Poe, Edgar Allan

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), son of itinerant actors, was born in Boston. His father died the following year, and may have deserted his wife before that time, for she continued to support herself, taking the child with her from place to place until her death at Richmond, Va. (1811), when she left penniless Edgar and two other children: William Henry Leonard Poe (1808–31), who became a poet and may have collaborated with his brother; and Rosalie Poe (1810–74). Edgar was taken into the home of a Richmond merchant, John Allan. Although never legally adopted, for a long while he used his foster father's name, employing it as a middle name after 1824. He went to England (1815–20) with the Allans, and there attended school, as described in the semi‐autobiographical story “William Wilson.” After their return to Richmond, Mr. Allan, who had inherited a great fortune, was neither faithful to his wife nor sympathetic with his stepson, whose favoring of Mrs. Allan caused him to counter with remarks besmirching the character of Edgar and hinting at the possible illegitimacy of Rosalie. The relationship was further strained during Poe's attendance at the University of Virginia (1826), when Allan would give him no money, and he resorted unsuccessfully to gambling.

Allan insisted on Poe's preparation for a legal career, and after a violent quarrel the youth went to Boston, where he published Tamerlane (1827), issued anonymously at his own expense, which found no public. Under an assumed name and an incorrect age, he entered the U.S. army (1827) and was sent to Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, the setting for his later stories “The Gold‐Bug” and “The Balloon Hoax.” Mrs. Allan's deathbed plea caused a cool reconciliation with Allan, who aided Poe in obtaining an appointment to West Point and sent him a small sum to live on meanwhile in Baltimore, where he stayed with his brother and his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, while arranging for the publication of Al Aaraaf (1829), which contained the sonnet “To Science” and “ Tamerlane.” Admitted to West Point (1830), he soon set about by gross neglect of duty to get himself dismissed (1831), since his reason for attendance, the desire to reinstate himself with Allan, had already been lost.

During a short stay in New York, he published Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831), containing early versions of “Israfel,” “To Helen,” and The City in the Sea, and then went to live with Mrs. Clemm in Baltimore (1831–35), where he began to publish stories in magazines. He first attracted attention with “MS. Found in a Bottle,” which won a contest and brought him to the attention of J.P. Kennedy, who got him an editorial position on the Southern Literary Messenger, although he was discharged because of his drinking. At Baltimore he obtained a license (1835) to marry his cousin, Mrs. Clemm's daughter Virginia, aged 13, and may have married her before the public ceremony (1836). Reemployed by the Messenger, he moved with Mrs. Clemm and Virginia to Richmond, where, before he was finally discharged (1837), he had published the unfinished tragedy Politian, 83 reviews, 6 poems, 4 essays, and 3 short stories, and greatly increased the magazine's circulation.

He moved his family to New York (1837–38), where he did hackwork and published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, then going to Philadelphia, where as co‐editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839–40) he contributed “The Fall of the House of Usher,” containing the previously published “Haunted Palace”; “William Wilson”; “The Journal of Julius Rodman”; “Morella”; and other works; and published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), his first collection, which included “Berenice”; “Ligeia,” containing “The Conqueror Worm”; “The Assignation”; “The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall”; and other stories. Leaving Burton, he made plans for his own magazine, which led to an acquaintance with T.H. Chivers, whose similar poetry caused attacks and counterattacks of plagiarism after Poe's death. Poe was literary editor of Graham's Magazine (1841–42), to which he contributed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and other works, including some acute criticism which heightened his reputation. To the same magazine he later contributed “The Imp of the Perverse” (1845) and “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846). He came to know R.W. Griswold, who followed him as editor and bitterly attacked him after his death.

In 1842–43 he published “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” in a New York magazine, and won a prize in a Philadelphia newspaper for The Gold‐Bug, but even this did not help him, since he had wasted opportunities for further publication in Philadelphia. In New York (1844), he wrote “The Raven,” became associated with the New‐York Mirror, and as literary critic (1844–45) conducted his war there with Longfellow, whom he accused of plagiarism. These attacks he continued after becoming proprietor of the Broadway Journal (1845), where he also printed “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “Eleonora,” and The Premature Burial, and reprinted “The Tell‐Tale Heart” and other works. His eighth book, Tales (1845), reprinted previous works selected by E.A. Duyckinck, and included “The Black Cat” and “The Purloined Letter.” The Raven and Other Poems appeared the same year. Next associated with Godey's Lady's Book, Poe published “The Cask of Amontillado” and his articles on “The Literati of New York City,” whose harsh criticism of T.D. English prompted an answer, to which Poe replied with a successful libel suit.

Lacking regular employment, he with his wife and Mrs. Clemm nearly starved in their Fordham home, and Virginia died of tuberculosis during the winter. Although he published “Ulalume” and “The Domain of Arnheim,” and was at work on “The Bells” and Eureka, he was now more than ever in a thoroughly abnormal condition of body and mind, for which he attempted to find solace in the company of a Mrs. Shew, the poet Sarah Whitman, and the Mrs. Richmond addressed in To Annie. Torn between the love of the latter two, he attempted suicide. His erratic mind, depressed in personal affairs, nevertheless showed extreme exaltation in the lecture Eureka, in which he attempted to establish an all‐embracing theory of cosmogony. Upon his return to Richmond (1849), where he wrote “Annabel Lee,” he made a vigorous attempt to end his addiction to liquor, and became engaged to Mrs. Shelton, a former neighbor of the Allans, with whom he had had an early affair. On his way North to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, he stopped in Baltimore, where five days afterward he was discovered in a delirious condition near a saloon that had been used for a voting place. It has been supposed that he was captured in a drunken condition by a political gang, which used him for the then common practice of repeating votes. Four days later he died, and was buried in Baltimore beside his wife.

There have been strongly divergent evaluations of Poe's literary significance, from Emerson's dismissal of him as “the jingle man” and Lowell's “three‐fifths genius and two‐fifths sheer fudge” to Yeats's declaration, “always and for all lands a great lyric poet.” The difference of opinion is at heart directed at his criticism, for the poetry consistently exemplifies the theories set forth in “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Rationale of Verse,” and “The Poetic Principle,” in which he indicated his conception of poetic unity to be one of mood or emotion, and especially emphasized the beauty of melancholy. This romantic attitude has led to the criticism that his poetry is no more than a sustained tone, entirely dominated by its atmosphere. His reputation is also grounded on his use of the short story, which he preferred to the novel on the same basis that he preferred the short poem to the long. The stories may be said to fall into two categories, those of horror, set in a crepuscular world, and those of ratiocination, which set the standard for the modern detective story and conform to the critical theories expounded in Eureka. Although Poe was strongly influenced by many authors—e.g. Tennyson in his poetry, Coleridge in his criticism, and C.B. Brown in his fiction—he himself proved a source of influence on such Americans as Bierce and Hart Crane, and such Englishmen as Rossetti, Swinburne, Dowson, and Stevenson, besides having a profound effect on the French Symbolists.