Charles Baudelaire's grave lies in Montparnasse Cemetery, smack in the middle of Paris' sixth arrondissement. The winter months are a sheet of gray, with an endless roof of clouds hanging close overhead. Built high, the walls of the cemetery are speckled with moss; the rain splatters across the crack

Dark, Ecstatic, Intense, Lyrical, Manic, Overflowing, Symbolist poetry

If American drama was to recognize one fictional clan as first family, the Tyrones would win the title. (Granted, it would be a neck-and-neck race with the Lomans of "Death of a Salesman.") Eugene O'Neill's 1956 masterpiece, "Long Day's Journey into Night," established them as the dark alter ego of t

Dark, Depressive, Domestic, Gritty, Intense, Intimate, Realist theater

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilecti

Anxiety, Dark, Death, Gothic fiction, Grotesque, Intense, Lyrical, Sublime, Symbolist poetry, Violent

It may come as a shock that the 'boys' club' of Science Fiction was founded by a 19-year-old girl, but the strange life of Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley makes it seem quite logical. Shelley's "Frankenstein" (think Gothic manor meets modern laboratory) was an all-too-sane response to the mix of idealism

Catastrophe, Dystopic, Intense, Monumental, Romantic literature, Technology, Tragic