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Ackroyd’s great strength in this compact appraisal of Poe’s life and career is his evaluation of Poe’s achievement, issued with the perceptiveness and assurance of a fellow artificer. ‘He had an instinctive understanding of what would attract, and hold the attention of, a newly formed reading public,’ Ackroyd writes. ‘He understood the virtues of terseness and unity of effect; he realised the necessity of sensationalism and of the exploitation of contemporary “crazes”.’ Both stories and poems, Ackroyd explains, ride on ‘some undertow of meaning, which the reader shares with the author; they are both in the same condition of growing awareness’ – which nonetheless is never fully achieved. ‘All of his endings are abrupt and inconclusive, thus prolonging a mood of uncertainty and even of anxiety.’

(LRB 21 February 2008)

Chatto | hardback 170 pp. |ISBN: 9780701169886