Poe — Chambers's Encyclopaedia

Poe, EDGAR ALLAN, poet, critic, and romancer, was born at Boston, January 19, 1809. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was a young English actress; his father, David Poe, a player of loose habits, the runaway son of a revolutionary veteran at Baltimore. Orphaned at Richmond in his third year, Edgar was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy and childless merchant, who gave him more care than affection. In 1815 the family went to England, and the boy was sent to school at Stoke Newington, a suburb of London. From their return in 1820 till 1825 he attended a classical school at Richmond. The year 1826 was spent at the University of Virginia. Offended by his dissipation and gambling debts, his patron removed him to the counting-room, whence he presently absconded to Boston. Here he published Tamerlane and other Poems, by a Bostonian, 1827, a pamphlet of 40 pages (reprinted in London, 1884). Under the new pressure of poverty he enlisted, May 26, 1827, as Edgar A. Perry, giving his age as twenty-two. He served, apparently without fault, in the First Artillery at Forts Independence, Moultrie, and Monroe, and rose to be sergeant-major, January 1, 1829. He now effected a reconciliation with Mr Allan, who procured his discharge, April 15, and after a year's delay his admission to West Point. Meantime his second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, appeared with his name at Baltimore, 1829, 71 pages. He entered the Military Academy, July 1, 1830, recording his age as nineteen. Discipline and constraint did not suit him, and by deliberate neglect of duty he caused his dismissal, March 7, 1831. By this conduct he lost any remaining hope of favour from his patron, and was thrown finally on his own resources, which were probably confined to cadet subscriptions to his Poems. The volume appeared as a 'second edition' (it was really a third) in

New York, 1831, 124 pages, and contained Israfel, his earliest poem of value, and To Helen, in a first draft.

Of his life in Baltimore during the next two years few records remain. Here occurred his earliest love-affair, which came to nothing (see 'Poe's Mary' in Harper's Magazine for March 1889). Nearly the first earnings of his pen was the $100 prize won by A MS. found in a Bottle, in October 1833. He declined an invitation to dinner 'for reasons of the most humiliating nature—my personal appearance.' John P. Kennedy befriended him, and even, by the testimony of both, saved him from starvation. From this time he lived with his aunt, Mrs Clemm, and wrote for the Saturday Visitor. Not long before Mr Allan's death in March 1834 Poe made an attempt to see his foster-father, who drove him from the room; this incident, like many others in his life, has been exaggerated. His connection with the Southern Literary Messenger began with its publication of his tale Berenice in March 1835; a few months later he went to Richmond as its assistant-editor. The Clemms soon joined him, and on May 16, 1836, he married his cousin Virginia, who was then not fourteen, though a friend swore that she was 'of the full age of twenty-one.' For more than a year he worked hard and usefully on the Messenger, which printed many of his tales, criticisms, and poems, gaining great repute thereby. But Poe was 'irregular, eccentric, and querulous,' and these qualities, with the aid of stimulants, cost him more than one place. He left Richmond in 1837, and after a year or less in New York, of which the chief apparent fruit was The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838; 198 pages), in the summer of 1838 established himself (if he could be said at any time to be established) in Philadelphia.

Here he prepared The Conchologist's First Book (1839), the matter of which was taken from Cuvier, Wyatt, and Brown; procured at length the publication, without profit to himself, of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols. 1840); was connected with Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839); projected in 1840 the Penn Magazine, which came to nothing, and in 1843 The Stylus, which he never gave up the hope of starting; and for a year (1842-43) edited Graham's Magazine, then in the forefront of American literature. Long periods of sobriety and patient though ill-required labour would be interspersed with fits of reckless indulgence and months of desperate poverty. His wife's dangerous illness, caused by the rupture of a blood-vessel while singing, unnerved him, and weakened his always slight power of self-direction. A second prize of $100, won in 1843 by his wonderful story The Gold Bug, again saved the little household from starvation or near it.

In April 1844 he removed to New York, and from October to March following assisted Willis on The Evening Mirror. Here The Raven appeared, January 29, 1845, and won immediate fame. For a few months he was associated with C. F. Briggs in the Broadway Journal, which became notorious by his assaults on Longfellow as a plagiarist. In this year he published a volume of Tales, and The Raven and other Poems. In the spring of 1846 he occupied the famous cottage at Fordham. Here, January 30, 1847, in deepest poverty, Virginia Poe died, an attractive and pathetic figure, retaining her fragile and childish beauty to the last; she was but twenty-four. Her mother was more than a mother to the poet, and his home life drew out what was best in his nature, and afforded such measure as he attained of happiness.

Except for The Bells, The Domain of Arnheim, the wild psycho-astronomic 'prose poem' Eureka (1848), and a few minor pieces, the brief remainder of his life might to advantage be forgotten. Unable to stand alone, he sought vainly, and with an eagerness that approached insanity, to replace what he had lost. He was no libertine; his writings and his life were chaste; with women he was deferential, tender, chivalrous. He idealised them on the smallest provocation, and in these latter years he could not keep his imaginings in their proper place. Mrs Whitman was not the only object of his homage, and his frantic appeals to her, strangely intermingled with bar-room potations and an attempt at suicide (November 1848), were but the most striking and pitiable indications of a mind unhinged. Two months later he was deep in pen-work, and wrote to his 'Annie' that he was 'so, so happy,' with 'how great a burden taken off' his heart. In the spring Mrs Clemm wrote to the same 'Annie,' 'I thought he would die several times. I wish we were both in our graves.'

Starting southward, June 30, he had an attack of delirium tremens in Philadelphia. Recovering, his ticket was furnished by friends who considered it unsafe to trust him with money. He spent over two months in Richmond, lecturing there and at Norfolk, and receiving many attentions. A physician warned him that 'another such indulgence would probably prove fatal.' He became engaged to a lady of means, and about September 30 left Richmond, intending to wind up his affairs in the north and return for his wedding in October. On the 3d of October he was found in a wretched condition at a voting-place in Baltimore and removed to a hospital, where, after expressing the most poignant remorse, he died, October 7, 1849.

Poe's character has been the subject of much heated controversy. It was malignantly vilified by R. W. Griswold, whom he had chosen as his biographer and literary executor, in a Memoir prefixed to vol. iii. of his collected works (1850), but since suppressed. Efforts to rehabilitate his memory have been equally far from the truth. After all allowance made for the infirmities of a sensitive spirit, bearing an inherited taint and bowed down by 'unmerciful disaster,' the fact remains that he was the main author of his misfortunes. His splendid intellect seemed to lack certain qualities bestowed on common men; his moral vision was never clear, his sympathies were narrow, his will was far weaker than a man's should be. His temperament was feminine, and the 'Imp of the Perverse' was always at his heels. At forty he was no better nor worse than at seventeen, except that his constitution was undermined by excesses. Always he was isolated, absorbed, self-centred, visionary, hopelessly unpractical. He wrote to Lowell in 1844, 'My life has been whim, impulse, passion, a longing for solitude, a scorn of all things present.' The kindly Briggs, after months of daily intimacy, called him 'characterless' and 'utterly deficient of high motive.' It is humiliating to know that his brilliant writings found with difficulty a slow market and poor prices, but more so that he perpetually sold and resold old things for new. He was more diligent in defeating his own ends than in seeking them, in making enemies than in keeping friends. Except Willis, he quarrelled with his employers and associates; men trusted or benefited him to turn from him in the end, and usually with speed. The direst necessity could teach him prudence only by fits and starts; he was not responsible, reliable, respectable—at least, never for two years together. He worshipped Beauty, caring little for her elder sister Truth; from youth he falsified the facts and dates of his own life, so that his history became a puzzle to be solved by slow and painful labours. Profoundly unmoral, morbid and hectic in his moods, he could bear neither prosperity nor adversity; 'any motion would upset him, and his worst falls were after successes, or with success just in sight.' A mixture of the seraph and the tramp, he oscillated between the skies and the gutter, gravitating gradually downwards, because he had no god but self. Ambition, aspiration, self-respect, and the strongest love of which he was capable—his only real love, for his devoted child-wife—could not keep him from the brandy and opium which he knew to be his poisons.

As to his genius there is little room for question. Weird, wild, fantastic, almost ghoulish (judged by its results), finding its joy in gloom and its chief inspiration in memories or imaginations of dead women, dwelling by choice and habit on themes of ruin and desolation, on the awful, the horrible, even the foul, it was yet most genuine and notable; if not of the highest order, among the most picturesque and striking gifts ever vouchsafed to man. Ideality was its strongest note, but Poe could make realism serve his turn. His ratiocinative powers, exercised about 1841 in deciphering cryptograms and detecting the plot of Barnaby Rudge from the opening chapters, were marvellously displayed in some of his tales, especially those of Parisian murders, which were highly praised and widely circulated in France. At home during his lifetime his amazing tales were strangely neglected, and he was known chiefly as a critic. In this capacity he perhaps deserved less praise, and certainly less blame, than has befallen him. Occasionally misled by hatred or friendship, he was usually honest, independent, and fearless—even reckless; and he was first in this field as a reformer, deriding inflated mediocrity and discerning new-born power, sometimes long before it was discovered by the public. But his proper work was poetry and imaginative prose. His parade of scholarship rested on the slightest foundation. Of humour he had no particle, and some of his tales are poor stuff: such sold more readily than his best. His verses are often strained, artificial, full of mannerisms; 'everything is subordinate to sound.' In these, and in the more personal of his tales, wherein great wit and madness mingle, he was 'the poet of a single mood.' He will be long remembered for a few poems and many masterpieces of brief, powerful, and most peculiar fiction. In his own walk he stands unsurpassed if not alone, with a halo of mystery, gloom, and terror about him.

Apart from earlier sketches, and Mrs Whitman's Poe and his Critics (1860), his life has been written, generally for some reprint of his works, by J. H. Ingram (1874 and 1880), R. H. Stoddard (1875; see the six-volume edition of 1884), E. L. Didier (1876), and W. F. Gill (1877). G. E. Woodberry ('American Men of Letters,' 1885) unearthed some new facts. See also E. C. Stedman's Poe (1881). An edition by Stedman and Woodberry contains memoir and introduction (10 vols. 1895-96); another edition (10 vols. 1895-96), published by Lippincott, has neither.