the crowd than David Riesman did.” The psychological analysis in “William Wilson” is an excellent and frightening exploration off split personality two generations before Freud. Poe’s approach to literature, his famous method which emphasized strict artistic control rather than the spontaneous overflow of powerful emotion, earned him the homage of the French symbolists such as Baudelaire who spent 14 years translating his writings. A phrase in Marginalia, “my heart laid bare” became the title of Baudelaire’s journal, while another phrase “the orange ray of the spectrum and the buzz of a gnat…affect me with nearly similar sensations” was reflected in Baudelaire’s epoch making sonnet “Correspondences.” Poe’s greatest influence comes about in the murder mystery. He can be said to have invented it when he published “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Although murders in fiction existed before Poe, his preoccupation with the ingenious solution of the crime established in his tales of ratiocination changed the emphasis from the acts to getting the facts. Poe’s clever and strange detective Dupin, who also appeared in “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” and “The Purloined Letter,” is the identifiable ancestor of Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes, Agatha Christie’s Hurcule Poirot, Erle Stanley Gardner’s Perry Mason and all those other heroes whose minds are “resolvent and creative.” (E. A. Poe) ...
