Edgar Allan Poe: American Defender of the Medieval Imagination (Webinar)
$18.00
Edgar Allan Poe, while one of America’s most popular authors, is also America’s most deeply misunderstood author. The French have long admired Poe for his mythopoeic powers, but Americans largely think of him as the Stephen King of his day, revelling in fright, horror, and nihilistic violence. Or, as one critic put it, “his tales are nothing more than complicated machines for saying ‘boo.’” In general, American critics find little meaning beyond surface sensations in the work of Poe.
But Poe, working in the tradition of the Medievals through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is interested not in the surface but in the meaning beneath the surface of a story. He is not attempting to present reality (not even a dark reality, as some have claimed) but rather attempting to help his readers to look past surface reality and see the Ideal instead. In fact, Poe thought that the function of art was to set the mind soaring upward in what he called “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.”
In so many ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the American Samuel Taylor Coleridge, diagnosing the disease of our modernity’s earthbound rationalist, materialist existence and calling us back to a Medieval Imagination, rooted in The Great Chain of Being and expressed through symbolic images.
Join Angelina Stanford on November 17 to find out why Northrop Frye calls Poe “the greatest literary genius this side of Blake,” and to learn how Poe not only defends the Medieval Imagination but even anticipates the movement in the 20th century from realism to mythopoeia.
Note: I will be referencing much of Poe’s work but hope to look closely at “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Gold-Bug.”
You may also be interested in Coleridge’s Imagination: Restoring the Chain of Being (Previously Recorded Webinar)
Instructor: Angelina Stanford
Meet Times: November 17, 2025 from 7:00-8:30 PM ET (1 session, approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes long); Lifetime access to recording will be available to students
Individual Price: $18 (Non-Refundable)
How to access the class: One hour before the live event begins, customers will be given a link via email and also in the “My Courses” tab of their HHL accounts to watch the live webinar over Zoom. After the live webinar has concluded, the recording will be made available in the customer’s HHL account the next day for lifetime access.
Description
Edgar Allan Poe, while one of America’s most popular authors, is also America’s most deeply misunderstood author. The French have long admired Poe for his mythopoeic powers, but Americans largely think of him as the Stephen King of his day, revelling in fright, horror, and nihilistic violence. Or, as one critic put it, “his tales are nothing more than complicated machines for saying ‘boo.’” In general, American critics find little meaning beyond surface sensations in the work of Poe.
But Poe, working in the tradition of the Medievals through Samuel Taylor Coleridge, is interested not in the surface but in the meaning beneath the surface of a story. He is not attempting to present reality (not even a dark reality, as some have claimed) but rather attempting to help his readers to look past surface reality and see the Ideal instead. In fact, Poe thought that the function of art was to set the mind soaring upward in what he called “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above.”
In so many ways, Edgar Allan Poe is the American Samuel Taylor Coleridge, diagnosing the disease of our modernity’s earthbound rationalist, materialist existence and calling us back to a Medieval Imagination, rooted in The Great Chain of Being and expressed through symbolic images.
Join Angelina Stanford on November 17 to find out why Northrop Frye calls Poe “the greatest literary genius this side of Blake,” and to learn how Poe not only defends the Medieval Imagination but even anticipates the movement in the 20th century from realism to mythopoeia.
Note: I will be referencing much of Poe’s work but hope to look closely at “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Gold-Bug.”
You may also be interested in Coleridge’s Imagination: Restoring the Chain of Being (Previously Recorded Webinar)
Instructor: Angelina Stanford
Meet Times: November 17, 2025 from 7:00-8:30 PM ET (1 session, approximately 1 hour and 30 minutes long); Lifetime access to recording will be available to students
Individual Price: $18 (Non-Refundable)
How to access the class: One hour before the live event begins, customers will be given a link via email and also in the “My Courses” tab of their HHL accounts to watch the live webinar over Zoom. After the live webinar has concluded, the recording will be made available in the customer’s HHL account the next day for lifetime access.
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