Edgar Allan Poe

[Serenera]

Pas besoin de l'être, suffit d'avoir un niveau suffisant et une sensibilité littéraire. Admire le balancement des phrases, la richesse du lexique, le rythme si travaillé. Les évocations, les références. Le tout reste fluide (on évite l'effet Napoléon III) et élégant. C'est un des rares auteurs qui me déplaisent en français, et que j'idolâtre en anglais.

Un autre exemple du style poe-tique (elle est facile, mais de Lovecraft !) : l'incipit de la chute de la maison Usher :

Son cœur est un luth suspendu;
Sitôt qu’on le touche il résonne.
—DE BÉRANGER.

DURING the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of the evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher. I know not how it was; but, with the first glimpse of the building, a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit. I say insufferable; for the feeling was unrelieved by any of that half-pleasurable, because poetic, sentiment, with which the mind usually receives even the sternest natural images of the desolate or terrible. I looked upon the scene before me—upon the mere house, and the simple landscape features of the domain—upon the bleak walls—upon the vacant eye-like windows—upon a few rank sedges—and upon a few white trunks of decayed trees—with an utter depression of soul which I can compare to no earthly sensation more properly than to the after-dream of the reveler upon opium—the bitter lapse into every-day life—the hideous dropping off of the veil. There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart—an unredeemed dreariness of thought which no goading of the imagination could torture into aught of the sublime.

Bon, ses poèmes sont à tomber aussi. J'ai fait trois sauts périlleux la première fois que j'ai vraiment lu "Le Corbeau" et "Annabel Lee". Dont je possède des versions audio, lues notamment par le grand Christopher Walken.