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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