READIN: Borges on Whitman on Poe (oh my!)

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READIN started out as a place for me to keep track of what I am reading, and to learn (slowly, slowly) how to design a web site.

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🦋 Borges on Whitman on Poe (oh my!)

So for a while I've been wondering about the obituary of Poe that Borges attributes to Whitman in his lecture on The Detective Story... Today I tracked it down. (Thanks for their invaluable assistance to Brett Barney and Ed Folsom of the Whitman Archive.)

Borges is referring to Whitman's essay A Backward Glance O'er Travel'd Roads, in which he says of Poe's poems that "beyond their limited range of melody (like perpetual chimes of music bells, ringing from lower b flat up to g) they were melodious expressions, and perhaps never excell'd ones, of certain pronounc'd phases of human morbidity." Also worth looking at Whitman's note on Edgar Poe's Significance -- Whitman's take on Poe seems to have been very much in line with Borges' own.

posted evening of Friday, September 18th, 2009
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🦋 Borges on Whitman on Poe (oh my!)

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