Edgar Allan Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson
called him the jingle man, Mark Twain said that his prose was unreadable, and
Henry James felt that a taste for his work was the mark of a second-rate
sensibility. According to T. S. Eliot, "the forms which his lively
curiosity takes are those in which a preadolescent mentality delights."
After notices like those, most reputations would be sunk without a trace, and
yet Edgar Allan Poe shows no sign whatsoever of loosening his extraordinary hold
on our imaginations. In 1959, Richard Wilbur, an elegant poet and a critic of
refined taste, inaugurated the Dell Laurel Poetry Series (mass-market paperback
selections from classic British and American poets) with an edition of Poe's
complete poems, for which he provided a long and thoughtful introduction. In
1973, Daniel Hoffman, also a distinguished poet and critic, published a highly
regarded study of Poe's writings. In 1984, two massive volumes of Poe's
collected works, together comprising some three thousand pages, were published
in the Library of America. In the 1990s, Poe has been the subject of a
children's book and a substantial new biography, and a Halloween episode of the
Baltimore-based television series Homicide: Life on the Street made very
effective use of his legend and his writings, especially the poem
"Dream-Land" and the stories "The Tell-Tale Heart" and
"The Cask of Amontillado." A century and a half after his death, he is
the one American author whose name is known to virtually everyone.
Edgar Poe was on January 19, 1809, the
second of the three children of David Poe and Elizabeth (Arnold) Poe, both of
whom were professional actors and members of a touring theatrical company.
Eclipsed by his more famous wife, his own promising career ruined by alcoholism,
Poe's father deserted the family when Edgar was still an infant; nothing
conclusive is known of his life thereafter. While appearing professionally in
Richmond, Virginia, Poe's mother became ill and died on December 8, 1811, at the
age of twenty-four. Her three children, who would maintain contact with one
another throughout their lives, were sent to live with different foster
families. Edgar became the ward of John Allan, a successful tobacco merchant in
Richmond, and his wife Frances, who had no children of their own. Although never
formally adopted by them, Poe regarded the couple, especially Mrs. Allan, as
parents, and he took their surname as his own middle name. In 1815, business
reasons led Allan to move to England for what would be a five-year stay. Both in
London and then in Richmond after the family's return, Poe was well educated in
private academies. In 1825, he became secretly engaged to a girl named Elmira
Royster. The engagement, opposed by both families, was subsequently broken off.
In 1826, Poe entered the University of
Virginia, newly founded by former President Thomas Jefferson. He distinguished
himself as a student, but he also took to drinking, and he amassed gambling
debts of $2,000, a significant amount of money at the time, which John Allan,
although he had recently inherited a fortune, refused to honor. After quarreling
with Allan, Poe left Richmond in March 1827 and sailed to Boston, where, in
relatively short order, he enlisted in the United States Army (under the name
Edgar A. Perry, and claiming to be four years older than his actual age of
eighteen) and published a pamphlet called Tamerlane and Other Poems,
whose author was cited on the title page only as "a Bostonian." This
little book did not sell at all, but its few surviving copies are among the most
highly prized items in the rare-book market; one accidentally discovered copy,
bought for a dollar, was recently auctioned for $150,000. Poe's military career
went more successfully. After two years, he had been promoted to sergeant major,
the highest noncommissioned rank. He was honorably discharged in 1829, and
decided to seek an appointment to West Point in the hope of becoming a career
commissioned officer. He entered West Point in May of 1830, but chafed under the
regimen and, after deliberately missing classes, roll-calls, and compulsory
chapel attendance, was expelled in January 1831.
In 1829, Poe had published a second
collection of verse, which attracted little more attention than its predecessor.
A third volume, funded through contributions from fellow cadets, appeared in
1831. Among its contents was "To Helen," which had been inspired by
Jane Stanard, the mother of one his Richmond schoolmates. Poe referred to her as
"the first, purely ideal love of my soul." Also in 1831, Poe went to
Baltimore, where he moved in with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, his father's
sister, who was to be the most deeply devoted of his several mother-figures, and
her eight-year-old daughter Virginia. It was in this period that he began to
achieve wider recognition as a writer. In 1832, he published five tales in the
Philadelphia Saturday Courier. In 1833, he entered a competition
sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter (sic), winning the
second prize in poetry for "The Coliseum" and the first prize in
fiction for "MS. Found in a Bottle." In 1834, the publication of
"The Visionary" in Godey's Lady's Book marked the first time
that his fiction appeared in a magazine of more than local circulation.
Frances Allan had died in February 1829,
and John Allan, who was by this time permanently alienated from Poe, had
remarried in October 1830. On Allan's death in 1834, Poe received nothing.
Effectively disinherited, unsuited for business or the military, Poe turned to
journalism, the one avenue likely to afford a successful career to someone of
his interests and abilities. Through the recommendation of the novelist John
Pendleton Kennedy, who had been one of the judges of the Saturday Visiter
contest, Poe began in March 1835 to contribute short fiction and book reviews to
the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger. In a period of American
literature not notable for them, Poe exhibited coherent aesthetic principles and
high critical standards, and within months his vigorous and uncompromising
reviews began to increase the Messenger's circulation and to enhance its
reputation, prompting its publisher to make Poe his principal book reviewer and
editorial assistant. By the end of the year, Poe, who had moved to Richmond with
Virginia and Mrs. Clemm, was named editor in chief. In May of 1836, he secretly
married Virginia, his first cousin, who was then not quite fourteen years of
age.
Dissatisfied both with his salary and
with limits on his editorial independence, he resigned from the Southern
Literary Messenger in January 1837. Struggling to support Virginia and Mrs.
Clemm through freelance writing, he moved his family first to New York and then
to Philadelphia as he sought another editorial position. Despite financial
difficulties, Poe was able in this period to advance his own writing career,
publishing reviews, poems, and especially fiction in various journals and in
several volumes. In 1839, he began to write regularly for Thomas Burton's Gentleman's
Magazine, contributing a feature article and a number of book reviews each
month. Once again, Poe's editorship brought dramatic advances in both quality
and circulation, but he was dismissed from this position in June 1840 after once
again quarreling with his publisher. Failing in attempts to found his own
journal, in 1841 Poe became an editor of Graham's Magazine, a new journal
formed by George Graham through a merger of his magazine The Casket with
the Gentleman's Magazine, which he had bought from Burton. Once more the
pattern played itself out: the magazine thrived under Poe's direction, he wanted
a higher salary and a freer editorial hand, and he left his position--although
this time on relatively good terms with the publisher.
Poe's personal fortunes once more
suffered reverses as his writing career advanced. In January 1842, Virginia
suddenly began to hemorrhage from the mouth, the first indication that she had
contracted tuberculosis. She was seriously ill for a time, and would never again
be truly healthy. Poe also had renewed difficulties in his attempts to find
steady employment. But in 1843 he published several works, including "The
Tell-Tale Heart," in James Russell Lowell's short-lived journal The
Pioneer, and in June of that year his story "The Gold-Bug" won a
$100 prize in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper.
Widely reprinted, it made Poe famous with a broad fiction-reading public, but he
did not become financially secure. Owing to lax copyright standards at the time
that allowed for widespread reprinting--a condition that Poe himself
editorialized about--writers did not profit directly from the popularity of
their work. In 1844, Poe moved to New York, where he lectured on American poetry
and contributed articles to newspapers and magazines.
The year 1845 would bring both triumphs
and the beginning of a final downward spiral in Poe's life. His poem "The
Raven" appeared in the New York Evening Mirror in January, and was
an instant success with both readers and critics. He began writing for the Broadway
Journal, became its editor in July, and shortly thereafter fulfilled a
longstanding dream by becoming its owner as well. But a series of articles in
which he groundlessly accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism did harm
to Poe's reputation, and Virginia's health problems became severe. Financial
difficulties, his worry over Virginia, and his own precarious physical and
emotional state caused him to cease publication of the Broadway Journal
after less than six months as its proprietor. He moved out of New York City to a
cottage in then-rural Fordham (now a heavily urban section of the Bronx), where
in the midst of poverty, ill health, and Virginia's now grave illness, he still
somehow continued to earn a small income writing reviews and articles. A
satirical piece on fellow writer Thomas Dunn English provoked from its subject a
scurrilous personal attack in the Evening Mirror, which led Poe to sue
the publication. Although he would win the suit and collect damages the
following year, the whole episode was a great strain upon Poe's already fragile
nervous system.
On January 30, 1847, Virginia died,
plunging Poe into an emotional and physical collapse that lasted for most of the
year. In 1848, he was briefly engaged to marry Sarah Helen Whitman, a widowed
poet several years his senior, but their relationship was tense and strained,
and the engagement was broken off. He went to Richmond in the summer of 1849,
hoping to find financial backing for yet another journal, and while there he was
reunited with and re-engaged to Elmira Royster, his first love, now herself a
widow. He sailed from Richmond to Baltimore, where on October 3, 1849, he was
found outside a polling place (it was election day), in a state of delirium and
wearing shabby and ill-fitting clothing. He was taken to a nearby hospital,
where he raved feverishly for several days before dying on October 7 at the age
of forty. Neither the circumstances that had led to his condition nor the exact
cause of his death have ever been satisfactorily determined. Poe's posthumous
reputation sustained grievous and long-lasting damage from a libelous biography
by Rufus Griswold, whom Poe himself had appointed his literary executor, and
rumors, mostly unfounded, circulate to this day about Poe's mental state and
personal habits.
Whatever mysteries may still surround his life and character, there is no doubt of his enormous importance to Southern literature in several different areas. His best poems--"To Helen," "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and others--which many can recite by heart, demonstrate him to be a master of rhythmic effect. His stories, particularly his tales of horror and terror, are equally treasured by an immense readership. Yet despite his popular association with the gothic and the grotesque, Poe was also an accomplished humorist, as shown in a number of his short stories, and was capable of hilarious satire at the expense of inferior writers. For all his interest in lurid effects and morbid states of mind, he was also fascinated by ratiocination: in his three tales featuring Auguste Dupin, he singlehandedly invented the genre of the detective story. And more than anyone else in early nineteenth-century America, he played a crucial role in shaping and elevating literary taste and in developing aesthetic theory, particularly in the field of poetry. Thus, both with critics and scholars and with the general public, Poe remains a permanent fixture of our living literary culture.
Principle Works