Poe, Edgar Allan

born Jan. 19, 1809, Boston, Mass., U.S.

died Oct. 7, 1849, Baltimore, Md.

U.S. poet, critic, and short-story writer.

Poe was raised by foster parents in Richmond, Va., following his mother's death in 1811. He briefly attended the University of Virginia and then returned to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful, Byronic poems. By 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, the first of several periodicals he was to edit or write for. There he married a 13-year-old cousin, who died in 1847. At various times he lived in Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia. Alcohol, the bane of his irregular and eccentric life, caused his death at age 40. His works are famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. Among his tales are "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Pit and the Pendulum." "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter" initiated the modern detective story. His poems (less highly regarded now than formerly) are musical and sensuous, as in "The Bells," a showcase of sound effects; they include touching lyrics inspired by women (e.g., "Annabel Lee") and the uncanny (e.g., "The Raven").

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▪ American writer

Introduction

born January 19, 1809, Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.

died October 7, 1849, Baltimore, Maryland

 American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His "The Raven" (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature.

Life

      Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe's foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

      Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

      Later in 1839 Poe's Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue." In 1843 his "The Gold-Bug" won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York, wrote "The Balloon-Hoax" for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, "The Raven," which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny's” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May–October 1846) The Literati of New York City—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

      Poe's wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture "Eureka," a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

      Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure, or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

Appraisal

      Poe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.

      The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?

      Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics ( "To Helen," "Annabel Lee," "Eulalie," "To One in Paradise" ) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in "Ligeia" and "Eleonora." In "Israfel" his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

      More generally, in such verses as "The Valley of Unrest," "Lenore," "The Raven," "For Annie," and "Ulalume" and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death ( "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The Premature Burial," "The Oval Portrait," "Shadow" ), his tales of wickedness and crime ( "Berenice," "The Black Cat," "William Wilson," "The Imp of the Perverse," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart" ), his tales of survival after dissolution ( "Ligeia," "Morella," "Metzengerstein" ), and his tales of fatality ( "The Assignation," "The Man of the Crowd" ). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver ( "The Pit and the Pendulum" ), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.

      On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he attributed to his Legrand and Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical tales, which created the detective story, and his science fiction tales.

      The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style. In Poe's masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

      As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought the ancient unities: i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

      Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe's greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism (Symbolist movement) relied on his "The Philosophy of Composition," borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the modern theory of “pure poetry.”

Charles Cestre Thomas Ollive Mabbott Jacques Barzun Ed.

Additional Reading

Edition.

Thomas Ollive Mabbott (ed.), The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vol. (1969, 1978), the definitive edition.

Letters.

J.W. Ostrom, The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vol. (1948).

Bibliography.

J.L. Dameron and I.B. Cauthen, Jr., Edgar Allan Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism, 1827–1967 (1974), includes foreign criticism; Esther F. Hyneman, Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 (1974).

Biography.

Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941, reprinted 1969), long the standard work; N. Bryllion Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe (1949), emphasizes the theatrical quality of his life; Geoffrey Rans, Edgar Allan Poe (1965), introductory; Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (1963), his character and personality; C. Alphonso Smith, Edgar Allan Poe: How to Know Him (1921), introductory; James A. Harrison, Life of Edgar Allan Poe (1903, reprinted 1970); Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe (1961), primarily a critical introduction; Una Constance Pope-Hennessy, Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849: A Critical Biography (1934, reprinted 1969); William Robert Bittner, Poe: A Biography (1962), includes a summary of the basic points of scholarly controversy over his life; Roger Asselineau, Edgar Allan Poe (1970), a brief introduction; Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd ed. (1968), an overview of his achievement and influence.

Criticism.

E.H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (1957); Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale (1956); Louis Broussard, The Measure of Poe (1969), emphasis on his work as allegory and symbolism; Eric W. Carlson (ed.), The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829 (1966); William L. Howarth (ed.), Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales (1971); Robert Charles Regan (ed.), Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays (1967); Floyd Stovall, Edgar Poe the Poet: Essays New and Old on the Man and His Work (1969); Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe, and Other Studies (1933, reprinted 1962), each deals with some matter that has been in dispute among students of Poe.

Specialized topics

E.W. Parks, Edgar Allan Poe As Literary Critic (1964); W.T. Bandy, ed., Seven Tales, with a French Translation and Prefatory Essay by Charles Baudelaire (1971) and Charles Baudelaire, Edgar Allan Poe: Sa vie et ses ouvrages (1973), text in French and English, show Baudelaire as translator and plagiarist. John Walsh, Poe the Detective: The Curious Circumstances Behind “The Mystery of Marie Roget” (1967), reinvestigation of a crime used in a Poe story; David K. Jackson, Poe and the Southern Literary Messenger (1934, reprinted 1970), the periodical he edited; Hervey Allen and T.O. Mabbott, Poe's Brother (1926); Palmer Cobb, The Influence of E.T.A. Hoffmann on the Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1908); Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (1963); Celestin P. Cambiaire, The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France (1927, reprinted 1971); Samuel Moskowitz (ed.), The Man Who Called Himself Poe (1969), an anthology of fiction and poetry in which Poe appears as an integral character; Michael Allen, Poe and the British Magazine Tradition (1969); Patrick Francis Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Poe (1957).

Psychoanalytic

Joseph Wood Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (1926); John W. Robertson, Edgar Allan Poe: A Psychopathic Study (1922); David M. Rein, Edgar Allan Poe: The Inner Pattern (1960); Marie Bonaparte, Edgar Poe, étude psychoanalytique, 2 vol. (1933; The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, with an introduction by Sigmund Freud, 1949), often farfetched in its interpretations.

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