Edgar Allan Poe

Poe, Edgar Allan

Early Life and Works

After the death of his parents, both of whom were actors, by the time he was three years old, Poe was taken into the home of his godfather, John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant. The Allans took him to Europe, where he began his education in schools in England and Scotland. Returning to the United States in 1820, he continued his schooling in Richmond and in 1826 entered the Univ. of Virginia. He showed remarkable scholastic ability in classical and romance languages but was forced to leave the university after only eight months because of quarrels with Allan over his gambling debts. Poverty soon forced him to enlist in the army.

Because of the deathbed plea of his foster mother, he achieved an unenthusiastic reconciliation with Allan, which resulted in an honorable discharge from the army and an appointment to West Point in 1830. However, when Allan remarried the following year Poe lost all hope of further assistance from him and was expelled from the Academy for infraction of numerous minor rules. Living in a time of frequent economic crisis and depressions, he was to be plagued by poverty throughout his life, a condition that was exacerbated by his chronic alcoholism. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in 1827. It was followed by two more volumes of verse in 1829 and 1831. None of these early collections attracted critical or popular recognition. Poe went to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. In 1835, J. P. Kennedy helped him become an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He contributed stories, poems, and astute literary criticism, but his drinking cost him the editorship.

Later Life and Mature Works

In 1836 Poe married Virginia Clemm, then only 13, and in 1837 they went to New York City, where he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only novel. From 1838 to 1844, Poe lived in Philadelphia, where he edited Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839–40) and Graham's Magazine (1841–42). His criticism, which appeared in these magazines and in the Messenger, was keen, direct, incisive, and sometimes savage, and it made him a respected and feared critic. Some of his magazine stories were collected as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). At that time he also began writing the mystery tales that earned him the title “father of the modern detective story.” In 1844, Poe moved back to New York, where he worked on the Evening Mirror and later edited and owned the Broadway Journal.

The Raven and Other Poems (1845) won him fame as a poet both at home and abroad. In 1846 he moved to the Fordham cottage (now a museum) and there wrote “The Literati of New York City” for Godey's Lady's Book. His wife died in 1847, and by the following year Poe was courting the poet Sarah Helen Whitman. However, in 1849 he returned to Richmond and became engaged to Elmira Royster, a childhood sweetheart who was by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton. On his way north to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, he became involved in a drinking debauch in Baltimore. This indulgence proved fatal, for he died a few days later.

Assessment

Poe's literary executor, R. W. Griswold, overemphasized Poe's personal faults and distorted his letters. Poe was a complex person, tormented and alcoholic yet also considerate and humorous, a good friend, and an affectionate husband. Indeed, his painful life, his neurotic attraction to intense beauty, violent horror, and death, and his sense of the world of dreams contributed to his greatness as a writer. Such compelling stories as “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” involve the reader in a universe that is at once beautiful and grotesque, real and fantastic.

His poems (including “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “The City in the Sea,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee”) are rich with musical phrases and sensuous, at times frightening, images. Poe was also an intelligent and witty critic who often theorized about the art of writing. The analytical mind he brought to criticism is evident also in his famous stories of ratiocination, notably “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” Poe influenced such diverse authors as Swinburne, Tennyson, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, and the French symbolists.

Bibliography

See his collected poems and stories (3 vol., 1969–78); his letters, ed. by J. W. Ostrom (2 vol., 1948, repr. 1966); biographies by J. Symons (1981), D. Thomas and D. K. Jackson (1987), K. Silverman (1991), and J. Meyers (1992); studies by D. Hoffman (1972), B. L. Knapp (1984), J. G. Kennedy (1989), and D. Stashower (2006).

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–1849)

American writer Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins. His parents, both actors, died of tuberculosis in 1811. Young Edgar then lived with John Allan, a merchant, and incorporated his benefactor’s name into his own. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826, but after a falling out with John Allan he dropped out and joined the army. His first book, a collection of his poems, was published in 1827 shortly after his tenure in the army began. In 1830, after a brief reconciliation with John Allan, Poe was sent to West Point, but was expelled for disobedient behavior. In 1831 he moved to take a newspaper job in Baltimore, and while there met an aunt who had been previously unknown to him. In 1835, he married her daughter Virginia Clemm and remained married to her for twelve years, until her death in 1847. During those years, he moved from one job to another, drinking heavily, and always in debt. He himself died while on a drinking binge, and his body was found in a gutter. His literary executor wrote a scurrilous biography that turned many people against Poe through the rest of the nineteenth century, though it did not stop his rising fame, which grew both in North America and Europe. He was well-known in France and Germany in the late nineteenth century.

Rediscovered in this century, Poe found an extensive and appreciative new readership for both his poetry and short stories, many of which have been turned into movies. While Poe explored many areas of the gothic world, he never specifically wrote a vampire story. Contemporary critics, however, have found widespread use of a vampire or lamiai-like character in his various writings. Amid the actual vampirism encountered in the literature of the early nineteenth century, historians studying the period have noted that many writers considered a more metaphorical or psychic vampirism in which the vampire-like character sucks the life force or psychic energy from another, usually a person close to them. As early as the 1930s, D. H. Lawrence recognized such a theme in Poe’s work.

More recently James B. Twitchell carried Lawrence’s position even farther and argued that “the development of the vampire analogy was one of Poe’s central artistic concerns.” Twitchell saw the vampire (or lamiai, since his vampires were usually female) theme in a number of Poe’s stories, particularly “Bernice,” “Morella,” “Ligeia,” “The Oval Portrait,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In “Bernice,” Poe told the story of a man originally in a weakened condition who seemed to grow more robust as his cousin Bernice declined and finally died. In the end, however, it was Bernice who became the vampire, a fact signaled by her paleness, lifeless eyes, and prominent teeth.

The narrator of the story became increasingly afraid and after Bernice died, he went to the grave to slay the vampire by pulling her teeth.

Bernice was but the first of the supposed female vampires created by Poe.

Morella, in a story written shortly after “Bernice,” bled the narrator of her story of his willpower. She also possessed the vampire’s identifying marks: cold hands, hypnotic eyes, and a bloodless face. In like measure, the title character in “Ligeia” (1938) possessed a lamiai‘s likeness with her cold hands, pale appearance, prominent teeth, and hypnotic eyes. In these first three stories, suggested Twitchell, Poe used the vampiric theme to highlight a form of relationship between lovers. He returned to the theme in “The Fall of the House of Usher” in which the vampiric exchange of energy occurred between siblings. Finally, in “The Oval Portrait,” Poe wove a fascinating story of an artist who destroyed those around him by his all-consuming passion with his work. The story concerned an artist who was painting the portrait of his beautiful wife, not noticing that as he painted she grew weaker and weaker. He concluded his work by declaring it the essence of life itself. He eventually found his wife dead, completely drained of life.

Twitchell’s interpretations highlighted, if not a central theme, certainly an important and somewhat neglected secondary motif in Poe, a motif all the more significant due to its widespread use in the writings of so many of Poe’s prominent contemporaries.

Sources:

Poe, Edgar Allan

Poe, Edgar Allan