The American writer whom McLuhan treated less as a literary influence than as an inventor of cognitive form. Two Poes run through the series: the mariner of the maelstrom, McLuhan's standing image for keeping one's wits inside a vortex, and the author of the detective story, the form that reverse-engineers how apprehension actually works. Dialogue 68 joins them, making Poe the origin of the form that the electric age would later mime everywhere. New to it — start with dialogue 68 for the invention, then dialogue 58 for the maelstrom as method.
Across the dialogues
Promoted from image to origin — named "a major inventor" whose form the whole electric age would replay, with McLuhan's 1943 essay on him still judged topical a quarter-century on
The rank McLuhan assigned him — inventor rather than author, which puts Poe among the makers of media forms rather than among the writers who used them.
"So McLuhan said that Edgar Allan Poe was a major inventor, and he invented the detective story."
The dating that matters for the argument — the essay is from 1943, and its inclusion in The Interior Landscape in 1969 shows McLuhan still judged it topical twenty-five years later, so the detective form was an early and durable key rather than a late flourish.
"McLuhan's essay on Poe was published, I think, in 1943."
Connections
McLuhan's essay on Poe dates to 1943 and was still judged topical enough to reprint in The Interior Landscape in 1969.