Poe on religion.

[inbetween]

Raven...



At best, Poe was ambivalent toward religion itself but at times would invoke the name of God when it provided some desired effect he wished to convey.


Regards,

(I didn't read the other long answer - too lazy)
but the above is what I thought... poe uses religious images so many times and I could never quite make out if he really belived in it or just used it as pictures just the way you use a sertain colour or technique when painting a picture to produce a certain impression...
so now I think that is exactly what he did (most of the times)

(thx for this topic, otherwise I would have started up one myselve just about this question.. )

[sweetcaroline]

Hi, friends, I thought I would offer my two cents worth to this conversation. There is a blog post compiled of quotes that Poe misquoted posted on the Edgar Allan Poe (Richmond) Museum's blog post page, entitled "Did Poe Really Say That?" The quote mentioned is found in this list, and many Poe scholars do not believe that Poe quoted this. In fact, the author mentioned for possibly starting this misquote has been challenged multiple times, therefore this quote cannot be trusted. I saw somewhere in this forum that Poe's stories were not autobiographical, or at least that is what my eye may have correctly or incorrectly caught. There is some truth to this; however, many of his stories can offer literary insight to the culture of his time, and it is safe to say that perhaps some of his works may be speculated for being autobiographical. No, I'm not talking about the "Pit and the Pendulum," but the "Masque of the Red Death" may have some merit to it as being influenced by his wife Virginia's illness, for example. The Bubonic plague and TB seem to go hand-in-hand here, although this is my mere opinion. For further reading about Poe and religion, the sole topic of this conversation, I suggest you read the article entitled "Edgar Allan Poe and Religion" on the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore's website.

[Iain Sparrow]

I don't know much about Poe's relationship with religion, but reading his work and the way he treats morality and mortality, I imagine he was well grounded in conventional christianity. He was certainly not an atheist, nor did he use references to good and evil, Heaven and Hell, or God and Satan simply as a literary device. I should add that during Poe's lifetime their was great interest in occultism/spiritualism, and a moving away from puritanism... this seems to me to be very much apart of his writing.

[RufusWGriswold]

The source of the quote in the OP is here and is questionable at best:

https://books.google.com/books?id=_c...friend&f=false

[RufusWGriswold]

The curator of the wonderful "World of Poe" blog has this to say on the subject:

"A widely-circulated quote attributed to him, that "all religion is simply evolved out of chicanery, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry," is apocryphal. It originated from a justifiably obscure 1901 biography by a noisy crackpot named John Alexander Joyce, which is full of outlandish and clearly fictional statements. (Of especial note is his chapter claiming that "The Raven" was stolen from an 1809 poem called "The Parrot"--a work which never actually existed outside of Mr. Joyce's fevered mind.) Joyce claimed to have received this quote from a "Mr. William Barton, who was a typo and foreman on the 'Broadway Journal' when Poe was editor of the paper." I have not found any other indication this Barton even existed, and there is absolutely no reason to take this as evidence of Poe's spiritual beliefs. His views were unquestionably unorthodox, but I dare anyone to read "Eureka," "The Island of the Fay," "Mesmeric Revelation," "The Poetic Principle"--to make it short, just about anything he ever wrote--and still say he was an atheist."

[sweetcaroline]

Yes, thank you.