The Edgar Allan Poe Review

A few years ago, the professorial ego being what it is, I decided to amuse myself by doing a Google search with “Brett Zimmerman and Poe” to see what would turn up. I found the usual atrociously written high school essays citing me and other scholars (with the usual misspelling of “Allan”); one cocky adolescent even attempted to refute my thesis on the narrator as paranoid schizophrenic in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Then I came across an essay quoting extensively from one of my articles on “The Masque of the Red Death.” It was written by “Artemis Aesthetic,” who had a thumbnail photo of herself on the page, so I followed the link and eventually found her on a website called deviantART (http://www.deviantart.com/). The name surprised me; it sounded as if it were a website for perverts. Naturally, therefore, I was intrigued.

I discovered that deviantART (DA) is an online community for artists to upload, share, and discuss their work. I can do no better than to quote from the home page:

deviantART was created to entertain, inspire, and empower the artist in all of us. Founded in August 2000, deviantART is the largest online social network for artists and art enthusiasts with over 31 million registered members, attracting 65 million unique visitors per month.

As a community destination, deviantART is a platform that allows emerging and established artists to exhibit, promote, and share their works within a peer community dedicated to the arts. The site’s vibrant social network environment receives over 160,000 daily uploads of original art works ranging from traditional media, such as painting and sculpture, to digital art, pixel art, films and anime.

Considering myself a serious amateur photographer, I paid a small fee and joined. Once uploaded, a photo (called a “deviation” on the site) can be “faved” by other “deviants” (the name for members), who can write personal or public notes commenting on the deviation. One can get exposure by joining various groups; once a member, deviations of other members of the group appear on one’s personal site in batches for our perusal.

Many groups are general and will accept photographs (or poetry or prose) on any theme. Others are theme-related; it may not surprise readers [End Page 241] to know that deviantART features several groups devoted to Poe. The largest is “Edgar-Allan-Poe,” with 181 members as of this writing, and 201 watchers. These galleries feature paintings, drawings, photography, poetry, crafts, cosplay (dressing up as fictional characters), modeling, digital art, graphic novels, and short pieces of prose presumably in the Poe mode. We can also find scans of pages—portraits, letters—from various collections of Poe’s works or scholarly studies. Certain fans have pictures of themselves beside the tombstone at his original burial place; others have favored us with photos of the Poe statue in Baltimore or the EAP Museum in Richmond. Portraits of the man tend to dominate, however, as does raven-based art, ranging from the crude to the impressive. Figure 1, illustrating the invisible black backdrop technique, is a photograph of me and a raven taken by the deviant Darlene Munro (http://www.darlenemunro.com/). It seems that every artistic medium has paid tribute. The deviant “nshumate” contributed to “Edgar-Allan-Poe” three photos of an interesting piece of craftsmanship based on “The Masque of the Red Death” for what he says was a Poe-inspired auction at a local restaurant. “KanTookasBeast” has done a framed cross-stitch based on “The Raven.” The deviant “sew4fun114” sports a pair of what she calls “Poe raven arm warmers.” We can find an impressive wheel-thrown, hand-sculpted Edgar Allan Poe jug on the site of “thebigduluth,” while “vcallanta” has a pair of canvas shoes with a portrait of Poe on the right shoe and his raven on the left. The sculptor Mark Newman features a caricature mini-bust of Poe.

[End Page 242]

Poe dolls and other three-dimensional figures are not unknown on deviantART. “ExactaCrafts” sewed together a...