About Poe, with Jack DeLand

Mr. Deland, thank you for dropping by.

That’s DeLand.

Excuse me?

My ancestors were from the department of Landes, in southwestern France, hence “des Landes.”

Mm. Why did you create this website? What is this “real Poe” or “Truth about Poe” that you seek? What is wrong with Poe as we know him today?

I never believed in the tortured genius school of the Poe industry. The theory that I’m working out is that what we know of Poe — the pastiche of half-truths, recollections, and dead professors’ assumptions that I call cartoon Poe — is largely built upon happenstance and sheer bad luck.

There has developed a force within Poe criticism (academic Poe criticism; there is no non-) that I call a data-driven, accretively layered faux case law approach. It reduces Poe the living being — an actual human — to a postulate made up of or attributable to “facts” or data. The facts and data approach may work with material objects but not so well with human beings coursing through the flow of Life, which is where Poe (and the rest of us) exists until he (as we all) does not. Think of the carbon dating effort that showed Poe's hair had a high concentration of lead. Somewhere someone is making quasi-logical links between lead poisoning and Poe's poetry, or the evergreen category of "Poe's racism."

I think that we need to take Poe at his word when he calls the tales and even the poems “trifles.” He is working on something much greater than these trifles at the present moment, and he is always working in the present moment. How do we determine what he is really working on? We reverse engineer out his intent by solving the hoaxes.

I have been working on unraveling this play/playfulness for 50+ years now. There are three major hoaxes that have consumed the bulk of my study: "Hans Phaall. A Tale," The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and "The Man that was Used Up." I have structured the sight around the three hoaxes, including criticism in progress. The "play" of the hoax materials is carried out across Poe's entire oeuvre, and I include all possible first editions.

My theory is all-encompassing and sustainable but stitching together the bits across a lifetime (a short but true life; Edgar Allan Poe breathed - and then he did not). My hope is that others will carry on the torch for me when it necessarily falls. This is important; a brilliant man has been at the least highly understood and at most libeled. Poe is an American original in the wildest sense.