French writers and critics such as Charles Baudelaire and
Stéphane Mallarmé revered his theories of composition and his visionary style, aspects of
Poe’s writing that some of their American counterparts apparently either deeply rejected
or never fully understood. Why the work—and life—of the American poète maudit has
seduced so many French critics and writers may remain obscure to some, yet the praise
Baudelaire reserved for Poe should not come as a surprise if one acknowledges that the
former not only considered the latter to be like him a victim of bourgeois ideals but also
that Poe’s work embodied some of Baudelaire’s central aesthetic concepts—not
surprisingly so, Baudelaire’s collection of poems, Les Fleurs du mal, was put to trial for
being immoral and sexually offensive. More precisely, the French symbolist believed
that the texts of the American writer adequately illustrated the aesthetic notion of “Art as
artifice” and that Beauty was the product of Art, not nature or moral values—elements
which were singularly absent from his work. Consequently, this absence of morality
repelled the majority of Poe’s puritan compatriots and contemporaries. In sum, it is in
particular Poe’s “transgressive” tendency of privileging the poetic “effect,” the aesthetic
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