h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Okay, Nigel read the news, and it gave him something else to worry about.

Me, I wrote a poem about Edgar Allan Poe. Most people think Poe was a tinfoil-hat nutcase who went around rhyming 'weir' with 'sere'. Bah. That man was a genius who thought deeply about Life, the Universe, and Everything.

Anyway, here's the poem: A87788362 - 'The Purloined Universe'.

*wonders if he should ask Dmitri what's wrong with rhyming weir with sere*

*wisely decides not to*

Nothing, in my opinion.

'The skies they were ashen and sober;
The leaves they were crisped and sere—
The leaves they were withering and sere;
It was night in the lonesome October
Of my most immemorial year:
It was hard by the dim lake of Auber,
In the misty mid region of Weir—'

http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/19393

But that's not all he did.

If you get a chance, watch the film 'The Raven', with John Cusack. The critics panned it - and I could hear Poe laughing. They want the Griswold version of Poe. Poe would have made a great theoretical physicist.

I have just found a letter from Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Edgar Allan Poe.

She told him 'The Raven' was a big hit in the UK. Apparently, she had a friend who 'was unfortunate enough to own a bust of Pallas'. Elizabeth said her friend was afraid to look at it in the twilight, now.

I come from kilmarnock in scotland where there is a blue plaque thongy for poe
but I've no idea why

*the mental imagery, holds sides, will come back when I have composed myself*

A

Poe went to grammar school in Ayrshire. He was Scots-Irish, and his adopted family, who were Scots, took him to Scotland for an extended visit.

thst must be it then
my mum told me his granny lived there

Edgar Allen Poe was an important pioneering scientific debunker, debunking spurious scientific claims for his newspaper and magazine audience.

Also, that classic phrase, "When you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, has to be the truth." originated with Poe, though I think most people probably identify with Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes, who used the phrase in one of his stories.