Edgar Allan Poe Biography
( 1809 – 1849 )
(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 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.
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