In an essay for Electric Lit, Catherine Baab-Muguira says that Edgar Allen Poe is the perfect writer for the COVID-19 zeitgeist. “Few creative careers that have risen to such heights have also been conducted under so much stress— financial stress, professional stress, familial stress, psychosexual stress—and it shows in his work,” Babb-Muguira says.
Poe wrote about characters under constant duress and he lived that way, as well. Orphaned at 3, disowned by his adoptive family in his teens, Poe struggled financially, lost his wife to TB, and became lost in grief.
Babb-Muguira suggests we adapt Poe’s writing techniques, which reflected his own real-life horror, such as the use of horrific or morbid situations and a tone that jumps between satire and hysterics. “I mean, after the couple of Covid years we’ve all just had, who among us does not have these materials ready to hand?” she writes. “Maybe these tough, tedious experiences we’re all having might be worth something to us someday.”
