Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the beautiful

American Poetry Review, The, Nov 1995 by Hoffman, Daniel

With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion," wrote Edgar Allan Poe in the preface to his volume The Raven and Other Poems (1845). Yet, apart from juvenilia and fugitive verses, his poetic legacy consists of only some seventy poems. Poe's extensive oeuvre is comprised of his tales of detection, exploration, and horror; two novellas; political satires; philosophical colloquies; a cosmological prose poem over one hundred pages long; critical essays on poetics; over three hundred reviews of contemporary books of all kinds, from the fiction of Irving, Hawthorne, and Dickens and the poems of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Longfellow to such ephemera as the verses of Elizabeth Oakes Smith and S. Anna Lewis; the introduction to a book on shellfish; a series of character sketches of the literati based on analysis of their handwriting; "Marginalia," his notes on a miscellany of literary topics; and other journalism. In this life of busy hackwork for magazines, Poe managed to perfect two forms of fiction--the mystery, the horror tale--that have made him have a greater influence on the popular culture of our century than has any other writer of the nineteenth. Purposefully writing "not above the popular, nor below the critical taste," his essays on poetics defined the art and the work of the poet, influencing the French symbolists and, through them, T.S. Eliot, Wallace Stevens, and other modernist poets.

Compared to the voluminous work of Walt Whitman, or the 1,775 lyrics left us by Emily Dickinson, Poe's own poems make a meagre offering. His verse has been attacked for its mechanical meters, inflated diction, and other infelicities, yet few poets of his century beside those just named have been as widely read in our time as Poe, or have contributed to our national culture such unforgettable poems as "To Helen," "Israfel," "The City in the Sea," "The Raven," "Ulalume," "The Bells," and "Annabel Lee." To these, among Poe's essential poems, let us add "Romance," "Alone," "To Science," and "Lenore." A careful reading will show that while consistency of theme striates all of these, in mode, in form, in diction they are by no means alike, though Poe's unmistakable handprint marks every line.

The author of these works was born in Boston on 19 January, 1809 to Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British-born actress of great beauty, charm, and popularity, and David Poe, son of a Revolutionary Quartermaster general from Baltimore. David Poe also trod the boards, but with so little talent as to be derided in the press. Edgar had a brother, William Henry, and a sister, Rosalie; when Edgar was a year old his father, drinking too heavily, deserted the family. Elizabeth Poe went on tour with little Eddie in her care; his siblings were raised by relatives in Baltimore. When Edgar was two his mother, at liberty in Richmond, fell ill with consumption and died a lingering death in a boarding house, attended by sympathetic local matrons. One of these, Frances Allan, herself childless, took in the orphaned boy.

Her husband, John Allan, was an ambitious, self-righteous tobacco merchant who took his family along when he went on business to London, 1815-20; while there Edgar attended a school in Stoke Newington (described in his tale "William Wilson"). By 1825, Allan, inheriting a legacy, was a wealthy man, and, though never adopted, Edgar grew up in expectation of becoming his heir. Allan, however, required that Edgar take part in his business, and had a utilitarian contempt for the boy's literary ambitions and strivings. Their relationship was filled with tension, exacerbated after Mrs. Allan's death (also from consumption) and John Allan's remarriage. Allan sent Edgar to the newly-established University of Virginia on a meagre allowance; there, surrounded by the profligate sons of wealthy planters, Poe ran up gambling debts and tailors' bills which Allan refused to pay. Returning to Richmond, Poe quarrelled with Ailan and left home in 1827. Henceforth he lived a precarious life. He made his way to Boston, he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. This volume, containing; the title poem, a narrative of 400 lines, and nine lyrics, created no stir whatever. Its penniless author enlisted in the U.S. Army, signing on as "Edgar A. Perry" since a gentleman would not serve as an enlisted man. In 1830, with the intercession of John Allan, Poe qualified for West Point under his own name, but after serving a year he appealed to Allan to secure his release; Allan refusing, Poe got himself dismissed for neglect of duty. Nonetheless he dedicated his volume Poems (1831) by Edgar A. Poe "To the U.S. Corps of Cadets," and a decade later he canvassed his one-time classmates in the Corps for contributions to support a magazine of his own--a project in which he was never successful.

After West Point, Poe moved in with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and her eight-year-old. daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore. When Cousin Virginia turned fourteen, Poe married her. She and Mrs. Clemm (whom he called "Ma") comprised Poe's only stable family, whom he tried to support on the meagre salary of a magazine editor, augmented by small payments for poems, stories, and essays. Poe was an editor, successively, of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, 1835-36; Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Philadelphia, 1839-40; Graham's Magazine, 1841-42: The New York Evening Mirror, 1844-45; and, on borrowed money, briefly became editor and proprietor of The Broadway Journal, 1845-46. These brief tenures reflect Poe's tetchy disposition, quarreling with employers over salary and editorial decisions, and his drinking. Poe alternated period of sobriety with disabling binges, a common pattern among alcoholics. Despite these spells of insensibility and their consequences he produced a prodigious amount of work and was a very successful editor, increasing the subscription list of his employers' journals with his exacting literary reviews and by offering readers a prize for the solution of cryptograms. (The author of "The Cold Bug" was fascinated with secret writings and codes.)