Poe Edgar Allan

Bloom's Literature Poe Edgar Allan An American writer and critic who is credited with refining the short story form and inventing the modern detective story, Poe has been denied the full respect due his accomplishments. The details of his life, rife with reports of gambling, drinking, addiction to opiates, and other profligate behavior, combined with his marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, have overshadowed his achievements, which include the publication of more than 350 poems, short stories, and critical reviews and essays, and his influence in creating a uniquely American form of literature, as well as his continuing influence on contemporary literature and culture. Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in a boardinghouse on Carver Street, in Boston, near the Boston Common, while his actor parents, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe (1787–1811) and David Poe, Jr. (1784–1811?), were on tour. His elder brother, William Henry Leonard Poe (1807–1831), was also born in Boston, but his sister Rosalie Poe (1810–1874) was born in Richmond, Virginia. Edgar's father had been studying to be a lawyer but abandoned that career when he joined an acting troupe and married Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, who had been widowed less than a year before. Edgar's paternal grandfather, David Poe, Sr. (1742–1816), was a prominent member of Richmond society, a distinguished veteran of the American Revolution, and the former deputy quartermaster of Baltimore, as well as a wealthy man, but he disowned his son when David, Jr. abandoned law for the stage. David Poe's lack of acting talent and critics' harsh reviews led to his lack of popularity onstage, and his heavy drinking and violent temper made him a poor bet as a wage earner. After he deserted his wife and three children in July 1811, leaving them impoverished, Edgar's mother struggled to feed her children by continuing to take any stage roles she was offered, although she was already ill with tuberculosis and died only months later. Accounts of her death relate that she and her children were living in a poorly heated room, with straw on the floor for their beds; the three children were with her as she died and were found huddling close to their dead mother. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE49_Poeadj2.jpg Maria Poe Clemm After experiencing the trauma of their mother's death, the children were further traumatized when they were separated and sent to live with different families. William Henry Leonard was sent to Baltimore to live with the paternal grandparents, then after their death lived with his late father's sister Maria Poe Clemm (1790–1871). As an adult, William Henry journeyed to the Near East, the West Indies, Montevideo, the Mediterranean, and Russia during the late 1820s as a crewman aboard the American frigate Macedonian; his accounts of his adventures were listened to eagerly by Edgar, who later claimed some of William Henry's adventures for his own, hinting darkly of adventures in Russia and other distant places. William Henry died of tuberculosis and alcoholism at age 24. Rosalie, later described by observers as being mentally slow, was adopted by William and Jane Scott Mackenzie. Young Edgar was taken into the home of John Allan (1779–1834), a wealthy Richmond merchant whose wife, Frances Allan (1785–1829), was unable to have children. Both Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. Allan had been among a group of women from respectable Richmond families who considered their charitable duty to bring food and other items to the poor families in Richmond; among the families for which appeals were made were Elizabeth Poe and her children. When the children were left bereft of family, the two women assumed responsibility for Rosalie and Edgar. Frances Allan was a tender and unassertive woman who gave Edgar the maternal nurturing and love that he had not experienced with his struggling birth mother, and she also protected him against her husband's anger. The Allans provided Edgar with a private school education when they traveled to England in 1815, and his education continued in private schools when they returned to the United States in 1820. In 1826, Poe entered the newly established University of Virginia, but John Allan made him leave one year later after Edgar racked up huge debts by drinking and gambling instead of attending classes. Poe was forced to return to Richmond as a clerk in Allan's mercantile firm, but he hated the work and ran off to Boston, where he enlisted in the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. After Poe left the Allan household in 1827, he continued his contact with Frances Allan and wrote her affectionate letters. She was chronically ill and died of tuberculosis at age 44. In letters written to Sarah Elmira Royster, Poe revealed that he felt guilty about Frances Allan's death, feeling that he somehow might have been able to prevent it had he remained on good terms with John Allan and continued to live with the family. His grief was increased because he could not be with her in her final hours due to a bureaucratic delay in processing his military papers. He arrived in Richmond the day after her funeral. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE41_Poeadj2.jpg Frances Allan Poe served two years in the army, after which he pleaded with Allan to help him to leave the army. Allan agreed, provided that Poe obtain an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, to which he acquiesced. Frances Allan had died in the last weeks of Poe's enlistment, but she had pleaded his case with her husband, who was willing to give him another chance. Although Allan appeared to outsiders to treat Edgar as his son, his support was never wholehearted. Allan raised Edgar as the seeming heir to his fortune, but he never legally adopted the boy. Instead, Allan, who with his partner, Charles Ellis, eventually became a wealthy merchandiser of tobacco commodities and also inherited a great deal of money from his uncle William Galt, provided Edgar with only minimal support. He sent Edgar to the University of Virginia but failed to provide him sufficient funds to buy furniture, clothes, meals, or books. When Edgar was at West Point, Allan refused to provide any of the financial support that would raise Edgar's military life from its meager, rigid, and difficult existence of bare survival. Edgar might have tolerated the frugal coldness that Allan showed him, but he was intensely protective of his foster mother, whom he felt Allan had mistreated by having several extramarital affairs and by fathering several children by different women. Poe quarreled with John Allan before entering West Point, and that argument, coupled with Allan's remarriage in October 1830 to Louisa Gabriella Patterson, created a final, irrevocable break. Even after his death, John Allan provided one more insult to his foster son by omitting all mention of Edgar from his will, but he provided inheritances for illegitimate twin sons born in 1830, only a year after the death of Frances. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE42_POEadj.jpg John Allan Already at the military academy but with little hope of financial support from Allan, Poe worked to be expelled, and succeeded. After he left, he began his publishing efforts in earnest. His immediate literary influence was George Gordon, Lord Byron (1788–1824), whom he had emulated in wearing primarily black clothing and in his predilection toward melancholy subjects. Poe admired Byron both for his poetry and his rebelliousness, but John Allan had earlier expressed clearly his hatred for the cult that had grown up around Byron, and he blamed Edgar's attention to Byron for his foster son's rebellious behavior and profligate ways. In an attempt to show that he had reformed, Poe reassured Allan in a letter dated May 29, 1829, that he had long ago given up Byron as a model. However, this statement is suspect, as it appears in a letter in which he also asked his guardian to write to the publishers of Al Aaraaf to guarantee the book to the extent of $100. For years afterward, Poe was fond of reciting Byron's poetry during his public recitations. In one lecture, presented in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1848, his recitation of Byron's "Bride of Abydos" was rendered so affectingly that one onlooker wrote that this reading was the only remembrance of the evening that he carried away. The influence of the Byronic personality and attitudes on Poe's work is found in his manner of dressing in dramatic black, as well as in letters, poems, and several tales. A few Poe characters are thinly veiled examples of the Byronic physiognomy and personality, most apparently in "The Assignation." His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, had appeared anonymously in 1827, and the second volume of verse—his first to be commercially published—Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, appeared in 1829. Poe's third book, Poems, appeared in 1831. In 1829, no longer welcome in John Allan's home, Edgar moved to Baltimore to live with his paternal aunt Maria Poe Clemm (1790–1871) and her young daughter, Virginia Clemm (1822–1847), as well as her son Henry, an intermittent drinker; his paralytic grandmother, old Mrs. David Poe, who had been bedridden for two years; and his alcoholic older brother William Henry Leonard, who suffered from advanced tuberculosis. The household was povertystricken and survived only on the money that Henry Clemm made as a mason's apprentice, Poe's small allowance from John Allan, and Mrs. Clemm's sewing; yet Mrs. Clemm, known as "Muddy" to her dear "Eddie," enthusiastically welcomed him. "Muddy" was a penniless widow, but she was also a strong-willed woman who appears to have offered Poe both unconditional love and complete support in his literary attempts. Although not educated, she seems to have understood Poe's literary genius and backed his efforts to publish his early stories, and she offered him physical and mental support as well as emotional assistance throughout his career. With this move, Poe began a productive period of writing and publishing short stories while he also worked as an editor and established an important connection with the Southern Literary Messenger, where he served as editor from 1835 through 1837. For six years, Poe used the Clemm household as his home base as he traveled to Richmond and other cities in efforts to publish his writing and to make a living. During most of that time, he treated Virginia simply as his young cousin whom he called "Sis" or "Sissy," even asking her on occasion to carry love notes to other young women whom he was courting. After his grandmother and brother died and Maria's son went to sea, Poe felt a responsibility for the security of Maria and Virginia, with whom he had formed the first happy family unit in his life. In 1834, Poe expressed his love for the intelligent and beautiful 12-year-old Virginia, 13 years his junior, and proposed marriage. He tried to obtain a teaching position at Richmond Academy to provide a stable income for his new life, and while he was in Richmond, his second cousin Neilson Poe, who had married Virginia's half sister, offered to take Virginia into his household and to care for her until she was what he considered to be of a more suitable age for marriage. The offer was refused by Virginia and her mother, who took pity on Edgar, who had written desperate letters to them in which he had expressed his passionate love for Virginia and begged her to reject Neilson's offer. In a threatening and agonizing letter sent on August 29, 1835, Poe wrote, "Virginia, My love, my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey, think well before you break the heart of your cousin." https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE50_Poeadj2.jpg Virginia Clemm Poe In October 1835, when Poe was rehired by the Southern Literary Messenger, Virginia and Maria joined him in Richmond. After seven months, on May 16, 1836, the 13-and-a-half-year-old Virginia and the 27-year-old Poe were married. A witness swore that Virginia was 21. The marriage provoked a storm of disapproval among Poe's acquaintances and his extended family, especially his cousin Neilson, who had earlier tried to take Virginia into his household, but the marriage had Maria Clemm's blessing. Poe made every effort to develop Virginia's intellectual and social abilities, tutoring her in the classics, algebra, and other academic subjects, and he stretched his meager income to provide her with singing and piano lessons. Her sweet disposition and complete adoration of her "Eddie" made the first six years of marriage a time of emotional peace for the three members of the little household. For the first two years of the marriage, Poe continued to sleep apart from Virginia, but they began a normal married life when she turned 16, which continued until she experienced her first hemorrhage from tuberculosis when she was 20. From all accounts, Virginia remained childlike, plump, and sweet-tempered throughout most of the first six years of their marriage. In 1842, after a period of severe financial strain, Virginia lost considerable weight and became ill. On January 20, 1842, while she was playing the piano and singing to amuse her husband, a blood vessel in her throat broke, and blood began to pour from her mouth. Little more than five years later, on January 30, 1847, Virginia died. In the five years from the first serious evidence of her illness, Virginia had become an invalid, and her increasingly fragile health and the destruction of her body by tuberculosis sent Poe into deep depression. He lived in daily fear of her death, and the pain of watching her body waste away stayed with him until his own death. Many critics have seen the influence of Virginia's five years of dying in Poe's work during those years, especially in works that focus upon death in life, such as "Eleonora," "Berenice," "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." The madness of which Poe speaks in this letter and in other communications becomes the madness of the narrators of "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Black Cat." Although "Annabel Lee" may reflect their relationship, it is "Ulalume," published in December 1847, that was inspired by Virginia's death and which Poe made clear was a memorial to his late wife. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE12adj.jpg Edgar Allan Poe's "Annabel Lee" During their 10 years of marriage, Poe moved the family, including Maria Clemm, to Philadelphia and then to New York City, where he worked as an editor on such periodicals as Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, Alexander's Weekly Messenger, and Godey's Magazine and Lady's Book, among others. He also published extensive criticism and numerous poems and short stories in these and other publications. He published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, in 1838; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, containing 25 stories, was published in 1840; The Raven and Other Poems appeared in 1845, as did Tales by Edgar A. Poe. These years were Poe's most productive, and he appeared to enjoy the presence of his wife and aunt/mother-in-law, both of whom adored and revered him and made certain that his literary genius had the quiet and the comfort in which to flourish. It was also during these years of his marriage that Poe developed the detective story format with the detective as the main protagonist and created the detective who uses his ratiocinative power to solve the crime, which would serve as models to later writers. Poe's Auguste Dupin, a French detective hero, appeared in "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), "The Mystery of Marie Roget" (published over 1842 and 1843), and "The Purloined Letter" (1845). Dupin's remarkable powers of deduction and his idiosyncrasies—such as the desire to sequester himself from society and his procedure of entering the mind of the murderer—as well as the dual national association of a French detective created by an American writer, led to a range of successors both in the United States and abroad, the most famous of which was Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's Sherlock Holmes. Doyle used Poe's technique of narrating his detective's exploits through the viewpoint of a companion, and he gave Holmes intellectual capabilities as well as bizarre habits similar to those of Dupin. Critics have also suggested that Agatha Christie had Poe's Dupin in mind in creating her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who insists that his powers of detection reside in his use of "the little gray cells" and whose idiosyncrasies are abundant. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE24_Poeadj.jpg Edgar Allan Poe's "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" Within nine months of arriving in New York City in April 1844, Poe published "The Raven," and his success was instantaneous. Thus began a round of literary gatherings, invitations to lecture, and acquaintances with other writers who were later profiled in "The Literati of New York City." With his newfound success came the expected great tragedy when Virginia died in 1847 of tuberculosis. Poe also became very ill and was nursed by Maria Clemm and Marie Louise Shew, the medically trained daughter of a physician. Shew consulted the physician Valentine Mott, who told her that Poe had had a brain lesion when young, and this was responsible for the erratic behavior throughout his life. In the remaining two years of his life, Poe continued to publish and lecture. He died in Washington Hospital in Baltimore, on October 7, 1849, and was buried in Westminster Churchyard the following day. Poe had made a terrible error in appointing Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1815–1877) as his literary executor. Griswold was a Baptist clergyman who replaced Poe as the editor of Graham's Magazine, and the two men were literary and personal rivals for the favors of Frances Osgood. Despite their rivalry, both recognized the power that each carried in the literary world, so they maintained a tentative friendship. Once Poe was dead, however, Griswold was free to wreak his revenge on his old rival. The power and authority that such an appointment brought led the public to believe every scurrilous word of the infamous obituary of Poe that Griswold published. Using the pseudonym Ludwig, Griswold published an obituary of Poe in the October 9, 1849, issue of the New York Daily Tribune, which destroyed Poe's reputation and remained the "official" view of the poet's life for nearly a half century. As soon as Poe was dead, Griswold began the process of exacting posthumous revenge against Poe, stating of his death that "few will be grieved by it" and depicting him as a mentally unstable misanthrope who "had few or no friends." Still bitter from Poe's attacks on his work, Griswold condemned Poe as "little better than a carping grammarian" who also had "little or nothing of the true point of honor." Despite efforts by John R. Thompson, who published "The Late Edgar A. Poe" in the November 1849 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger, and George R. Graham, who published in his magazine "Defence of Poe" in March 1850 and "The Genius and Characteristics of the Late Edgar Allan Poe" in February 1854, Griswold's vitriolic characterization of Poe became the unofficial biographical record that extended well into the 20th century and kept Poe from achieving his full literary due. Griswold's lies included claims that Poe was expelled from the University of Virginia, that he deserted from the U.S. Army, and that he had been "sexually aggressive" toward John Allan's second wife. Griswold also made a pronounced effort to prove that Poe was a morally negligent drug addict whose concerns were only for himself. In his introduction to the 1850 edition of Poe's works, Griswold misled readers by suggesting that Poe had based the portrayals in his bizarre stories on personal experience. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE54_Poeadj.jpg Rufus Griswold Poe had trusted that Griswold would make certain that his sister Rosalie and "Muddy" would have comfortable lives from the proceeds of his literary estate, but his wishes were not honored. Weeks before his death, Poe had asked Rufus Griswold to edit his works in the case of his sudden death, a request to which Griswold had agreed. Griswold also acquired the copyright to the works at that time and later refused to turn it over to Mrs. Clemm when Poe died. Instead, in order to publish the material with an appearance of credibility, he asked that she endorse him as executor of Poe's literary estate and as editor of the works, which she did in a preface to the first volume of Griswold's 1850 edition. For her efforts, she received several sets of the published works, which she tried to sell to raise money on which to survive. Left without a home at Poe's death, she lived with friends at different times in Richmond and Fordham in New York City before returning to Baltimore in 1858. On February 16, 1871, she died in the Church Home and Infirmary, formerly named the Baltimore City Marine Hospital, where Poe himself had died in 1849. Poe's first English biographer, John Henry Ingram (1842–1916), tried in Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters and Opinions (1874) to correct the many misconceptions created by Griswold regarding Poe's character. He wrote lengthy correspondence to everyone he could locate who had ever had any contact with Poe. He also traced many Poe letters and corresponded extensively with Sarah Helen Whitman and Annie Richmond, using all the information that he could to refute the many venomous lies that Griswold told and wrote about Poe's relationships with women. Ingram's enthusiastic defense of Poe aided in reversing the common 19th-century misperceptions regarding Poe's character, but Poe did not receive serious consideration from literary critics until well into the 20th century. It was not until the 1941 biography by A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Autobiography, that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Even after this, however, critics such as Joseph Wood Krutch and Marie Bonaparte continued to assert that the madmen and murderers in Poe's stories had their sources in his life and in his disturbed mentality. Added to the controversy over Poe's sanity was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. Such literary figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T. S. Eliot dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased. These same works were judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as George Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. In contrast to Poe's unfavorable reputation among American and English critics was the generally more positive opinion held by critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with high esteem by French writers, especially those associated with the late 19th-century Symbolist movement. Baudelaire was an early critical defender of Poe's work, and his translations remain the best in any language. Published over 16 years from 1848 to 1864, they occupy five books of the 12-volume set of Baudelaire's standard works. Baudelaire vowed to make Poe a great man in France, even though Americans had largely dismissed him. His enthusiasm was shared by other members of the French Symbolist movement, such as André Gide (1869–1951), who proclaimed Poe the master of the "interior monologue," the presentation of a character's thoughts in a manner more controlled than stream-of-consciousness and on a level closer to direct verbalization, and Stephen Mallarmé (1842–1898), who encouraged the French critics to embrace Poe's work. https://fofweb.infobase.com/Electronic_Images/ImageGallery/POE16_Poeadj2.jpg Edgar Allan Poe's "The Devil in the Belfry" Despite Griswold's massive campaign of character assassination, Poe's works have endured. Many of his poems and short stories have inspired composers of such diverse nations as Ireland, Russia, Lithuania, France, Sweden, Austria, and, of course, the United States to compose musical accompaniments and other instrumentals. Renowned French impressionist composer Claude-Achille Debussy (1862–1918) left two unfinished operas on Poe themes, Le Diable dans le Beffroi ["The Devil in the Belfry"] and La Chute de la Maison Usher ["The Fall of the House of Usher"], on which he had been at work for years and which obsessed him. Poe's short stories have provided contemporary writers with inspiration and inspired Hollywood to place Poe's work on screen, although most films were loosely based on the works, sometimes associated only by title or the recitation of the relevant poem at the beginning or end of the movie: The Pit and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), The Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Haunted Palace (1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1965), The City Under the Sea (1965), The Conqueror Worm (1968), The Oblong Box (1969), and Cry of the Banshee (1970). Today, Poe is regarded as one of the founding writers of modern literature, both in popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in the more complex literary forms of poetry and criticism. Unlike earlier critics who disparaged Poe's work and sought to find the sources of his art in his mind and life, many critics today focus on the works as creative compositions. Rather than viewing each poem and each story as simply the expression of Poe's emotions and mental state, critics now acknowledge Poe as an artist whose stories, poems, and essays exhibit his creative talents and convey a sense of modernism in literature that remains relevant more than a century and a half after his death. Copyright © 2025 Infobase Learning. All Rights Reserved.