Richard Kopley and Paul Lewis, cochairs of the PSA’s Fifth International Edgar Allan Poe Conference, are busy with the plans for the 2021 conference to be held in Boston at the historic Omni Parker House Hotel founded in 1854. The keynote speaker for the conference will be Marilynne Robinson. Her essay on Poe in the February 5, 2015, issue of the New York Review of Books begins with this sentence: “Edgar Allan Poe was and is a turbulence, an anomaly among the major American writers of his period, an anomaly to this day.” She also had this to say on the bicentennial of Poe’s birth: “I could not stop memorizing his poems. To say them and hear them taught me to feel the deeper coherences of language, as if words ordered by their sounds and suggestions were a charm that opened more meaning than words contain” (Baltimore Sun,...

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