A Resurrection of Poe and Baudelaire

On September 9, David Edgerley Gates wrote "The Tell-Tale Heart", about Edgar Allan Poe's creating "dread through a very calculated use of echoes and repetition, foreshadowing and false narratives. What he’s struggling to write, in effect, is psychological horror. Even though that term, or even the concept, didn’t exist at the time."  (LINK)

I'm not sure that the concept of deliberately creating dread through various means wasn't around in Poe's time is entirely true - there were a lot of Regency Gothic Novels (which Jane Austen made splendid fun of in Northanger Abbey):  1764's The Castle of Ontranto (Horace Walpole), 

“and then the figure, turning slowly round, discovered to Frederic the fleshless jaws and empty sockets of a skeleton, wrapt in a hermit’s cowl. “Angels of peace protect me!” cried Frederic, recoiling. “Deserve their protection!” said the spectre.”
― Horace Walpole, The Castle of Otranto

1796's The Monk (Matthew Gregory Lewis), 1794's The Mysteries of Udolpho (Ann Radclyffe), 

“You speak like a heroine,” said Montoni contemptuously, “we shall see if you can suffer like one.”

― Ann Radcliffe, The Mysteries of Udolpho

and many more which centered around decay,  corruption, sex, dark romance, supernatural forces, wickedness, innocence, and a whole lot of gore.  

But going back to Poe - he was a poet before he was ever a prose writer, and it shows.  Which is undoubtedly the reason why Charles Baudelaire (considered by many to be the modern French poet, and the French poet of modernity) was obsessed with him.

“A short story must have a single mood and every sentence must build towards it.”
― Edgar Allan Poe
“Always be a poet, even in prose.”
― Charles Baudelaire

"In...1847, I came upon a few fragments of Edgar Allan Poe, and felt a strange sort of shock…[.] I discovered, believe me if you will, poems and stories that I had already thought of, but of which I had only a vague, confused and disorganised idea, and which Poe had managed to pull together and perfect...." (Source)

 And Baudelaire promptly dropped (almost) everything, and spent his most productive years (1856-1865) translating Poe’s works into French. Now he wasn't the first to translate Poe, but he was the one who made Poe's work sing in French. (Baudelaire's Translations at Gutenberg Press for free.) And his translations became the standard throughout Europe.

First note: Despite his obsession with Poe, when Baudelaire named his poetry collection Les Fleurs du Mal -- Flowers of Evil in English -- it was in homage of Nathaniel Hawthorne's highly appropriate Rappaccini's Daughter. (Link here to read on-line)

Second note: In Memoirs of a Drudge, James Thurber reminisces about working at the Riviera edition of the Chicago Tribune in Southern France. (And why didn't my guidance counselor ever tell me about this job?) Anyway, there were regular printers' strikes, and after one of them, the whole press room, half-tanked, got on a train for Cannes. Promptly another argument broke out, this time over which was better, the original or the French translation of Poe's The Raven? And would a real raven be more likely to say, "Jamais plus" or "Nevermore"? "He returned with the claim that our fellow-passenger to a man were passionately on the side of Jamais plus." Betcha the translation was Baudelaire's... 

Another person whom Poe influenced was, of course, H. P. Lovecraft. 

In my early teens, I read most of Poe, most of Lovecraft, and got warped accordingly.  (I'm in good company:  Apparently, so did Stephen King.)  I still say that two of the scariest stories I've ever read are Lovecraft's "The Picture in the House" and "The Shadow Out of Time".  

“The oldest and strongest emotion of mankind is fear.”
― H.P. Lovecraft

“It is absolutely necessary, for the peace and safety of mankind, that some of earth's dark, dead corners and unplumbed depths be left alone; lest sleeping abnormalities wake to resurgent life, and blasphemously surviving nightmares squirm and splash out of their black lairs to newer and wider conquests.”
― H.P. Lovecraft, At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror

“Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win.”
― Stephen King

“A short story is a different thing altogether – a short story is like a quick kiss in the dark from a stranger.”
― Stephen King, Skeleton Crew

“A little talent is a good thing to have if you want to be a writer. But the only real requirement is the ability to remember every scar.”
― Stephen King

Shirley Jackson must have had a very good memory.  From The Lottery to The Haunting of Hill House to (my favorite) We Have Always Lived in the Castle, Jackson was one of the great horror / thriller writers.  

“No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.”

        ― Shirley Jackson, The Haunting of Hill House

True horror stories are mostly about language, aren't they?  

“The 3 types of terror: The Gross-out: the sight of a severed head tumbling down a flight of stairs, it's when the lights go out and something green and slimy splatters against your arm. The Horror: the unnatural, spiders the size of bears, the dead waking up and walking around, it's when the lights go out and something with claws grabs you by the arm. And the last and worse one: Terror, when you come home and notice everything you own had been taken away and replaced by an exact substitute. It's when the lights go out and you feel something behind you, you hear it, you feel its breath against your ear, but when you turn around, there's nothing there...”  ― Stephen King

"Ye get a hankerin'..."  

"I'm going to let my boy in!"

"Whose hand was I holding?"

BTW, Two other horror stories that will scare the sleep from your eyes are ""'Oh, Whistle, and I'll Come to You, My Lad'" (M. R. James) and, of course, "The Monkey's Paw" (W. W. Jacobs).