SOURCE: Sorescu, Roxana. “Eminescu and Poe.” Romanian Review 41, no. 11 (1987): 62-8.

In the following essay, Sorescu inspects motifs common to Eminescu and Edgar Allan Poe.

Let us start a literary discussion by assuming the condition of any discussion about literature: that of perpetrating an impiety. Let us put side by side two summaries, the reduced, skeletonized, rationalized models of two masterpieces, Mihail Eminescu's poem “Melancholy” and Edgar Allan Poe's tale “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Not without recalling the challenge issued—with that mixture of frankness, lucidity, insolence and desire to startle that characterize his theoretical writings—by Poe himself in “The Philosophy of Composition”: “of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death—was the obvious reply “And when”, I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical”? From what I have already explained at some length...