Poe, Edgar Allen / 2008-07-21 00:00:00
1850
THE PREMATURE BURIAL
by Edgar Allan Poe
THERE are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but
which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate
fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish
to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety handled only when the
severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill,
for example, with the most intense of "pleasurable pain" over the
accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at
Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew,
or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three prisoners in the
Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact- it is
the reality- it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should
regard them with simple abhorrence.
I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august
calamities on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the
character of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy.
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