Discussions A

EDGAR ALL AN POE 1809–1849

The facts of Poe’s life, the most melodramatic of any of the major American writ-ers of his generation, have been hard to determine; lurid legends about him circulated even before he died, some spread by Poe himself. Two days after Poe’s death his supposed friend Rufus Griswold, a prominent anthologizer of American literature to whom Poe had entrusted his literary papers, began a campaign of character assassination, writing a vicious obituary and rewriting Poe’s correspon- dence so as to alienate the public as well as his friends. Griswold’s false claims and forgeries, unexposed for many years, signiScantly shaped Poe’s reputation for de cades.

Yet biographers now possess much reliable information about Poe’s life. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was a prominent actress, touring the Eastern Seaboard in a profes- sion that was then considered disreputable. In 1806, as a teenage widow, she married David Poe Jr., another actor. Edgar, the couple’s second of three children, was born in Boston on January 19, 1809; a year later, David Poe deserted the family. In Decem- ber 1811, Elizabeth Poe died at twenty- four while performing in Richmond, Virginia; the evidence suggests that her husband died soon afterward at the age of twenty- seven.

The disruptions of Poe’s Srst two years were followed by years of security after John Allan, a young Richmond tobacco merchant, and his wife, Frances, took him in; his siblings (William Henry, born 1807, and Rosalie, born 1810) were sent to dif- ferent foster parents. The Allans, who were childless, renamed the boy Edgar Allan and raised him as their son, but they never adopted him legally. Poe accompanied the family to En gland in 1815, where he attended good schools until the collapse of the London tobacco market forced the Allans back to Richmond in 1820. In 1824 Allan’s Srm failed and hostilities developed between Poe and his foster father. Allan lost interest in supporting Poe Snancially; even after inheriting all the property of a wealthy bachelor uncle, including several slave plantations, he provided only mini- mal funds to Poe for studying at the University of Virginia in 1826. Poe was a good student and wrote poetry on the side, but he ran into debt and began to drink. He gambled to pay his debts, instead losing as much as $2,000 (around $30,000 in cur- rent value). Allan refused to honor the debt, and Poe had to leave the university before his Srst year was completed. In March 1827, after another quarrel between the two, Allan ordered Poe out of the house.

The eighteen- year- old outcast Poe went Srst to Baltimore, and then moved north to his birthplace, where he paid for the printing of Tamerlane and Other Poems, “By a Bostonian,” in 1827. Even before its publication, “Edgar A. Perry” (he had changed his name to avoid creditors) had joined the army. Released from the army with the rank of sergeant major, Poe now sought Allan’s in^uence to help him get into the military academy at West Point. While waiting for the appointment, Poe condensed Tamerlane, revised other poems, and added new ones to make up a second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, published in Baltimore in December 1829. In a short but favorable review, the in^uential New En gland critic John Neal declared that Poe could become “ foremost in the rank of real poets.”

Admitted to West Point in June 1830, Poe quickly became known for his convivial- ity and skills in mathematics and French. Despite renewed con^ict with Allan, he believed himself the heir to Allan’s great fortune. But his expectations were dashed when Allan, less than two years after the death of Frances Allan, married the thirty-

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Edgar Allan Poe. Daguerreotype, 1848.

year- old Louisa Patterson in October 1830 and had a son in 1831 (in fact when Allan died in 1834, Poe was not mentioned in the will). The dis- illusioned Poe began to miss classes and roll calls and, as he anticipated, was expelled from school. Support- ive friends among the cadets col- lected funds to publish his Poems, which appeared in May 1831. In this third book of his poetry Poe revised some earlier poems and for the Srst time included versions of both “To Helen” and “Israfel.”

Poe’s mature career— from his twenty- Srst year to his death in his fortieth year— was spent in four lit- erary centers: Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. The Baltimore years—mid- 1831 to late 1835— were marked by hard work and comparative sobriety. Poe lived in poverty among his once- prosperous relatives, including his aunt Maria Poe Clemm and her daughter, Virginia. Poe’s Srst story, “Metzengerstein,” was published anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, in January 1832; other stories appeared in the same paper through- out the year. Over the next two years, Poe placed stories and poems in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. In January 1834 he made a signiScant breakthrough, publishing his tale “The Visionary” in Godey’s Lady’s Book, a pop u lar Philadelphia monthly edited by Sarah J. Hale, for many years the nation’s most prominent woman of letters. The writer and editor John P. Kennedy, who had read Poe’s submissions to the Saturday Visiter, introduced the increasingly well- known Poe to Thomas W. White, publisher of the new Richmond- based Southern Literary Messenger. In August 1835, Poe became White’s editorial assistant, moving back to Richmond where, for the next seventeen months, he played a signiScant role in the operations of the journal. Not only his stories and poems but also his often slashing reviews appeared in the Messenger, gaining him a reputation as the “Tomahawk Man,” as White called him. Relations between Poe and White deteriorated when Poe resumed drinking. Returning to Baltimore brie^y, Poe secretly married Virginia Clemm, and later publicly wed the thirteen- year- old Virginia in a May 1836 ceremony in Richmond.

Hoping to make the Southern Literary Messenger a nationally esteemed publica- tion, Poe had to negotiate between the proslavery views of white Virginians and the growing opposition to such views in the North. As a result, though the journal did occasionally print proslavery pieces (including an anonymous defense of slavery in a review of April 1836 that was long attributed to Poe but was almost certainly not written by him), it usually adopted a middle- of- the- road position linking slavery to states’ rights rather than God’s will. In Poe’s writings overall, slavery and race remain highly problematical. Like many white writers of the time, Poe sometimes resorted to racial ste reo types, and he sometimes conveyed his fears of the possibili- ties of black violence. For the most part, however, the perverse killers of his tales are white men. Critics continue to debate Poe’s views on slavery and race. Although he spent years in the South and even held hopes for inheriting the property of a

slaveholder, the fact is that his relative silence on the po liti cal debate on slavery makes him notably different from most southern intellectuals of the time— William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, and many others— who went on record with their proslavery views.

White Sred Poe early in 1837, citing Poe’s drinking, his demands for a higher sal- ary, and his regular clashes with White about the day- to- day operations of the jour- nal. Poe then moved, with his aunt (now his mother- in- law as well) and his wife, to New York City, where Mrs. Clemm ran a boarding house to support them all. In Richmond he had written a short novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of which White had run two installments in the Messenger early in 1837. Harper’s pub- lished it in July 1838, but it earned him little money. (It is now regarded as one of Poe’s major works.) In 1838 Poe moved to Philadelphia, where, despite extreme pov- erty, he continued writing. In May 1839 he got his Srst steady job in more than two years, as co- editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. There, in a job that paid him a small salary, he published book reviews and stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.” Late in 1839, the Philadelphia Srm of Lea and Blanchard published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of the twenty- Sve stories Poe had written to that date. The mostly good reviews did not lead to good sales; the country was in the midst of an economic depression.

By the late 1830s, Poe was at the height of his powers as a writer of tales, though his personal and professional life continued to be unstable. William Burton Sred him for drinking in May 1840 but recommended him to George Graham, who had bought out Burton’s and created a new magazine called Graham’s. Throughout 1841, Poe was with Graham’s as a co- editor, courting subscribers by writing articles on cryptography— the art and science of code breaking. He also published “The Mur- ders in the Rue Morgue,” the Srst of what he termed his “tales of ratiocination” fea- turing detective August Dupin, a tale that many critics regard as the earliest example of detective Sction. In January 1842, Virginia Poe, not yet twenty, began hemorrhag- ing from her lungs while singing; she lived as a tubercular invalid only Sve more years. Poe continued reviewing for Graham’s, but he resigned from the magazine in May 1842 after a dispute with Graham. His hope of his own journal— to be called the Stylus— was never realized.

In April 1844, Poe again moved his family to New York City, working as an editor on the New York Eve ning Mirror. Poe’s most successful year was 1845. The February issue of Graham’s contained an essay by James Russell Lowell declaring Poe a man of “genius”; and Poe’s most pop u lar work, “The Raven,” appeared in the February Amer- ican Review after advance publication in the New York Eve ning Mirror. One new liter- ary acquaintance, the in^uential editor Evert A. Duyckinck, selected a dozen of Poe’s stories for a collection brought out by Wiley & Putnam in June and arranged for the same Srm to publish The Raven and Other Poems in November. Poe lectured on the poets of America and became a principal reviewer for a new weekly, the Broadway Journal, which also reprinted most of Poe’s stories and poems. Still hoping to have his own magazine, in which he could be free of editorial interference, he purchased the Broadway Journal only to see it fail in January 1846.

While the tempo of Poe’s life speeded up, with ever more literary feuds and drink- ing bouts, he maintained an undiminished commitment to his writing. During 1847, the year that Virginia died from tuberculosis, Poe was seriously ill himself. In 1848 he published Eureka, a philosophical prose work that presented God as the force behind all matter, and all matter as seeking a return to oneness. (See the excerpt in the section on “Science and Technology in the Pre–Civil War Nation.”) He also published “Ulalume,” a poem inspired by his grief at the loss of Virginia. In 1848 he fell in love with the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who refused his initial pro- posal, then agreed to a December 1848 marriage, and Snally broke off the relation- ship. In his Snal year, during a two- month stay in Richmond, Poe joined a temperance

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society and got engaged to Elmira Royster Shelton, a widow whom he had known in his childhood. On a subsequent trip to Baltimore, Poe was found senseless near a polling place on Election Day (October 3). Taken to a hospital, he died on October 7, 1849, “of congestion of the brain.” His poem “Annabel Lee” was published posthu- mously later that year.

Much of Poe’s collected writings consists of his criticism, representing his abid- ing ambition to become a powerful critic and in^uence the course of American lit- erary history. Just as he had modeled his poems and Srst tales on British examples (or British imitations of the German), he took his critical concepts from treatises on aesthetics by late- eighteenth- century Scottish Common Sense phi los o phers, who emphasized the aesthetic importance of moral sympathy. Later, he modiSed his approach with borrowings from A. W. Schlegel, Coleridge, and other Romantics, who emphasized the importance of intuitively conceived notions of the beautiful. But despite modulations in his theories, Poe’s critical principles were consistent: he thought poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty; informational poetry, poetry of ideas, or any sort of didactic poetry was, in his view, illegitimate. Holding that true poetic emotion was a vague sensory state inspired by the work of art itself, he set himself against realistic details in poetry, although the prose tale, with truth as one object, could proSt from the discreet use of speciScs. He believed that poems and tales should be short enough to be read in one sitting; otherwise the unity of effect would be dissipated. In his most famous artistic treatise, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe makes clear that, unlike Emerson, he remains skeptical of the possibilities of transcendental vision untethered by the material realities of body and aesthetic form. In crucial ways, then, Poe split with Emerson and other Transcenden- talists in arguing that the vision that comes to the artist and reader is inextricably linked to the formal qualities of the work of art itself.

Poe’s reputation today rests not on his criticism, however, but on his poetry and tales. He has had im mense in^uence on poets and prose writers both in the United States and abroad; among those who have followed his lead are such modernists as T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. The tales have proven hard to classify— are they burlesque exaggerations of pop u lar forms of Sction, or serious attempts to contribute to or alter those forms, or both of these at the same time? Poe’s own comments delib- erately obscured his intentions. Responding to a query from his literary admirer John P. Kennedy in 1836, who labeled his work “seriotragicomic,” he said that most of his tales “were intended for half banter, half satire— although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.” At the core of this and others of Poe’s comments on his Sction is the pragmatism of a professional writer who recog- nized the advent of a mass market and wanted to succeed in it. He worked hard at structuring his tales of aristocratic madmen, self- tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs, and other deviant types so as to produce, as he wrote in “The Philoso- phy of Composition,” the greatest possible effect on his readers. Poe, more than most, understood his audience— its distractedness, its fascination with the new and short- lived, its anomie and confusion— and sought ways to gain its attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophi- cal, cultural, psychological, and scientiSc issues: the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending demo cratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimen- sions of one’s own mind; and new ideas about technology and the physical universe. Seriously as he took the writing of his tales, Poe always put his highest stock in poetry, which he called a “passion” and not merely a “purpose.” As he remarked in “The Philosophy of Composition,” poetry, even more than Sction, provides the possi- bility of taking the reader out of body, in effect out of time, through “that intense and pure elevation of soul” which can come with “the contemplation of the beautiful.” In

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1. The text is from The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The sonnet was initially printed as an untitled prefatory poem to Poe’s 1829 volume Al Aaraaf: Poe added the title to an 1843 reprinting. 2. True, Stting. 3. Roman goddess of the moon (imaged as a chariot or car that she drives through the sky). 4. Wood nymph in Greek and Roman mythology, often thought of as living within a tree and per- ishing with it. 5. Nymph living in brooks or fountains.

1. The text is that of 1845, with two errors of indentation corrected. The poem was Srst pub- lished in 1831, where, among other differences, lines 9 and 10 read: “To the beauty of fair Greece, / And the grandeur of old Rome.” The title invokes Helen of Troy, according to Greek myth the beau- tiful daughter of Zeus and the cause of the Trojan War. 2. Victorious ships (from the Greek nike). 3. Luxurious, curling. 4. Nymphlike, fairylike.

a life that was often a tangled mess, the pursuit of the beautiful in works of art moti- vated Poe’s writing to the very end.

Sonnet—To Science1

Science! meet2 daughter of old Time thou art Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes! Why prey’st thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture! whose wings are dull realities! How should he love thee— or how deem thee wise 5 Who woulds’t not leave him, in his wandering, To seek for trea sure in the jewell’d skies Albeit, he soar with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragg’d Diana3 from her car, And driv’n the Hamadryad4 from the wood 10 To seek a shelter in some happier star? The gentle Naiad5 from her fountain- ̂ ood? The elSn from the green grass? and from me The summer dream beneath the shrubbery?

1829, 1845

To Helen1

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks2 of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way- worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. 5

On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth3 hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad4 airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. 10

Lo! in yon brilliant window- niche How statue- like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand!