"Edgar Allan Poe" bởi Hanns Heinz Ewers 

Here is an excerpt:

If only Edgar Allen Poe could have sat here in the Alhambra. How he would have dreamed! How the colorful stories would have flown lightly around his head before landing! With a few quick words he could have built an Alhambra whose thick towers would have withstood the rain and endured for centuries.

Here he might have found another way to reach ecstasy. He might not have needed to drink. But the poor poet's soul was stuck over there in New England strongly penning realistic prose while at the same time Washington Irving, the English model of morality, was allowed to dream in the moonlight magic of Alhambra..His Tales of Alhambra have become world famous.

Day by day I see strangers enter this sacred place, in their hand reviews and in their jacket pockets Edgar Allan Poe's book. This is how they read The Fall of the House of Usher or the Dionysian Last Days of Pompeii!

Can't you perceive the influence of Lord Lytton or Irving's spirit within this pair of beautiful stories? No, a whisper from a Catholic cemetery flows through the haunted Moorish palace in his soul. Although he was no famous poet, although he was only a common journalist, not Bulwar, not Irving created these beauties. He created Pompeii and the Alhambra in spite of them.

Poe's ability was not enough for his burning desire. The only method that worked was to gather up everything he had inside using it to awaken and carry him into ecstasy. The entire amount of stimulation he surrounded himself with was barely able to lead him to this condition.

If this unhappy poet only once in his life received a kiss from the Muse it was through his beautiful wife, Virginia Clem. The moralists want to call this intoxication holy and divine while forcefully rebuking the poet's other ecstasies, those from alcohol and from Opium, as unholy and devilish. They are equal! The valuable art that came forth from them was no less glorious.

The agony from the divinely consecrated ecstasy was scarcely inferior to the devilish! Where another was in paradise he was in hell, a passionate blissful hell whose flames were no less scorching. The hand of the poet was rich and Morella, Ligeia, Berenice and Lenore are all owed to the dying eyes of Virginia before her death was certain. He knew the gleaming red of her cheeks lied, knew it was a deception and that within the depths of her moist, shimmering eyes an unrelenting illness grinned out at him.

In the evening when he stroked her beloved locks he could sense, "She won't live many more days" and in the morning, "Another day less".

It was a dying person that his lips kissed, a dying person whose beautiful head lay next to him nights when he rested. When he was awakened by the rattle and laborious wheezing of her hard working lungs he would see the white linen shroud, see the cold drops of death sweat on her brow. The visible long drawn out death of his beloved took years. That was the only "fortune" this luckless poet ever had.

Oh yes, the coronation of his dead spouse gave him fame, but it was the fame of fear, of silent grief, the despair behind the smiling mask: A paradise of torments. Virginia sank deeply into his soul and came out in his finest stories. Who can perceive which nameless agonies gave birth to her whisper?

Before the last thread of life snapped and the still wife was laid in the tomb Edgar Poe wrote his masterpiece The Raven. Nothing like that poem or like him had ever been seen before in world literature. I would like to scream in the faces of the English hypocrites.

"His ecstasy came out of the divine intoxication of a lost bleeding heart as well as the common intoxication that comes out of a wine bottle."