A slim, engaging work of literary history and criticism ... Impressionistic ... Ogden weaves elements of his depressing biography, as well as mostly gratuitous anecdotes from her own. Neither a true biography nor a comprehensive tree of his inestimable influence, this book might best be described as an impassioned defense of Poe, in aesthetic terms ... As a critic, Ogden is both incisive and eloquent.
Probing, and sometimes puzzling ... Ogden’s readings of Poe are psychoanalytically inflected, too, though at times her book feels less like an 'analysis of the dead' than a self-analysis, or even a therapy session ... One of the most compelling things about Darkness Becomes Bright is that, while Ogden’s reasons for writing about Poe seem deeply felt, she never quite clarifies them ... Though Ogden makes a spirited case, I come away from Darkness Becomes Bright not quite convinced of Poe’s greatness ... But her book is moving anyway, as a meditation on how literature can transmute the worst experiences—author’s and reader’s alike—into something bearable, or even beautiful.
Ogden’s readings of Poe, like Bonaparte’s, seem at first to owe their greatest debt to psychoanalysis. But her real methodology is her life ... These personal anecdotes, which reveal how Ogden became the reader she is, are in my view the most interesting as well as the most consequential passages.
The book has some less-than-wonderful elements, too. The introduction is confusing, and the chronology is difficult to follow at times. The Freudian dream analysis is heavy-handed and problematic. And Ogden’s fictional imaginings of incidents in Poe’s life can seem presumptuous or disrespectful of historical facts. These flaws aside, her creative mashup of biography, history, literary criticism, and memoir ultimately resolves into a thoughtful and engaging narrative about why Edgar Allan Poe’s darkest stories still attract and fascinate us today.
Innovative if disjointed ... The book’s inventive format unfortunately results in a jumbled reading experience. Readers will struggle to follow its many winding threads.
