“Hoaxter, liar, impostor, and plagiarizer” (45) are words Kaplan used to describe Edgar Allan Poe. Poe as he claimed to be, was the best when it came to deception and perversion.In living his life and even in his manner of negotiating death, Poe was a captive of the imp of perversity. But with art as his shield, the realms of perversity became a haven for his troubled soul. . . Perversion is a complex strategy of mind, with its unique principles for regulating the negotiations between desire and authority. To achieve its aims, the perverse strategy employs mechanisms of mystification, concealment and illusion, devices characteristic of the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The perverse strategy is, as Poe might have put it, a faculty of human soul. (46)Even though a good number of critics despise Edgar Allen Poe with a passion, almost all who read his creations gave him credit for being a genius. He was the first to write a detective story and tales that dealt with split personality or divided consciousness way before the matter was well known by the common people. He managed to capture the imagination of the public by exploring the mysterious psychological world of the individual – madness, despair, pain, inner chaos, etc. His works, which lack a sense of right or wrong, had great influence upon some types of popular fiction, with a detective story on the lead. Ranging from French symbolists, like Rimbrad and Mallarme, to American writers, such as Bierce, Melville, and Faulkner, were influenced by Poe’s writings. He even inspired well-known Philosophers like Frederick Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. Just to mention a few, gothic architecture, psychological abnormalities, hidden meanings, nightmarish activities, mystery, and inner turmoil were the focus of Poe’s tales, and “The Raven,” in particular.In some ways, “The Raven” shows Poe at his greatest image-making power, in w...
