Morgan Library & Museum announce Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul

The Morgan Library & Museum announce Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul an exhibition on view October 4, 2013–January 26, 2014.

The works of Edgar Allan Poe have frightened and thrilled readers for over one hundred fifty years. Terror of the Soul, an exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum, will bring together more than one hundred items related to Poe’s poetry, fiction, and literary criticism, and explore his profound influence on his contemporaries and later generations of writers. The objects featured in Terror of the Soul—a phrase and concept Poe introduced in his preface to Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque—are drawn primarily from the Morgan’s holdings and The Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature at The New York Public Library, two of the most important Poe collections in the United States. A number of exceptional loans from private collections will also be included.

Poe’s mastery of multiple writing genres, including his ironic reworking of the Gothic tradition as a vehicle for his psychologically acute and metaphysically ambitious dramatizations of the terrified soul, will be elucidated by manuscripts of several of his famous poems and short stories, early printed editions, letters, and literary criticism published in contemporary newspapers, magazines, and journals. On view will be such works as “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” in Poe’s own hand; one of the earliest printings of “The Raven;” the first printing of “The Cask of Amontillado;” and an unprecedented three copies of Tamerlane, Poe’s earliest published work and one of the rarest books in American literature. Lesser-known writings, including A Reviewer Reviewed—Poe’s never-before-exhibited critique of his own work, written under a pseudonym— and the author’s annotated copy of his last published book, Eureka, provide a more complete picture of this complex writer.

Terror of the Soul is among the first museum exhibitions to explore Poe’s reception by, and wide-ranging influence on, fellow writers as diverse as Charles Dickens, Stéphane Mallarmé, Vladimir Nabokov, and Terry Southern. Manuscripts by other literary masters on view include Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, Oscar Wilde’s The Picture of Dorian Gray, Robert Louis Stevenson’s The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and T. S. Eliot’s manuscript of The Waste Land, annotated by Eliot and his friend, Ezra Pound. Another highlight of the exhibition is the notebook containing Paul Auster’s previously unpublished lecture on Poe’s significance as an American writer and his influence on French literature.

The Morgan Library & Museum 225 Madison Avenue, at 36th Street, New York, NY 10016-3405 212.685.0008 www.themorgan.org