Poe-try to her ears: Junior Lucy Foxworthy shares her love of famous writer
“Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing, Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before; But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token, And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, ‘Lenore?’”
This quote comes from “The Raven,” one of junior Lucy Foxworthy’s favorite poetic pieces by Edgar Allan Poe.
While most teens spend their free time scrolling on social media or playing games on their phones, Foxworthy can be found curled up with an old book of Poe’s short stories. In fact, she owns two different collections of his writings and considers herself perhaps his biggest fan.
Poe was an American writer, poet, editor and a very large critic. He was well known for his ominous writing abilities and storytelling, creating the feeling of wanting more after every page. Foxworthy knows almost every detail of his life.
“I just adore his writing style,” explained Foxworthy. “It is just so quintessentially romantic, gothic; it’s so fun to read. His style is nice. You read something and it feels like the feeling; it’s not a good feeling or a bad feeling either, it’s just like a chill.”
Foxworthy added that Poe’s rhythm and word choice play a huge role in her love for his writing. She feels like he fills the pages with imagery. She had heard about Poe in school, but she really got interested in him at the beginning of her freshman year.
“I was digging around my house. I like to collect things,” she explained. “I was looking around my house for anything neat that I could just keep in my room on display. I found a very old, kind of beat up book from the 1920s: A collection of Edgar Allen Poe’s poems, short stories, essays that he published.” After reading a few pages, she was hooked.
She not only enjoys his writing, she really enjoys his personal story. “A lot of weird things happened in his life,” she said. “A lot of weird things happened in his death. When he first was buried, he was buried in an unmarked grave because he wasn’t very popular when he died. In the late 1800s, he was supposed to be taken out of his grave and put into a big new one, like the tall one he’s currently in. When they took him out of his grave, his body had been poorly taken care of. When they were moving the coffin, it fell open, and his bones and remains spilled out and they had to put them back in there. So he has just had horrible luck all through his life and his death. Just so many weird things happened to him. It’s so fascinating.”
Foxworthy added that another interesting fact she discovered was that when he was around the age of 27, he married his 13-year-old cousin.
“A lot of the characterization that we have about him in the modern days -- like him being a drug addict or a madman -- is not true,” said Foxworthy. She noted that items published by his lifelong enemy, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, had false information that damaged his reputation.
Foxworthy feels that it is important to know the correct information when sharing facts about a person. From her research on Poe, she found out that he was a good writer and a better critic. “He did a lot of editing work and he was very well known as an editor. He also did very critical reviews. Very critical. So he was known for that,” said Foxworthy. “Once he published “The Raven” -- it was like an overnight hit.”
And even though it was an instant hit for Foxworthy as well, she admitted that she loves almost all of Poe’s work. “They are all just such fun reads,” she said. “I just can’t describe it; it’s just his word choice, like the rhymes that he chooses, the writing schemes, the rhythm of them. They’re just so fun. There’s a lot of imagery. I just love the big words. It’s very beautiful, flowery -- the language that he uses.”
Story by Jaela Mainah