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Edgar Allan Poe






(1809–1849)

The demands of Truth are severe. She has no sympathy with the myrtles. All that which is so indispensable in Song is precisely all that with which she has nothing to do. It is but making her a flaunting paradox to wreathe her in gems and flowers. In enforcing a truth we need severity rather than efflorescence of language. We must be simple, precise, terse.

(“The Poetic Principle”)

“Man is a rational animal; Man is a political animal”: These are tenets of the Aristotelian conception of humanity. But the American author Edgar Allan Poe subscribed to a different, darker vision of human nature, a concession to the irrational in humanity. Poe conceived the “imp of the perverse” as his idea of irrational “Man, ” the being who succumbs to unconscious and even hateful impulses. He thereby anticipated the odysseys into the abyss of human thought by such writers as Fyodor Dostoevsky, H. P. Lovecraft, and Stephen King. When few authors, other than Shakespeare, had ventured to identify humanity as “the stuff dreams are made on, ” Poe explored dreams, nightmares, fantasies, and compulsive impulses in a way to make Freud shudder. He courted the abstruse and sought to embrace an arcane medievalism, when most of his contemporaries were copying European myths and legends or trying to attach American folklore to a Puritan past. T. S. Eliot denounced Poe’s adolescent advocacy of a supernal realm of perfect beauty and intuitive understanding. On the other hand, Steven Spielberg admits that his best movies would have been inconceivable without Poe’s Icarian idealism, his eccentric search for transcendence.

Poe eludes easy categorization, since he resists being an “American” writer. His personal feelings of disinheritance appear to have permeated his tales, and he refuses to locate his narratives in an American setting. He courts the bizarre, the fantastic, the grotesque, the dangerously morbid. He indulges in necromancy, in Eastern and gothic texts, in antiquarianism for its own sake. He wants to be Merlin or Nostradamus, an alchemist after Goethe’s Faust. Yet everywhere we find references to the two seminal works that ground American literature, the Bible and the works of Shakespeare. In his own time, Poe borrowed from Charles Brockden Brown, Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron, Walter Scott, and E. T. A. Hoffmann. He liked the fictional style offered in Blackwood’s Journal. Popular culture lured him with its incursions into mesmerism and archaeology, especially Egyptology. He read minor poets and purveyors of the macabre. Drawing from the many writers in his canon, Poe added an immediacy of effect, a nervous energy that struck a new chord, decidedly musical, in his reading public. The French loved him in his own time and beyond, hence Poe’s great infl uence on symbolism and surrealist poets and painters, including Franz Kafka and Edward Burne-Jones, Rainier Maria Rilke, and Egon Schiele. Poe espoused a theory of the superior, aesthetic personality, and so we can see connections to Oscar Wilde, George Bernard Shaw, and Friedrich Nietzsche. The art of the detective story and his delving into criminal psychology deeply affected Arthur Conan Doyle and Robert Louis Stevenson. And few can compete with his virtuosic vocabulary, singular erudition, hard work, and mastery of the English language.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Two years later his actor father, David Poe, Jr., abandoned Edgar; his older brother, William Henry Leonard, age four; and his sister, Rosalie, less than a year old, in the sole care of their mother, Elizabeth Arnold, who continued to act professionally on the stage. Soon orphaned in late 1811, after the December death of his mother, Edgar received protection, but never formal adoption, by John Allan and his family of Richmond, Virginia. The Allans gave Edgar a good education, including five years abroad, in England, 1815–20. In 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, but he left after one year, since Mr. Allan refused to underwrite a second year of study. Allan had no patience with Poe’s literary aspirations, nor with Poe’s character, which Allan thought dissolute. Poe considered Allan miserly and abusive. Allan died when Poe was in his early wenties, not caring to mention Poe in his will.

Resigned to faring on his own, Poe became ssociated with eastern cities, Boston, Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. In Boston Poe enlisted in the army under a pseudonym, Edgar A. Perry. At the same time, a Boston publisher brought out Poe’s first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, an indication of Poe’s future development. Poe attended West Point (an apocryphal story of Poe’s West Point fi asco has him appearing on parade wearing only his shoes and sword!), but after his expulsion for gross neglect of duty and general disobedience in 1831 he moved to Baltimore to live with the remaining members of the Poe family, his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia. Despite what may or may not be the stuff of lore, Poe embarked in writing gothic fiction, some of which satirized German and British models. Whatever his approach may have been at the beginning, Poe soon found himself published and the winner of a prestigious prize; in 1833 the Baltimore Saturday Visitor awarded Poe $50 for “MS Found in a Bottle.” This national recognition ultimately enabled Poe to secure an editorial post in 1834 on a Richmond, Virginia, magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger. Meanwhile, Poe’s brother, William Henry, had died of alcoholism in August 1831, and once in Richmond Poe sent for Mrs. Clemm and her daughter, Virginia (aged 13), whom he eventually married in order to regularize his familial circumstances.

Poe’s work on the Southern Literary Messenger increased its circulation 10-fold, solidifying his reputation and providing some financial security, but his ambitions began to expand beyond Richmond, even while his alcoholism had begun to intrude on his professional life. Poe fell into an unfortunate pattern, especially so far as the publishing world was concerned, for unreliability. During this period in May 1836, Poe married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Virginia’s mother, Maria Poe Clemm, entirely approved, and the three lived together as a family. In 1837 Poe either quit or was forced off the staff of the Messenger, and he moved to New York in a fruitless quest to find permanent employment. He published his one novel, The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym, an epic adventure-romance, in an attempt to expand his literary horizons and legitimize the American novel in a larger structural context, akin to Virgil’s Aeneid. Pym inspired such writers as Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville, and possibly Joseph Conrad, to exploit the South Seas narrative as a vehicle for their own use. Pym also established Poe as the philosophical antithesis to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau’s naive optimism in nature’s innate goodness. Nature, for both Poe and Hawthorne, would always be a mix of mother and destroyer, nurturer and fatal temptress.

The year 1839 found Poe in Philadelphia, an assistant editor at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. There Poe composed several of his most famous tales, “Ligeia, ” and “The Fall of the House of Usher, ” but his drinking provoked his dismissal. When Burton’s, under new management, became Graham’s Magazine, Poe was rehired. The period 1839–44 had Poe at the top of his form, and, along with “The Tell-Tale Heart, ” “The Masque of the Red Death, ” and “The Pit and the Pendulum, ” Poe wrote “The Gold Bug, ” which won a $1, 000 award from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper. Poe also embarked on literary criticism, a role that would win him friends and rivals. In 1844 he moved to New York, settling in a country house in the Bronx. He composed several more tales and critical essays and one treatise in philosophy, Eureka. His major achievement was the publication of “The Raven, ” a poem of anguished loss and bereavement. “The Raven” generated fame, if not wealth, and it would quickly become a standard poem in America’s literary canon, a prime example of poetic “music” at a period when America had no actual composer to compete with romantic artists such as Fré dé ric Chopin, Robert Schumann, and Franz Liszt.

Around 1845 Poe realized his dearest wish, to become the sole editor of an infl uential literary magazine, the Broadway Journal. Unfortunately mismanagement and improper investment led to the magazine’s demise. This melancholy period reached a tragic peak in January 1847, with the early death of Poe’s young wife, Virginia, after she had suffered repeated bouts with tuberculosis. Her alternate lapses and recoveries may have contributed to the poet’s equally fi tful bouts of drinking; certainly her image as a frail, almost supernaturally delicate presence found its way into many of his tales and poems, such as “Annabel Lee” and “The Oval Portrait.”

In 1846–47 Poe tried to rekindle his romantic life by courting a number of literary ladies; on one occasion Poe offered marriage to Sarah Helen Whitman but was rebuffed at the last minute. He decided to return to Richmond, thinking the South offered future success. The people of Richmond actually lionized Poe, acknowledging him as a major literary personage. Nearing the end of his intense but truncated career, Poe enjoyed something close to celebrity, in that he was wined and dined, quoted, and perpetually sought out for his opinions. A much-proffered photograph of the time (1849) reveals a handsome, secure, confi dent, and healthy man, a defi nite contrast to other images of him, which support his reputation as sickly and dissolute. His prospects looked good; he took a pledge to abstain from drink; he became engaged to a childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster; and he again formulated plans to initiate another literary magazine on his own.

None of these happy possibilities, unfortunately, was to be. While Poe was returning to New York from Richmond in 1849, a series of still unexplained mishaps occurred. Poe failed to reach New York and was instead found in Baltimore, lying in a coma in the street. It was election time in Baltimore, a city rather notorious for political skullduggery, including falsifying voters’ registrations, carousing, brawling, and sexual blackmail. On October 6, Poe passed away in a Baltimore hospital. Speculation has it that Poe was either the victim of foul play or the victim of his own propensity to drunkenness. His condition had apparently devolved into pneumonia, whose signs accord with contemporary descriptions of Poe’s states.

It has taken the better part of 150 years to undo a reputation built up by certain critics seeking to discredit Poe’s personal and literary repute in America. More than once, Poe’s complete mastery of the first-person narrator caused readers to confuse Poe with the social psychopaths and murderers he portrays in his writing. Many of his tales depict a protagonist who takes a sadistic delight in tormenting perceived oppressors. The vividness of Poe’s detail has encouraged some readers to identify him with the lunatics, drug addicts, and multifarious fringe or marginal social types of his tales. But the richness of allusion and the apparent cosmopolitanism of his style reveal an urbane, cultivated individual, whose range of motifs and imagistic strategies shows him well versed in the lively arts of his day. The persistent themes in Poe—such as the odyssey of descent, often into nightmare—ally him to the continental infl uence of Dante and epic journeys to the underworld in Homer. As does Hawthorne, Poe explores the tenuous relationship between art and life, the often-fatal attraction of aestheticism, which would influence Walter Pater and his acolyte, Oscar Wilde. As a literary critic, Poe is well aware of his debts to Aristotle, Wyatt, Shelley, and Wordsworth, whose efforts to codify art through a deliberate approach to poetics influenced Poe’s own structured manner of thinking about the aims of poetic creation. In many respects, Poe is a Roman writer in the manner of Petronius, cataloging spiritual hubris and excess in palatial settings, invoking the divine vengeance of death itself. Mark Twain (Samuel Langhorne Clemens) offered us A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court, but Poe takes us further back in history, into the primal, archaic night of primitive, destructive energies.

 

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