Edgar Allen Poe the Controversial

Edgar Allen Poe

The controversial American poet Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston and dies forty years later in Baltimore, under unknown circumstances. Poe's eventful and unusual life seems, in a way, as peculiar as his work, and it is considered by many of his critics and interpreters as the main source of influence for his art. His life is marked by the deaths of many of his beloved relatives and friends: his parents, both actors, die when the poet was only two years old, his foster mother dies a little later, then his brother, and finally his wife Virginia, at the age of twenty two, after having been married to Poe for nine years. The frequent drinking, his poor health, his poverty and his social inadaptability all contribute to his formation as a writer. Thus, the most important influences on Poe's creativity are his own personality, the death and sickness of the most important women in his life, and the social problems he was confronted with, especially those related to his career as an editor. These aspects of Poe's life are crucial to the interpretation of his work, as they serve as a ground both for his originality and for his pessimistic view of life. The death of a beautiful woman, which is the most recurrent leitmotif in Poe's verse and prose, has influenced in its turn many other writers, from the French symbolists to Vladimir Nabokov, Oscar Wilde, Melville or Jorge Luis Borges. It is important to notice that the life facts have influenced not only the subjects and the obsessive motives of Poe's works, but actually his philosophy about life, death and art: the obsessive life-in-death images (the encrypted corpses of beautiful women, fro example) can be interpreted as metaphors for the dead but still lifelike work of art.

Thus, many of Poe's critics have placed an utmost importance on the very character and personality of the author, which seemed to have had an innate or acquired propensity for morbidity and death. Many of the greatest psychoanalysts have commented on his work, as a result of his strange personality, among them Freud, Lacan and Marie Bonaparte. Freud for instance contended that his work must be connected to his personality in the first place, if it is to be understood:

Thanks to her interpretative effort, we now realize how many of the characteristics of Poe's works were conditioned by his personality, and can see how that personality derived from intense emotional fixations and painful infantile experiences. Investigations such as this do not claim to explain creative genius, but they do reveal the factors which awake it and the sort of subject matter it is destined to choose."(Felman, 126)

Louise J. Kaplan also traced Poe's work back to the anxieties and fears of his troubled childhood. According to her Poe's traumas, especially the father's desertion of the family and then his mother's death, are the main influences behind his work. Kaplan, like many other psychoanalysts, seems to treat Poe as a 'case', that is someone who has important psychological issues, which have been translated into the violence and morbidity of works:

When Poe was about eighteen months old, his alcoholic father abandoned the family. Shortly thereafter, Edgar witnessed the sickness, decay, and death of his mother. He became an orphan and his sister and brother disappeared. Poe's tales are convincing depictions of the castrations, separations, abandonments, and annihilations that constitute the typical anxieties of childhood, anxieties that in Poe's case must have reached overwhelming and therefore traumatic proportions. Poe's portrayals of body mutilations, smotherings, drownings, entombments of the living, the wasting away and rotting away of bodies, situations emptied of human dialogue, are calculated to re-evoke in the reader the archaic fears of childhood."(Kaplan, 50)

Felman however, who also tries to resolve the psychoanalytical substrata of Poe's work, concludes more pertinently that Poe should be seen in the first place as a poet and a genius. He remarks that his work and the lack of balance of his world view should not be lain so much on the psychological structure of the poet but actually on the creative process itself. According to him, the most interesting aspect of his work from a psychological point-of-view, is the permanent struggle between the conscious and unconscious. Most of his stories are either purely detective pieces or imbued with elements of deductive reason or analysis. At the same time, this conscious level is always doubled by an unconscious one, the obsession, the "idee fixe":

Poe is felt to be at once the most unequaled master of 'conscious art' and the most tortuous unconscious case, as such doomed to remain "the perennial victim of the idee fixe, and of amateur psychoanalysis.' Poetry, I would thus argue, is precisely the effect of a deadly struggle between consciousness and the unconscious; it has to do with resistance and with what can neither be resisted nor escaped. Poe is a symptom of poetry to the extent that poetry is both what most resists a psychoanalytical interpretation and what most depends on psychoanalytical effects."(Felman, 139)

Thus, Felman defines poetry as the struggle between the conscious and unconscious, and this definition seems to apply very well to Poe's works which are made up of the conflict between his actual life experiences and the conscious artistic process. As a personality Poe strives between the unconscious side, derived from his life facts, and the conscious ideas he entertains about life, art and death.

The influence of his Poe's personality on his works, that is of the sum of events that had shaped his psychological structure are complemented by the more particular events in his life, related strictly to the death of the beloved and beautiful women in his life. Again the same statement about the struggle between his consciousness and unconsciousness remains valid, as Poe transforms the obsession he has with the dead women that he loved, into a poetic principle. In his Philosophy of Composition he advocates that the death of a beautiful woman is "the most poetical topic in the world":

The poet endeavored in the Philosophy of Composition to rationalize his obsession with dying young women, calling the theme "the most poetical topic in the world," as if that assertion explained the brooding evocation of the "lost Lenore" and all of the other doomed ladies in his writing. Poe's biography yields plentiful sources for his preoccupation with cadaverous women and mournful men[...]"(Kennedy, 78)

The beautiful woman that dies is in a way a symbol for art itself, as it can be seen in Poe's short story the Oval Portrait, where the artist manages to capture the lifelike qualities of the girl portrayed:

She was a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee. And evil was the hour when she saw, and loved, and wedded the painter. He, passionate, studious, austere, and having already a bride in his Art; she a maiden of rarest beauty, and not more lovely than full of glee: all light and smiles, and frolicksome as the young fawn: loving and cherishing all things: hating only the Art which was her rival: dreading only the pallet and brushes and other untoward instruments which deprived her of the countenance of her lover."(Poe, 115)

As Kennedy observes, the author seems to have implied in his story that the artist actually steals away the life of the object during the creative process:

The picture possesses an "absolute lifelikeliness of expression" that startles the narrator, rivets his gaze for half an hour, and then leads him back to the book (which happens to describe the paintings in the bedroom). The volume provides a brief account -- reminiscent of Hawthorne's "The Birthmark" -- of a "wild and moody" painter who worked so obsessively to idealize his young bride through portraiture that he did not notice her failing health and so completed his masterpiece only to discover that he had killed the beloved subject."(Kennedy, 71)

Thus, art can be seen as a preserver of life after death. This is probably Poe's translation of his own feelings: the lingering obsession with the dead woman, and his impossibility to let go. The pain at the loss of the beautiful women in his life is sublimated in his view about art. The most important inspiration for this theory was presumably Virginia, the thirteen-year-old wife and cousin, who had died of consumption. According to one of Poe's best known biographers, Quinn, the poet's love for the child wife was genuine, and she was his inspiration for the pure and good women in his writings, like Annabel Lee, Eleonora or Ulalume:

Poe's life-long devotion to Virginia is beyond question, and his own answer to the criticisms which his marriage created in Richmond and elsewhere is given in 'Eleonora' and 'Annabel Lee.' It is, incidentally, the only answer a gentleman could make. 'Eleonora' is, of course, an ideal picture, but its description of the passing of cousinship into passion has more verity than the testimony of feminine friends whose emphasis upon Virginia's mental immaturity was perhaps based upon a wish rather than a fact. Such evidence as there is can be taken up at a later time. But of one thing we can be sure. If Virginia was the prototype of Eleonora she was not the model for Morella or Berenice or Ligeia."(Quinn, 255)

These feelings can also be inferred from Poe's letters to Mrs. Clemm, Virginia's mother:

I am blinded with tears while writing this letter-- I have no wish to live another hour. Amid sorrow, and the deepest anxiety your letter reached -- and you well know how little I am able to bear up under the pressure of grief -- My bitterest enemy would pity me could he now read my heart -- My last my only hold on life is cruelly torn away -- I have no desire to live and will not but let my duty be done. I love, you know I love Virginia passionately devotedly. I cannot express in words the fervent devotion I feel towards my dear little cousin -- my own darling. But what can [I] say. Oh think for me for I am incapable of thinking. Al [l my] thoughts are occupied with the supposition that both you & she will prefer to go with N. Poe.[...]"(Hart, 9)

Hayes documents on the great number of losses in Poe's life, from his natural mother, to his foster one, and to Virginia, each of these increasing his pain and his obsession:

And there were losses of other women whom Poe had loved, as well: the death of surrogate mother Jane Stith Stanard in 1824, the termination of his romance with young Elmira Royster in 1826, the death of foster mother Frances Allan in 1829. Moreover, as he worked on "The Raven, " he may well have anticipated the death of his "young, gentle, and idolized wife" Virginia: the onset of her tuberculosis occurred three years before the poem was published (and she died two years after it appeared). Finally, there was another critical loss for Poe - the death of his brother Henry, which recalled the death of his mother. In 1829, Poe wrote of the connection, asserting that "there can be no tie more strong than that of brother for brother - it is not so much that they love one another as that they both love the same parent. " (Hayes, 194)

Poe idealized the image of the lost women in his writing, and they became a symbol of beauty that passes away, as it is expressed in his most important poems like, the Raven, the Sleeper, Annabel Lee and Ulalume. In the Raven, for example Poe's emphasis on the word "nevermore" is a token of his obsession with death and the impossibility of resurrection or return:

Prophet!" said I, "thing of evil- prophet still, if bird or devil!

By that Heaven that bends above us - by that God we both adore

Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,

It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore

Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore."

Quoth the Raven, 'Nevermore.'"(Poe, 217)

His other poems, like Ulalume evoke the same feeling of absence and desolation. The dialogue between the poet and his psyche in this poem is very significant: the writer seems to be driven by a strange force to the place of burial of his beloved, while he is holing a dialogue with his conscious self. The duality between the unconscious drive that brings his steps to the tomb and the conscious attempt to persuade himself that all is well, is dramatic. The direct dialogue with his psyche, with his unconsciousness is very telling: the poet cannot dominate his obsession with the death of his lover, that attracts him over and over again.