Edgar Allen Poe the Life

Edgar Allen Poe

The Life of Poe

When the great American writer Edgar Allan Poe passed away on October 7, 1849, there were many interesting, informative obituaries written about his life and his literature - and not all of them positive, to be sure. Certainly, there have been numerous biographies published on the life and work of Poe subsequent to that time, some of which will be used in this research; but the excerpts from several of obituaries seem especially appropriate for the introduction to this paper.

An obituary published originally in the New York Daily Tribune - which is reprinted in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (edited by I.M. Walker) - journalist Rufus Wilmot Griswold asserts that "...few will be grieved" by Poe's passing (Griswold 294). The reason for that skeptical outlook is that "...he had few or no friends," Griswold writes; and for the most part, regrets of his death will relate "...principally by the consideration that in him literary art lost one of its most brilliant, but erratic stars" (Griswold 294).

Griswold chronicles Poe's early life (he was orphaned at the age of two), Poe's career (though he wrote brilliantly "...his contributions...attracted little attention...), and Poe's struggle for a sustainable income and literary respectability. "[Poe's] conversation was at times almost supramortal in its eloquence" (Griswold 298); his voice was "modulated with astonishing skill" and his "large and variably expressive eyes looked reposed or shot fiery tumult" into those who were listening to him speak, Griswold explained.

Poe's imagery was from the worlds "...where no mortal can see but with the vision of genius," Griswold continued on page 299. Poe "rejected the forms of customary logic" and while he was "a dreamer...in heaven or hell..." he walked the streets "...with lips moving in indistinct curses." All those references notwithstanding, Griswold (p. 301) admits that Poe was "...scarcely surpassed in ingenuity... [and] was most successful in the metaphysical treatment of the passions."

Another obituary of note was written by Nathaniel Parker Willis in the Home Journal and also published in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage. Having worked with Poe on editorial projects, Willis recalled that during his working moments the author was "invariably punctual," "industrious," "quiet, patient...and [a] most gentlemanly person." Still, that having been said, when Poe drank "a single glass of wine," Hirst recounted, "his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost, and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane" (Willis, 308).

In Arthur Ransome's book, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Study, the author reports that in 1831 Poe was court-martialed and kicked out of West Point (for disobeying orders; failing to attend classes and church services; for missing parades). In 1836 married a 13-year-old girl (Virginia); and in the "six years since he left West Point Poe had fought his way up from poverty..." But subsequent to that his life "is a story of shiftings from the pillar to the post of journalism" (Ransome 28). He often took writing positions with journals and newspapers and then quit, burning bridges in the process.

His wife suffered a broken blood vessel while singing in 1842, and "her health afterward was never the same," according to author David Rein (Edgar A. Poe: The Inner Pattern) (Rein 4). Actually Virginia had been in poor health, but Poe had not noticed it until the blood vessel broke. Years later, "the event was still vivid in Poe's memory, as he indicated in a letter to a friend: 'Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before..."

Virginia died in 1847 following a long illness; this was sadness on piled onto bad luck, for prior to her passing they had "become so poor that a public appeal was made for them" (Ransome 39). In fact, much of Poe's adult life was lived in poverty - not in squalor, or downright destitution, but something approaching those conditions.

It is suggested that he took opium," Ransome writes on page 32, who makes no attempt to verify that rumor. But it is and was well-known that Poe was an tragically addicted alcoholic, and Ransome adds that while Poe had engaged in infidelity even while married to Virginia, after her death, he was know to "make love to two or three middle aged woman at once" (Ransome 42-43). His "frenzied wooings alternated with bouts of drinking," Ransome writes on page 43, and in the end, on October 7, 1849, after telling the doctor attending him the best thing his "best friend could do would be to blow his brains with a pistol" (Ransome 44), he died.

Poe's Literature - Generalizations and Critiques of his Work

Did the author's personal and social problems influence his work? Most certainly they did. But does Poe's work - including his more brilliant work - stand on its own quite apart from the knowledge readers have of his madness and his saturation with alcohol?

Robert Shulman ("Poe and the Powers of the Mind") writes in the journal English Literary History (ELH) that notwithstanding all the "emphasis on [Poe's] dubious metaphysics or even more unfortunate personal pathology" (Shulman 245) readers can indeed go to Poe's fiction for "illumination that writers of a more psychologically sophisticated era are oddly handicapped from providing."

And, Shulman explains to readers of his scholarly tome, don't believe that by embracing Poe's "aesthetics and cosmology" one can automatically have a better understanding of Poe's fiction and poetry. The typical psychological study of Poe tends to treat his fiction as an "unconscious manifestation of the author's problems," Shulman explains, "or as an unconscious conformation of orthodox Freudian categories." It seems to irritate Shulman that in many psychological studies of Poe's work, he "emerges as a rather bedraggled victim of tendencies he failed to understand."

However, in Shulman's view, Poe fully understood what he was doing in his fiction, and indeed had an "unusual insight into often obscure mental processes" and that he had "remarkable understanding and control."

In the book Critics on Poe (David B. Kesterson, Editor), poet Walt Whitman ("Poe's Significance") wrote that Poe's poetry, while illustrating "an intense faculty for technical and abstract beauty," lacked any sign of "moral principle...or the simpler affections of the heart..." The revered poet Whitman ripped Poe as having an "...incorrigible propensity toward nocturnal themes," as presenting a "demonic undertone behind every page," and "by final judgment," Poe's poetry probably belongs "among the electric lights of imaginative literature, brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat."

Writing in the same book, ("Poe's Enigmatic Reputation") E.C. Stedman asserted that Poe's imagination "was not of the highest order, for he never dared to trust it implicitly." And Poe's idea of beauty being of the "fantastic or grotesque," is not "the highest beauty" one can seek or obtain in literature. In the opinion of some older critics, Stedman writes, Poe's life "...was not only pitiful but odious, and his writings are false and insincere." The writing he did "speak of his morbid genius, his unjust criticisms, his weakness and ingratitude." Some critics loathed Poe so intensely, Stedman asserts, the "scarcely can endure the mention of his name."

Others, from younger generations, see him as a "sensitive, gifted being, most sorely beset and environed, who was tried beyond his strength and prematurely yielded, but still uttered not a few undying strains." And the newer class of critics and reviewers has raised a "...chorus of indiscriminate praise" which has "grown so loud as really to be an ill omen for his fame..."

Another critic writing in Critics on Poe is the legendary author Henry James, who truly was a "critic" in the purest sense. James alluded not to Poe's literature but to Poe's criticism of other writers, including Nathaniel Hawthorne. Poe's collection of critical sketches, James writes is "very curious and interesting reading," and it has one quality that stands out above the others, and "ought to keep it from ever being completely forgotten" - it is "an exquisite specimen of provincialism..."

And James didn't stop there. "Poe's judgments are pretentious, spiteful, vulgar..." But within those nasty themes Poe's judgments do contain "a great deal of sense and discrimination as well," and indeed, "here and there, sometimes at frequent intervals," one can find a phrase or two of "happy insight imbedded in a patch of the most fatuous pedantry."

Meanwhile when approaching a story by Edgar Allan Poe, the reader knows full well what to expect; something grim, shocking, bloody, evil, dark, sinister, and possibly something surprising is bound to happen. It may even be hideously frightening, and that will not be a shock to the senses of an experienced reader of Poe. But the real point of reviewing a Poe short story in the context of literary criticism, the real challenge, is to learn from the master himself. Reading Poe should be more than mere entertainment; it should be a learning experience in terms of how to use irony, how to produce sardonic humor, and how to employ bold and even cold narrative.

The Raven

Poe's famous poem, "The Raven," to most readers is a straightforward yet haunting, chilling tale of the loss of someone loved, and the troubling emotions and inner sensations that go along with a loss, no matter how the loss occurred. In this case, the "rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore..." is the one lost. Why did an angel name Lenore, one has to wonder? Is there something associated with death or the afterlife in this image?

In fact Poe builds up the beauty of "lost Lenore" in sharp contrast to him saying that it was a "bleak December," and "each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor" and adds that when he awoke from his nap, and looked out his chamber door, there was only darkness "and nothing more."