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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe’s father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems  (George Redway), was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems  (Hatch & Dunning). Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Raven.” After Virginia’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe’s lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of “acute congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s work as an editor, poet, and critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement. French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Charles  Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer and critic famous for his dark, mysterious poems and stories, including “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

Quick facts, army and west point, writing career as a critic and poet, poems: “the raven” and “annabel lee”, short stories, legacy and museum.

FULL NAME: Edgar Allan Poe BORN: January 19, 1809 DIED: October 7, 1849 BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Virginia Clemm Poe (1836-1847) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Edgar Allan Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Edgar’s life, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was only 2.

Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie, Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. John was a successful tobacco merchant there. Edgar and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he had a more difficult relationship with John.

By age 13, Poe was a prolific poet, but his literary talents were discouraged by his headmaster and by John, who preferred that young Edgar follow him in the family business. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan’s business papers.

Money was also an issue between Poe and John. Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, where he excelled in his classes. However, he didn’t receive enough money from John to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference but ended up in debt.

He returned home only to face another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe moved to Boston.

In 1827, around the time he published his first book, Poe joined the U.S. Army. Two years later, he learned that his mother, Frances, was dying of tuberculosis, but by the time he returned to Richmond, she had already died.

While in Virginia, Poe and his father briefly made peace with each other, and John helped Poe get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Poe excelled at his studies at West Point, but he was kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties.

During his time at West Point, Poe had fought with John, who had remarried without telling him. Some have speculated that Poe intentionally sought to be expelled to spite his father, who eventually cut ties with Poe.

After leaving West Point, Poe published his third book and focused on writing full-time. He traveled around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, but providing for an illegitimate child Allan had never met.

Poe, who continued to struggle living in poverty, got a break when one of his short stories won a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . He began to publish more short stories and, in 1835, landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the “Tomahawk Man.”

His tenure at the magazine proved short, however. Poe’s aggressive reviewing style and sometimes combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in 1837. His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

Poe went on to brief stints at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine , Graham’s Magazine , as well as The Broadway Journal , and he also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger , among other journals.

In 1844, Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of “The Raven,” in 1845, that made Poe a literary sensation.

That same year, Poe found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against Poe.

Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle financially, and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law.

Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , in 1827. His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published in 1829.

As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835 to 1837, Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Later on came poems such as “Ulalume” and “The Bells.”

“The Raven”

Poe’s poem “The Raven,” published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror , is considered among the best-known poems in American literature and one of the best of Poe’s career. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his great love Lenore and is visited by a raven, who insistently repeats one word: “Nevermore.” In the work, which consists of 18 six-line stanzas, Poe explored some of his common themes: death and loss.

“Annabel Lee”

This lyric poem again explores Poe’s themes of death and loss and might have been written in memory of his beloved wife, Virginia, who died two years prior its publication. The poem was published on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe’s death, in the New York Tribune .

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , a collection of short stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “William Wilson.”

In 1841, Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His literary innovations earned him the nickname “Father of the Detective Story.” A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for “The Gold Bug,” a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

“The Black Cat”

Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post . In it, the narrator, a one-time animal lover, becomes an alcoholic who begins abusing his wife and black cat. By the macabre story’s end, the narrator observes his own descent into madness as he kills his wife, a crime his black cat reports to the police. The story was later included in the 1845 short story collection, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe .

Later in his career, Poe continued to work in different forms, examining his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “The Rationale of Verse.” He also produced the thrilling tale, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

From 1831 to 1835, Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He began to devote his attention to Virginia; his cousin became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836 when she was only 13 years old and he was 27.

In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis. Poe was overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.

Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore at age 40.

His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond on ten days earlier, on September 27, and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. On October 3, he was found in Baltimore in great distress. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later. His last words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”

At the time, it was said that Poe died of “congestion of the brain.” But his actual cause of death has been the subject of endless speculation. Some experts believe that alcoholism led to his demise while others offer up alternative theories. Rabies, epilepsy, and carbon monoxide poisoning are just some of the conditions thought to have led to the great writer’s death.

Shortly after his passing, Poe’s reputation was badly damaged by his literary adversary Rufus Griswold. Griswold, who had been sharply criticized by Poe, took his revenge in his obituary of Poe, portraying the gifted yet troubled writer as a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer. He also penned the first biography of Poe, which helped cement some of these misconceptions in the public’s minds.

Although Poe never had financial success in his lifetime, he has become one of America’s most enduring writers. His works are as compelling today as they were more than a century ago. An innovative and imaginative thinker, Poe crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise, and move modern readers. His dark work influenced writers including Charles Baudelaire , Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Stephane Mallarme.

The Baltimore home where Poe stayed from 1831 to 1835 with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Poe’s cousin and future wife Virginia, is now a museum. The Edgar Allan Poe House offers a self-guided tour featuring exhibits on Poe’s foster parents, his life and death in Baltimore, and the poems and short stories he wrote while living there, as well as memorabilia including his chair and desk.

• The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• Lord, help my poor soul.
• Sound loves to revel near a summer night.
• But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
• And now—have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart.
• All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
• I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
• [I]f you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
• Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Watch “The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe” on HISTORY Vault

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Article contents

Poe, edgar allan.

• Thomas Wright
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
• Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka (1848)
• Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
• The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
• The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
• Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

Further Reading

• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966. Collection of all of the famous essays on Poe, including those by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Walt Whitman.
• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. A Companion to Poe Studies . Westport, Conn., 1996. A comprehensive collection of modern appraisals of every aspect of Poe's life and work.
• Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge, 2002. Excellent and wide-ranging collection of late-twentieth-century Poe scholarship.
• Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 . Boston, 1974.
• Silverman, Kenneth . Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York, 1991. Its psychoanalytic explanations are sometimes unconvincing, but it is easily the best biography available.
• Walker, I. M. , ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage . New York, 1986. Anthology of contemporary reviews of Poe's work.

Related Articles

• American Detective Fiction
• Popular Fiction
• The Short Story in America

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Edgar Allen Poe Biography | Edgar Allan

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Edgar Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe. Hunter Smith 6 10-25-11. Edgar Allan Poe. http://www.eapoe.org/. Born on :January 19, 1809 Died on: December 7, 1849 . 5 Short Stories and 5 Poems. 5 POEMS Annabel Lee Alone A Dream W ithin a Dream The Valley of Unrest The Raven. 5 STORIES

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Edgar Allan Poe Hunter Smith 6 10-25-11

Edgar Allan Poe http://www.eapoe.org/ Born on :January 19, 1809 Died on: December 7, 1849

5 Short Stories and 5 Poems 5 POEMS • Annabel Lee • Alone • A Dream Within a Dream • The Valley of Unrest • The Raven 5 STORIES • The Angel of the Odd • The Black Cat • The Masque of the Red Death • The Murders in the Rue Morgue • The Gold Bug

Biography of poe From the beginning of Poe’s life, he has always been a mysterious mad man. January 19, 1809 he was born in Boston, Massachusetts. There were four children. After the death of his parents, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan in Virginia. Edgar went to England with the Allan's in 1815. his first book was Tamerlane and other poems, published in 1827. He moved to Baltimore and published a second book in 1831. He married his cousin when she was but 13. After getting married the two ran to new york 1836, he published another book called the narrative of Gordon Pym.

Part 2 Their last place of residence, Fordham, Virginia had past away in 1847. Alcohol, he more frequently ingested made him have more erratic behavior. After a year, he went to get his “teenage-sweetheart” Elmira Royster.

Your theory on Poe’s Death The alcohol theory to me seems most accurate. In 1847, when Virginia died, he turned to alcohol. I feel Poe had to get some type of kidney failure or poisoning. For me the alcohol theory is best.

Annabel lee • Annabel Lee, a love affair. Poe wrote the poem to show his love for the “fair maiden” to show what love they had shared and what feeling he had when she had past. • A lively affair this poem is, a woman with Poe “in this kingdom by the sea”. They loved with a passion to be separated not. Poe's rage when she died, and subtly when she was living. Using the moon as a metaphor of her beauty. He uses insanity as well as talented poetic skills to bring out what him and his love had shared.

Conclusion (5+ sentences) Poe is known to be the father of horror stories from his demented and crudeness. I make connections with his stories because of his depressive nature and sorrowful writing. He is and artist with words and he speaks not only to my ears, but to my soul. Many not understanding Poe’s meaning, but also he had issues with his life. Not many understand what he is meaning.

Finish paragraphs on your favorite story • In lively detail he shares how she died, quoting “That the wind came out of a cloud, chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.” He explains what he saw, what he felt. He tells how the kinsmen took her away and put her corpse in a tomb. Poe left with sorrowful thought of his passing maiden. • Over all I believe the poem was for his love, for what his beloved and himself had for each other.

Works Cited • Robert Giordano “Poe Stories” 10/31/11 <http://www.poestories.com/offline.php>. • C.D. Merriman for JalicInc “Edgar Allen Poe” 10/31/11<http://www.online-literature.com/poe/>. • The Edgar Allen Poe society of Baltimore “Mystery death of Edgar Allen Poe” 10/31/11 <http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poedeath.htm>. • SparkNotes Editors. “SparkNote on Poe’s Short Stories.” (2002.) (31 Oct. 2011.) • <http://www.sparknotes.com/lit/poestories/section10.rhtml>. • Shmoop Editorial Team. "The Masque of the Red Death Symbolism, Imagery & Allegory." (11 Nov. 2008.) ( 2 Nov. 2011.) • <http://www.shmoop.com/masque-of-red-death/symbolism-imagery.html>.

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4 Poe’s Lives

Richard Kopley , Distinguished Professor of English at Penn State DuBois, Emeritus, is the author of the books The Threads of The Scarlet Letter (University of Delaware Press, 2003) and Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries (Palgrave Macmillan, 2008, 2011), and of the forthcoming book The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present (Camden House, 2018). He is also the editor of Poe's Pym: Critical Explorations (Duke, 1992), Prospects for the Study of American Literature (NYU Press, 1997), Poe's novel Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (Penguin, 1999), and Ebenezer Wheelwright’s novel--a source for Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter--The Salem Belle (Penn State University Press, 2016). With Jackson R. Bryer and Paul Thifault, he coedits the journal Resources for American Literary Study (Penn State Univeristy Press). He also co-edited the second volume of Prospects for the Study of American Literature (AMS, 2009) with Barbara Cantalupo; Poe Writing / Writing Poe (AMS, 2013) with Jana Argersinger; and Edgar Allan Poe in 20 Objects (Johns Hopkins Sheridan Libraries, 2016) with Gabrielle Dean. He received the Poe Studies Association’s first J. Lasley Dameron Award for an Outstanding Poe Bibliography or Collection for the annotated Poe bibliography in the Oxford Bibliography Online; he is now one of the editors-in-chief of the American Literature Module of Oxford Bibliographies Online. Former president of the Poe Studies Association and the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, he has spoken on Poe and Hawthorne in the United States and abroad, including Switzerland, where he was a Fulbright Specialist. He has recently published a short story, “Teaching in My Sleep” (Writing on the Edge, 2016) and a children’s picture-book, Kenny and the Blue Sky (Eifrig Publishing, 2018).

• Published: 05 April 2018
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This essay proceeds chronologically, describing and evaluating noteworthy book-length biographies of Poe, from William Fearing Gill to James Hutchisson. The quality of these biographies ranges from the problematic (especially Woodberry, Allen, and Krutch) to the preeminent (especially Quinn, Thomas and Jackson, and Silverman). Discussions of the biographies include such matters as accuracy and insight, style and pace, and research and regard. Cruxes include Poe’s drinking, Poe’s sexuality, Poe’s will, the conclusion of Poe’s Pym, and the value of Poe’s Eureka . Though we never finally really know Poe, we may, by reading and rereading the best of these biographies, approach him more closely than we have approached him before.

Replying to a January 11, 1848, letter from his correspondent George W. Eveleth, which cited comments by various editors on his drinking, Poe countered on February 29 that when he did drink he went among friends, so they inferred that he always drank—“Those who really know me, know better.” 1   Really knowing Poe is a difficult matter. A Poe biographer today requires scholarly resources and scholarly resourcefulness, knowledge and judgment, fellowships and fellow feeling. I will consider here chronologically some of the noteworthy book-length Poe biographies, assessing their approaches to Poe—and how closely they approach him.

Poe’s posthumous reputation was critically shaped by Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s bilious obituary and memoir. 2 Some, such as N. P. Willis, George R. Graham, and John Neal, sought to offer a more appreciative voice. 3 Early Poe biography emerged from the ongoing controversy.

William Fearing Gill wrote the first book-length biography of Poe, the 1877 The Life of Edgar Allan Poe , a refutation of Griswold’s distortions and lies. 4 As Gill acknowledges, he benefitted from the help of some of those who knew Poe well: Sarah Helen Whitman, Neilson Poe, Annie Richmond, George R. Graham, Maria Clemm, and Thomas C. Clarke. 5 The volume is brisk and sympathetic, though it slows down a bit with a long treatment of “The Raven.” Also, inevitably for so early a biography, it contains occasional errors, including that Poe’s parents died in the Richmond theatre fire of December 1811, that their three children “were left among strangers,” and that Poe met Elmira Royster in Richmond in 1831. 6 And it features occasional omissions, such as Poe’s trip to Boston in 1827 and his then joining the army. Gill concludes his biography by speaking for “the fairer side of the poet’s life.” 7 He follows these same words in a previous essay with a qualification: “I have not indeed found all the missing parts, needed to make of the mutilated statue a symmetrical whole; but, possibly, from some of the facts contained in this rambling paper, may be gathered suggestions at least of a fairer form than fame had hitherto given to the personal character of EDGAR A. POE.” 8 This qualification, much modified in the book, was certainly warranted. An “Appendix” to the volume reviews work on Poe and recounts the 1875 honoring of Poe at the occasion of his reinterment in the cemetery of Baltimore’s Westminster Church, with ample quotations from the addresses.

Gill did revise his work in subsequent editions. For instance, he silently corrected himself regarding the death of Poe’s parents—he states that Eliza Poe died of pneumonia on December 8, 1811, and posits that her husband, David Poe, died of consumption soon thereafter. Also, he asserts that the three Poe children were taken by “kind friends.” 9 And he acknowledges that Elmira Royster was “a friend of [Poe’s] childhood.” 10 He significantly revised his statement in the first edition that “[Poe] never drank, never could have drunk, to excess” by contending, more modestly, in a later edition that “[h]is excesses were few and far between.” 11 So the later editions of the Gill biography are more accurate than the first edition, but not without a significant literary violation. Poe biographer Susan Archer Weiss stated that for these later editions Gill had taken her own material without her permission. (He does mention her in his acknowledgments.) She filed suit, but eventually gave up the effort. 12 Gill certainly offered a service to Poe studies by challenging the allegations of the unethical Griswold, but evidently Gill had ethical issues of his own.

John Henry Ingram’s 1880   Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions was another strong defense of Poe against the notorious obituary and memoir by Griswold. Ingram had written to those who had known Poe—including George Eveleth, Rosalie Poe, Marie Louise Shew Houghton, Annie Richmond, and Sarah Helen Whitman—and had built a remarkable collection of Poe materials (later acquired by the University of Virginia). 13 His two-volume book is full of valuable information, with many incidents and comments becoming standard in Poe biography. However, the book is flawed, in part by its too extensive quoting and in part by its occasionally unreliable assertions. Ingram claims, for instance, that Poe traveled to Europe after he attended the University of Virginia, that Poe resigned from the Southern Literary Messenger , and that Poe translated pieces from the French in the New Mirror and the Evening Mirror from 1843 to 1845. 14 Ingram also occasionally quotes a Poe narrator without noting that it is not Poe himself speaking—as, for example, with his early use of “William Wilson.” 15

Poe’s drinking is a problematic matter for Ingram, and he doesn’t bring it up explicitly until Poe resigns from Graham’s Magazine in 1842. But we know that Poe drank when he was attending the University of Virginia and when he served editorially at the Southern Literary Messenger . Another problematic matter is Ingram’s understanding of the complexity of Poe’s work. For example, though Ingram was a champion of Poe, he wrote about The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , “The chief defect in the tale is the supernatural final paragraph—wisely omitted in the London reprint—which neither adds to the interest nor increases the life-like truthfulness.” 16 My view is that without that final paragraph the covert structure of the novel is inaccessible. The state of that final paragraph is not “unfinished,” 17 but as finished as any passage in literature, suggesting simultaneously the literal, autobiographical, and biblical levels of the work. 18 Also problematic is Ingram’s occasionally patronizing attitude toward his subject, evident in such phrases as “The poor little orphan,” “the unfortunate man” and “the poor fellow.” 19 Perhaps, though, the sentimentality of Victorian England was fostering such a tone, as today’s resistance to sentimentality is not.

Yet much that we know about Poe is owing to Ingram’s quest for the true story of this writer whom he so admired. We may therefore fairly read Ingram’s work, flaws and all, with appreciation.

By contrast to Ingram’s biography, George E. Woodberry’s 1885 American Men of Letters Edgar Allan Poe offers little sympathy, limited praise, and considerable criticism. The biographer acknowledged later, “My attention had never been drawn to Poe, nor my interest specially excited by his works.” 20 Woodberry does correct Ingram on Poe’s travel to Europe after his time at the University of Virginia and on Poe’s translating from the French for the New Mirror . 21 But he writes of “the real worthlessness of much of Poe’s early work” and “the worthlessness of Poe’s thought in this field” (regarding Eureka ). 22 “To Helen” is “overpraised,” “The Pit and the Pendulum” is “a tale of no striking originality,” and “for the most part his mastery was over dismal, superstitious, and waste places. In imagination, as in action, his was an evil genius.” 23 Writing about Poe’s criticism, Woodberry adds, “The good he did was infinitesimal.” 24 However, Woodberry admires “the intense energy of Griswold’s delineation of [Poe] in the ‘Tribune’ [the ‘Ludwig’ obituary], a piece of writing that has the power of genius and cannot be forgotten while his memory lives.” 25 Woodberry offers a summary view of Poe as a man: “as he was self-indulgent, he was self-absorbed, and outside of his family no kind act, no noble affection, no generous sacrifice is recorded of him.” 26 By 1885, there were a number of positive works about Poe—not only the Gill and Ingram volumes but also a variety of reminiscences of Poe, especially by friends responding to Griswold’s attacks (including Sarah Helen Whitman’s 1860   Edgar Poe and His Critics ). But Woodberry apparently preferred to be, in some respects, a latter-day Ludwig.

Woodberry’s two-volume 1909 The Life of Edgar Allan Poe repeats much of what the biographer had already written, but with a greater range of material to draw on, including manuscripts of the Griswold family and publications since 1885. Notably, Woodberry closes with a series of positive comments by people who cherished Poe—George R. Graham, N. P. Willis, Frances Sargent Osgood, Sarah Helen Whitman, Elmira Royster Shelton, Charles Chauncey Burr, and Maria Clemm—but follows them with the meager comment, “This is the sheaf of memories that was laid upon his grave.” 27 Each of the volumes offers “Notes Mainly on Obscure or Controverted Points,” which provides supplementary information, often of much interest. And the second volume includes useful appendices, including Appendix C, a primary Poe bibliography. Still, as in 1885, so in 1909: Woodberry is unsympathetic to his subject. Both Woodberry biographies are therefore unsatisfying.

James A. Harrison’s The Life of Edgar Allan Poe is the first volume in his 1902 Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , the standard scholarly edition before Mabbott. The book looks plain, but its language is surprisingly florid. Consider, for instance, “The zephyrlike gossamer women of the Tales are incarnations of whispering winds; their movements are the breezy undulations of air travelling over bending grain; their melodious voices are the lyrics of the wind articulating themselves in flutelike throats; and full of passion and pregnancy of meaning are the musical inflections that exhale from their lips as perfumes exhale from the chalices of flowers.” 28 This diction does not wear well. Fortunately, it diminishes somewhat as the book progresses. Floyd Stovall comments, “Harrison seems to have been romantic by temperament, and his prose style, even in his biography of Poe, was at times poetic, not to say flowery.” 29

Harrison relies on many texts, including the Gill, Ingram, and Woodberry biographies. But occasionally he seems too dependent on quotation. And Harrison does not always name the author of the quotation. Furthermore, he does sometimes get things wrong: for instance, he dismisses Poe’s debt to Elizabeth Barrett Barrett’s poem “Lady Geraldine’s Courtship” in “The Raven,” and he contends that the Harpers “repeatedly rejected … Poe’s best work” (though they did publish Pym ). 30 Still, this is clearly a valuable biography, one worth studying, especially given the biographer’s responsiveness to his subject. The volume concludes with a strong appendix, featuring a not-entirely-reliable autobiographical memorandum from Poe to Griswold, Maria Clemm’s preface to the Griswold edition, the “Ludwig” obituary, and appreciative essays on Poe by N. P. Willis, James Russell Lowell, Philip Pendleton Cooke, John R. Thompson, and George R. Graham. Notably, the stand-alone edition of the biography features a “Bibliography of the Writings of Edgar A. Poe” not in the biography in the Complete Works ; this early bibliography appears instead at the end of volume XVI: [355]–379.

After the biographies of Gill, Ingram, Woodberry, and Harrison, the 1907 The Home Life of Poe , by Susan Archer Weiss, is an interesting change of pace. It focuses on the personal and in so doing relies for the first time in Poe biography on Poe’s best friend John H. Mackenzie, once of Richmond. Weiss also includes her own reminiscences of Poe in Richmond in 1849, when she was twenty-seven. 31 She is forgiving of Poe’s drinking, attributing it to heredity, but not forgiving of his interest in poet Frances Sargent Osgood. She considers Poe to have been weak willed, unduly susceptible to the influence of others, from Maria Clemm, who encouraged him to marry her daughter, his cousin Virginia, to sociable friends and acquaintances, who on various occasions encouraged him to take a drink. 32 And Weiss writes thoughtfully about what she considers Poe’s frustrated aspirations for greatness: “A marked peculiarity of Poe’s character was the restless discontent which from his sixteenth year took possession of and clung to him through life, and was to him a source of much unhappiness. It was not the discontent of poverty or of ungratified worldly ambition, but the dissatisfaction of a genius which knows itself capable of higher things, from which it is debarred—the desire of the caged eagle for the wind-swept sky and the distant eyrie.” 33   The Home Life of Poe is not always reliable, but it is sometimes engaging and usually sympathetic.

A gryphon of a book is John W. Robertson’s 1921   Edgar A Poe: A Study. The eagle half, Edgar A. Poe: A Psychopathic Study , is a sympathetic attempt to understand the origins of Poe’s medical problem. Robertson, who was a medical doctor, attributed that problem to Poe’s hereditary disease, “dipsomania.” He acknowledges that he focuses on “the darker side of Poe’s life” and offers such apparently explanatory phrases as “nervous diathesis” and “an organic congestion of the meninges of the brain.” 34 One may be put off by the clinical, potentially reductive approach—yet clearly some explanation is wanted for Poe’s drinking and its consequences. Still, I was heartened to read, “To write biography successfully one must love one’s subject.” 35 And it was especially touching to read the conclusion, which begins, “And, among these ‘Royal and Noble Authors’ ”—Isaak Walton, Oliver Goldsmith, William Makepeace Thackeray, Robert Louis Stevenson—“Poe would not have been the least of those I loved.” 36 Robertson goes on to imagine himself caring for Poe in Fordham. If the diagnosis here is not wholly illuminating, the bedside manner is much appreciated.

And then there is the lion half of this volume. Edgar A. Poe: A Bibliographic Study concerns Poe’s varied publications, as well as publications related to him. Robertson pursued his interest in Poe’s oeuvre through this work and through his later elaboration, Bibliography of the Writings of Edgar A. Poe and Commentary on the Bibliography of Edgar A. Poe , both of 1934. But Edgar A. Poe: A Bibliographic Study also concerns writings about Poe: this section’s latter pages concern Poe biography. Robertson credits Emile Lauvrière, in his 1904 volume Edgar Poe: sa vie, et son oeuvre , for his thesis about dipsomania, 37 but faults him as well: “To Lauvrière, Poe presents a type of genius in its most repulsive form.” 38 Furthermore, Robertson notes, “He accepts as true all that has been alleged, and admits all into his discussion as a basis for further generalization.” 39 Robertson later comments about a highly negative judgment by Lauvrière, “This is an outrage on the memory of Poe comparable only to the verbal assault of Griswold.” 40 The good doctor concludes, drily, “It is said that Lauvrière’s period of preparation extended over six years. Judged by the psychopathic value of this labor seven months should have more than sufficed.” 41

Robertson also offers salubrious comments about other Poe biographers: Gill (“he did the best he knew”), Ingram (“This extreme partisanship was unfortunate”), Woodberry (1909) (“Like [Frankenstein’s monster], so does this Poe construction fail in recalling to us a human possessing amiable traits and loving consideration for those around him”), and Harrison (“a standard Life for those who appreciate Poe’s work”). 42 The first three judgments seem reasonable; the fourth judgment was reasonable in its time. Robertson’s gryphon is a mythical beast well worth seeking out and studying. If it does not offer Poe himself, it does offer a genuine and affectionate effort to discover him.

This beast was followed, five years later, by the leviathan: Mary E. Phillips’s two-volume, 1,683-page Edgar Allan Poe, The Man. Its dust jacket proclaims, “Now the Truth is Known.” This is a heroic effort, with enormous detail and evident sympathy. But it requires great patience. With cloying Harrisonian orotundity, Phillips writes on page 1, “Sullen was Nature’s greeting that shivering Thursday gave little Edgar Poe when his new life of immortal craft, with its ‘spark of genius’ aloft, was stranded on earthly shores.” Then, after many pages on the Poe family in general and his parents in particular, she writes on page 70, “On such a day, Thursday, Jan. 19, 1809, the second son of David Poe, Jr., and brave Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was ushered into this world of literal misery and storms for him.” 43

In its substance, the book is uneven. For example, Phillips argues effectively that Poe was actually strong willed and defends energetically against aspersions on his mother’s character, but her rendering of Edgar’s early relationship with Elmira Royster is overly romanticized, and her support of Poe’s supposed voyage to London in 1827 unwarranted. Her treatment of Poe’s time at the Brennan Mansion is ample and thoughtful, but her account of Poe in central Pennsylvania is unreliable and her contention for Poe as “Outis”—the respondent to Poe’s allegations of plagiarism against Henry Wadsworth Longfellow—is unconvincing. 44 The book is not, as its dust jacket asserts, “A Standard Final Biography”; it is, rather, a dense, flawed resource for subsequent never-final biography.

Hervey Allen’s two-volume Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe , also of 1926, offers a quicker pace than Edgar Allan Poe, The Man. 45 It tells Poe’s story with fewer pages, shorter chapters, and the unifying motif of Poe as the angel Israfel. But it is seriously problematic. Allen, too, was a poet, and the reader must expect—and be wary of—the imagined passages. We see these early on with renderings of Poe’s time with Rob Stanard and his mother Jane Stith Stanard, his early relationship with Elmira Royster, his participation in a class at the University of Virginia, his return to Richmond after the death of his foster mother Frances Allan, and his writing at night in his barracks at West Point. 46 Furthermore, Allen shared the prejudices of his time. The reader will be taken aback by language regarding Mrs. Allan (“the feminine impulsiveness of his wife”), African Americans (“the exuberance and the strangeness of the modus vivendi of the darky”), and Poe’s slow but adoring sister Rosalie (“Rosalie was a moron,” and later, revised to little effect, “Rosalie was, at worst, a rather high grade moron”). 47

Allen acknowledges the importance of Poe’s drinking, subscribes to the “one-glass” theory, and attributes Poe’s drinking early on to the influence of his companions at college, his uncertain place among these heirs of wealthy families, and the promise inherent in the glass of “self-confidence and oblivion.” 48 However, Woodberry-like, he sometimes offers no sympathy. Poe’s friend F. W. Thomas argues that Poe attempted to resist drink and also comments on Poe’s writing about his drinking, “There is a great deal of heartache in the jestings of this letter.” Allen adds, “This is kindly and well meant, but like much interested evidence offered to the jury must be largely struck out as irrelevant.” 49 Poe’s cousin William Poe writes to Edgar Poe that drink is “a great enemy to our family,” but Allen diminishes the assertion, suggesting that it could be applied to “almost any ‘family,’ ” that many people have heard of “several bibulous relatives.” 50 Perhaps for Allen, a person addicted to drink was just another “other,” from whom he sought distance.

Allen’s allegations of Poe’s opium use beginning in Baltimore in the 1831–1834 period are not convincing. Though Allen claims that “there can be no moral doubt” 51 about it, the tenuous evidence—including occasional mention of opium in Poe’s early tales—is unpersuasive. Also questionable is Allen’s venturing into considerations of Poe and the erotic. Imagining that the conjectured opium diminished Poe’s desire and helped lead to his marrying his young cousin, Allen adds, “That there were other and more profound sexual disturbances in Poe’s nature, the Sadistic trend of a considerable body of his work indicates.” 52 Here Allen slides into speculation and faux insight.

Allen is weak on literary interpretation. He argues that “the root of Poe’s misfortunes, agony, and shipwreck, as well as his power as a literary artist, lay in some inhibition of his sexual life” and applies this view to “The Raven,” claiming that “the necessity that had been forced upon him by the nature of his marriage, to substitute a dream for the reality of love, led inevitably to despair.” 53 One wonders how Allen knows all this. And we should recall that Poe wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition” that the raven was “emblematical of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance ,” a vital theme of the 1838 Pym , which memorialized through its framed center not his 1836 marriage to Virginia but the 1831 death of Poe’s brother Henry. 54 To replace Poe’s grief with sexual frustration seems a facile distortion. Furthermore, apparently not finding Poe’s 1848 Eureka susceptible to his psychosexual musings, Allen maintained that with this book, Poe’s “exaltation of the ego” “had already passed the last admitted borders of sanity,” that in this volume “the signs of hallucination and disorganization are plain,” and that it is “at best , a highly and cleverly elaborated sophistry.” He adds, apparently definitively, “A successful apology for it cannot be made.” 55 Allen is neither a sensitive reader nor a penetrating one.

His Israfel does not possess authority. One may read it indulgently or resistingly, but not trustingly. The lightly revised one-volume 1934 edition should be read with a similar caution.

Joseph Wood Krutch’s 1926   Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius is similarly untrustworthy—perhaps more so, since there is no scholarly apparatus at all, only the author’s claims and impressions. We may readily see problems with regard to matters of fact. For example, Krutch omits the critical quotation marks provided by Griswold in his obituary regarding language from Bulwer’s The Caxtons —but omitted by Griswold in his memoir—thereby incorrectly concluding that Griswold wrote these words about Poe. 56 He states that Poe contributed to the New York Review in October 1827—it was October 1837—and that Poe wrote to his brother in 1835—it was to his cousin; we have no letter from Poe to his brother, who died in 1831. 57 And Krutch asserts that Poe bought the Fordham cottage, most likely with money he received as a result of his lawsuit against Thomas Dunn English. 58 Problems with matters of fact anticipate serious problems with larger claims.

Krutch is another assassin, a kind of Woodberry redux. His critical method is an offended obtuseness. The repeated language indicates his pathographic bias: “neurotic,” “morbid,” “abnormal,” “evil,” “madness,” “disease.” His egregious summary judgments extend that bias: “Death robbed posterity of nothing worth the having”; “It would be difficult indeed to prove that the course of American literature would have been essentially different if he had never lived.” 59

There is one claim that warrants particular attention since it is the one for which Krutch’s volume is most notorious. The critic alleges that Poe “avoided all his life the sexual connection with any woman,” that Poe’s marriage to Virginia was “no real marriage,” that to Poe “consummation was impossible,” that he resisted understanding “the psychic impotence of his sexual nature,” and that Virginia was “always dead in his imagination.” 60 The first response is, of course, that Krutch offers no proof. How could he? The second response is that there is a tale that speaks to the “normal amorousness” that Krutch denies exists in Poe’s tales 61 —the 1841 “Eleonora.” Even Woodberry acknowledged in his 1885 biography that this tale offers a singular “warmth, the vital sense of human love”—though he omits this point in his 1909 work. 62 Krutch mentions the tale but avoids the telling passage. 63 T. O. Mabbott wrote that “Some autobiographical element in Poe’s story is undeniable” (M 2: 636). The falsity of the alleged “complete sexlessness” of Poe’s writing 64 is evident in a highly suggestive passage in “Eleonora” about ecstatic nature (M 2: 640–641).

We may pass here from travesty to majesty. Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography is a very valuable volume—fortunately, this 1941 biography was reprinted in paperback in 1998. 65 The book offers well-selected detail, ably sifted and interpreted. The reader gains a significant understanding of Poe, both positive and otherwise. Highlighting Poe’s letter of August 29, 1835, about Virginia—“one of the most important documents in [Poe’s] biography”—Quinn declares simply, “Poe loved her and she adored him.” 66 But elsewhere he acknowledges, regarding Poe’s courting Elmira Royster Shelton in 1849, “He probably had some idea of profiting by the marriage.” 67

Importantly, the author regularly disputes claims by Hervey Allen. For example, Quinn challenges Allen’s claim for Poe’s use of opium, offering a variety of evidence, including Poe’s evident unfamiliarity with the impact of laudanum. 68 And he targets Allen’s corollary point: “If there were any need to refute the theories which deny to Poe the normal experiences of a man, and to Virginia, those of a woman, ‘Ulalume’ would be an answer.” 69 Citing Eureka , Quinn disputes Allen’s allegations about a creative decline in the final years of Poe’s life. 70 Also importantly, faulting Woodberry, who, he comments, was “leaning too much upon Griswold,” 71 Quinn reveals the vengeful reverend’s distortions of Poe’s writing, William E. Burton’s, and Griswold’s own. 72 Relying on parallel passages, Quinn makes the case definitively and declares rightly that these distortions are “unforgivable.” 73 If anyone should have been “ashamed” of himself (as Griswold claimed Poe had written 74 ), it was Griswold.

Quinn occasionally falters, as when, explaining why Poe was let go from the Southern Literary Messenger , he mentions Poe’s drinking only in a footnote. 75 He can be too gentle. He does quote too extensively, especially from Poe’s letters, but this is understandable since by 1941 John Ward Ostrom had only compiled his checklist of Poe’s correspondence. 76 Quinn’s criticism tends to be perceptive but not probing. And this biographer does seem to privilege the poetry over the prose: “It is as a poet that Poe must ultimately be judged.” 77 However, at least Quinn writes of the ending of Pym , “There have been critics who object to what they are pleased to call an inconclusive ending. But when the details of the voyages have long been forgotten, the picture of the mysterious figure remains, stimulating the imagination of those readers who do not have to have everything explained to them in words of one syllable.” 78

The final five paragraphs of this biography offer a keen appreciation of Poe—they bear rereading. But with regard to one statement there, it is good to have to make a correction: “In every city in which he lived, except the city of his birth, stands a lasting memorial to him.” 79 Now Boston, too, has its lasting memorial to Poe.

Most of the twelve appendices are useful and interesting. Perhaps most valuable is Quinn’s record of “The Theatrical Career of Edgar Poe’s Parents.” 80 And the bibliography is certainly a helpful guide, with brief astute comments. For instance, Quinn asserts that Allen’s biography was “written with spirit, but largely secondary, and with a tendency toward the romantic and the acceptance of unchecked evidence.” And he states that Krutch’s volume was “based on a mistaken theory of Poe’s physical constitution.” 81

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography is one of the essentials of Poe scholarship. It rewards study even seventy-seven years after its publication.

The rise of Freudian psychology significantly shaped literary biography in general and Poe biography in particular. This is clearly evident in Marie Bonaparte’s The Life & Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation , which includes a foreword by Sigmund Freud. Published in English in 1949, the work first appeared, in French, in 1933. 82 It did not, therefore, rely on Quinn, but, rather, on Allen. Bonaparte acknowledges, “Throughout the biographical section of this work, I have followed the admirable life of Poe by Hervey Allen.” 83 This is a problem, and so, too, is the psychoanalytic approach itself.

Certainly her focus on Poe’s mother is altogether fair, but Bonaparte develops that focus questionably, arguing, for example, that Poe’s “sado-necrophilia” led him to fear his impulses and avoid women sexually. 84 She refers to Poe’s “fearful sex drives aroused by the sight of his poor Virginia’s hæmorrhages and the sound of her racking cough.” 85 He drank, in part, because of his “latent homosexuality.” 86 The “repetition compulsion” is repeatedly invoked, 87 but detail that does not support her theory is not highlighted. Henry Poe’s death is only slightly treated, 88 and, although the sickness of Virginia is considered resonant with the sickness of Poe’s mother, 89 the evident health of his beloved Annie Richmond is not discussed.

Interestingly, though Bonaparte does consider Poe to have been a user of opium, she diverges from Allen’s claim that his opium use diminished his sexual capacity, preferring Krutch’s assertion that Poe was impotent in the first place. 90 Psyche’s drooping wings, in “Ulalume,” suggest this. 91

Though Bonaparte is often mistaken, we cannot dismiss her, for she is attentive to detail, and sometimes fittingly so. For example, at the end of her biographical section, she appropriately stresses Poe’s calling “Reynolds” on his deathbed, and she thereby infers a link to the ending of Pym . 92 She should be read warily, but she should be read. If her method was sometimes primitive and reductive, she was certainly a close reader.

Avoiding any overriding interpretive thesis, William Bittner in Poe: A Biography tells Poe’s story plainly and directly. He sees his biography as journalistic rather than scholarly, appropriately enough—there are no archival or textual discoveries here, nor any notes. The appendix, “The Poe Controversies,” is thoughtful and engaging. But the biography itself is sometimes a bit flat. Occasionally worrisome are the inferred states of mind—for instance, Poe’s “great pleasure” in selecting the name “Arthur Gordon Pym” and Virginia’s “envy” about women wearing hoop skirts. 93 More problematically, Bittner sometimes just gets things wrong, as when he writes that the Ariel adventure in Pym , except for its “characters” and “atmosphere,” is “irrelevant to the plot” of the novel and that Poe wrote “Ulalume” before his wife Virginia died. 94 Overall, Bittner’s biography is workmanlike but occasionally lackluster.

Edward Wagenknecht’s 1963   Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend is a refreshing volume. It offers a breadth of reading and an ample budget of judgment. It does not offer new research or new theories, nor does it provide the usual chronological organization. Rather, it proceeds topically: “Life,” “Living,” “Learning,” “Art,” “Love,” “God.” It might be objected that such categories are limiting, yet they serve Wagenknecht well and enable him to cover much ground. And he does so fairly and sensitively.

He offers insightful consideration of Poe’s “inability to compromise,” the “implicit” morality of his writing, and his love for his wife, concluding in this regard, “Virginia was the moral and emotional center of her husband’s life.” 95 He is perceptive regarding Poe’s “religious frame of reference” and discerning when he suggests that Poe “shows a sense of reverence and an appreciation of God’s infinitude.” 96 Focusing on Poe’s sense of God in man (expressed at the end of Eureka ), Wagenknecht denies Poe’s supposed “self-aggrandizement” and sees a consonance between Poe and Emerson. 97 Discussing Poe’s blending of the cosmological and the aesthetic in Eureka , Wagenknecht seems judicious in inferring “a passion for God on Poe’s part and a longing for salvation, or, to put it another way, a Sense of the Whole and a hunger for union with the Whole, by which one cannot be other than profoundly moved.” 98 Wagenknecht’s final paragraph is one of the great tributes to Poe of all time. It begins, memorably, “Few Americans have aspired more nobly than Poe, and, if he fell short of his ideal, this should bring him closer to us and help us to understand him better.” 99 Wagenknecht’s volume seems to this reader to warrant that rarest of accolades, “wise.”

The possibilities for Poe biography—and for Poe study in general—have been immensely enhanced by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson’s 1987 The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849. There is no biographical narrative here—rather, there is documentary evidence for such a narrative: excerpts and details from manuscripts, letters, reviews, reminiscences, legal papers, newspapers, magazines, dissertations, books (including biographies), and articles. Archival resources from over twenty institutions, from Boston to Austin, were consulted. Appropriate commentary is sometimes provided, including, for uncertain items, multiple viewpoints. (See, for example, Poe’s baptism, David Poe Jr.’s death, and the Allans’ move from the Ellis home. 100 ) An occasional “perhaps” or question mark is necessary and only increases the volume’s trustworthiness.

Thomas, the author of the 1978 dissertation “Poe in Philadelphia, 1838–1844: A Documentary Record,” selected and compiled the material from 1838 to 1849; Jackson, the author of the 1934 Poe and “The Southern Literary Messenger,” that for 1809 to 1837. The project was overseen by the ever-thoughtful, ever-supportive, distinguished nineteenth-century Americanist Joel Myerson. The eleven chapters feature useful headnotes and welcome illustrations. The “Introduction” and “Biographical Notes” at the beginning and the “List of Sources” at the end vitally strengthen the work. And the index makes the entire project eminently accessible. This is a field-changing volume, providing for Poe studies a new order and clarity. Perhaps additional discoveries regarding the life of Poe, made since the publication of The Poe Log , will eventually warrant an expanded version of this landmark work. Meanwhile, The Poe Log is one of the most important reference works in Poe studies—fitting company for the Mabbott/Pollin/Levines edition of Poe’s works, the Ostrom/Pollin/Savoye edition of Poe’s letters, the Fisher compendium of Poe-related selections, and the Deas study of Poe portraiture. 101

And one of the most important Poe biographies is Kenneth Silverman’s 1991   Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . 102 It offers ample research, a lively narrative, and the effective theme of lifelong mourning. It moves along, providing reliable, carefully selected detail. It is good to reread after twenty-five years. The Poe that emerges from this volume is a man who never recovered from the death of his mother when he was not yet three years old, who grieved for her his entire life, and who honored her in his writing.

The writing is clear and engaging, and the assertions, when uncertain, are thoughtfully modulated. The smoothness of the writing is itself a considerable accomplishment, for that writing is based on an astonishing array of documentary evidence (including materials from 150 volumes of the Ellis & Allan papers), yet the volume knows not seams. The seventy-page “Notes” section deserves close attention, for Silverman offers there not only the enormous number of citations, gathered over years of archival work, but also judgments about the reliability of various documents and brief considerations of various topics, from David Poe’s desertion of his family to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ’s form to Poe’s connection with Frances Sargent Osgood. 103 Silverman also includes there occasional evaluative comments on previous work in Poe biography, including Bonaparte (“On many points her book remains persuasive and revealing, and it was the first to perceive the pervasive effects of mourning on Poe’s life and writing”) and Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson (“the superbly researched Log”). 104

Silverman offers many discerning judgments in the text of this biography, as when he writes of John Allan’s failing to give Poe permission to resign from West Point (“Viewed fairly, [Poe’s] situation must be seen as entirely Allan’s fault”), Poe’s sense of structure (“Poe also weighed words carefully and savored the niceties of prose architecture”), the English edition of Pym (“A pirated English edition appeared in London a few months later, unforgivably omitting the brilliant last paragraph”), and Poe’s first collection of tales (“In fact, except Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales two years earlier, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was in 1839 the most powerfully imagined and technically adroit collection of short fiction ever published by an American writer”). 105 Occasionally, Silverman’s judgments are more negative, and at times some Poe scholars and aficionados may disagree. But a give-and-take goes with the biographical territory. The deft phrase that stays with me—one that concerns Poe’s writing great short stories in the midst of great personal difficulties—is “some defiantly willed self-transcendence.” 106 Here Silverman is getting at something I admire very much about Poe—his achievement in adversity.

Published a year after Silverman’s Poe biography, Jeffrey Meyers’s Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy is a well-paced account, drawn primarily from secondary research. 107 There are occasional flaws—for instance, Meyers presents “Eleonora” as if it were written and published in 1842, after Virginia’s hemorrhage. 108 (It was written and published in 1841 [M 2: 635–638], before the tragic incident.) But Meyers does make incisive assessments, as when he suggests that “The Man of the Crowd” is “Poe’s most underrated story.” 109 He is weak on Pym and Eureka , however—and he unfortunately allows the final comments on the latter book to go to Woodberry and Krutch. 110 Meyers is strongest at the end, with lively overview chapters on Poe’s reputation and influence.

James M. Hutchisson’s 2005 biography Poe tells the familiar story with a leitmotif of Poe’s need for unity and control. But the book has bibliographical problems, both primary and secondary. For example, it repeats Meyers’s claim that “Eleonora” was published in 1842. It also maintains that “The Raven” was published in the January 29, 1845, issue of the American Review . But there was no such issue—the American Review appeared monthly. The volume also asserts that the poem appeared in the Mirror on February 8, 1845. In fact, the poem appeared in the American Review in the February 1845 issue; in the Evening Mirror on January 29, 1845; and in the Weekly Mirror on February 8, 1845 (M 1: 363). Regarding the error of attributing to Poe the Drayton-Paulding review in the Southern Literary Messenger , concerning slavery, a note in Hutchisson’s work states that Terence Whalen’s fine 1999 volume Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses “lays the matter to rest,” without mentioning J. V. Ridgely’s similarly fine 1992 article and 1998 edition that also effectively disproved the attribution. And regarding a correspondence between “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Richard Wright’s Native Son , another note maintains that “This similarity has gone unremarked.” Yet it had been remarked previously by several scholars. 111 Hutchisson’s volume is just not sufficiently careful.

I will close by recurring to a matter that Silverman touches on, both in his biography and in an essay on biography: knowability. Discussing “The Man of the Crowd,” he comments parenthetically, “He [the narrator of the story] finds that he cannot ‘read’ the old man, figuring the uninterpretability of Poe’s own enigmatic writing, and self.” 112 Perhaps, however, the story may be interpreted—we just haven’t discovered fully how yet. It seems unlikely to me that the ratiocinative Poe would create a mystery to which there is no solution. His life was not wholly under his control, of course, but as this volume reveals, an interpretation of the man may be approached. Silverman considers the limits of knowledge again in his essay on biography: “When to stop? When you drop. You never find as much as there is; looking wider, deeper, longer, always brings more.” 113 And toward the close of this essay, he again addresses limits: “The biographer lives with the queasy knowledge that another person’s life must remain in essence unknowable and unrevealed. He creates at best a simile, a resemblance, a composite police sketch based on fleeting observation. Nevertheless, the likeness always tells us something, not everything but something, about the subject, something moreover real and dependable. The challenge is to stay true to the facts but move the reader by the spectacle of another soul’s journey through time.” 114 I can only agree. Biography is an asymptote to a line—a line or curve forever approaching that much-sought line, but never finally getting there. If even with scholarly resources and scholarly resourcefulness, knowledge and judgment, fellowships and fellow feeling, we never finally really know Poe, we can get closer. And the great effort involved is certainly worthwhile for this great figure—and for his devoted readers.

1. For Eveleth’s letters, see Thomas Ollive Mabbott , ed., The Letters from George W. Eveleth to Edgar Allan Poe (New York: New York Public Library, 1922). For Poe’s Letters to Eveleth, see James Southall Wilson , ed., The Letters of Edgar A. Poe to George W. Eveleth (1924), reprinted from the Alumni Bulletin, University of Virginia 3rd ser. XVII (January 1924): 34–59. Poe’s letters to Eveleth are in CL. For the quotation I include, see CL 2: 648.

2. “Ludwig” [Rufus Wilmot Griswold], “Death of Edgar Allan Poe,” in Poe in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life, Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates , ed. Benjamin Franklin Fisher (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), 73–80 ; “Memoir of the Author,” in Poe in His Own Time , 101–152.

3. Nathaniel Parker Willis , “Death of Edgar A. Poe,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage , ed. I. M. Walker (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1986), 307–312 ; Graham , “The Late Edgar Allan Poe,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, 376–384 ; Neal , “Edgar A. Poe,” in Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage , 385–393.

4. William Fearing Gill , The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (New York: D. Appleton, 1877). See “Ludwig,” “Death of Edgar Allan Poe” and Griswold, “Memoir of the Author.”

Gill, Life , 5–6.

Gill, Life , 20, 54.

Gill, Life , 242.

8. Gill , “New Facts about Edgar A. Poe,” in Laurel Leaves: Original Poems, Stories, and Essays , ed. William Fearing Gill (Boston: William F. Gill, 1876), 359–388 (see especially 388).

9. Willam F. Gill , The Life of Edgar Allan Poe , 4th ed. (New York: W. J. Widdleton, 1878), 20.

Gill, Life (1878) , 54.

Gill, Life (1877) , 80; Gill, Life (1878) , 80.

12. Susan Archer Weiss , The Home Life of Poe (New York: Broadway Publishing Company, 1907), 227–229. For Gill’s passing acknowledgment of Weiss, see Life (1878), vi.

13. For guides to the Ingram Collection, see John Carl Miller , John Henry Ingram’s Poe Collection at the University of Virginia (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1960) ; Paul P. Hoffman , Guide to the Microfilm Edition of John Henry Ingram’s Poe Collection (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1967) ; and John E. Reilly , John Henry Ingram’s Poe Collection at the University of Virginia , 2nd ed. (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Library, 1994). For editions of letters about Poe from the Ingram Collection, see John Carl Miller , ed., Building Poe Biography (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1977) and Poe’s Helen Remembers (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1979).

14. John Henry Ingram , Edgar Allan Poe: His Life, Letters, and Opinions , 2 vols. (London: John Hogg, 1880), 1:62–68 (Europe), 142 ( Messenger ), 248, 263 (French). Ingram later conceded, in his unpublished “The True Story of Edgar Allan Poe,” that Poe did not travel to Europe after attending the University of Virginia. See Hoffman, Guide , 24.

Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe , 1:12.

Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe , 1:148.

Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe , 1:147.

18. For elaboration, see my Introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , by Edgar Allan Poe , ed. and annotated by Richard Kopley (New York: Penguin, 1999), ix–xxix (see especially xx–xxvii).

Ingram, Edgar Allan Poe , 1:10; 2:230.

20. George E. Woodberry , The Life of Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), 1:v.

21. George E. Woodberry , Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1885), 220, 279.

Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe , 95, 291.

Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe , 59, 186, 349.

Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe , 268.

Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe , 347.

Woodberry, Edgar Allan Poe , 350.

Woodberry, The Life of Edgar Allan Poe , 351–356.

Floyd Stovall, “Introduction to the AMS Edition,” in H 1: n.p.

H 1: 217, 228.

31. John C. Miller , “The True Birthdate and the Hitherto Unpublished Deathdate of Susan Archer Talley Weiss,” Poe Studies 10, no. 1 (1977): 29.

32. Perhaps an influence on Weiss’s judgment was a comment in a sensitive essay by Edmund Clarence Stedman in Scribner’s : “My own pity for him [Poe] is of another kind; it is that which we ever must feel for one in whom the rarest possibilities were blighted by an inherent lack of will .” See Stedman , “Edgar Allan Poe,” Scribner’s Monthly 20, no. 1 (May 1880), 124. See also Stedman , Edgar Allan Poe (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881), 101–102 ; and Stedman , Edgar Allan Poe (Cedar Rapids, IA: privately printed, 1909), 93.

Weiss, The Home Life of Poe , 221.

34. John W. Robertson , Edgar A Poe: A Study (San Francisco: privately printed, 1921), 4–10 (“dipsomania”), 135 (“darker side”), 57 (“nervous diathesis”), 121 (“organic congestion”).

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 84.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 152.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 379–380. For the full argument about Lauvrière, see 364–385.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 373.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 377.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 384.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 385.

Robertson, Edgar A. Poe , 394 (Gill), 396 (Ingram), 401 (Woodberry), and 404 (Harrison).

43. Mary Elizabeth Phillips , Edgar Allan Poe, The Man , 2 vols. (Chicago: John C. Winston, 1926), 1:1, 70.

Phillips, Edgar Allan Poe , 1:130–131 (strong willed), 1:216–221 (defense of his mother), 1:224–231 (his early relationship with Elmira Royster), 1:287 (his supposed 1827 voyage to London), 2:882–897 (Brennan Mansion), 1:601–616 (central Pennsylvania), 2:956–989 (Poe as “Outis”).

45. Hervey Allen , Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe , 2 vols. (New York: George H. Doran, 1926).

Allen, Israfel , 1:107–108, 135, 156–157, 232, 287–288.

Allen, Israfel , 1:50, 60, 103; 2:823.

Allen, Israfel , 1:170.

Allen, Israfel , 2:558–559.

Allen, Israfel , 2:565n.

Allen, Israfel , 1:371.

Allen, Israfel , 1:373.

Allen, Israfel , 2:571, 610.

For a discussion of Poe’s memorializing Henry in Pym , see my aforementioned Introduction to The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , ed. Kopley, xx–xxi.

Allen, Israfel , 2:591, 661, 742.

56. Joseph Wood Krutch , Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius (New York: Alfred H. Knopf, 1926), 12–13, 90.

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 95 (1827) and 138 (1935).

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 162.

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 191, 205.

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 25 (“sexual connection”), 50 (“no real marriage”), 67 (“consummation was impossible”), 117 (“psychic impotence”), 120 (Virginia “dead in his imagination”).

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 83.

Woodberrry, Edgar Allan Poe , 168; The Life of Edgar Allan Poe , 1:299 .

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 124–125.

Krutch, Edgar Allan Poe , 82.

65. Arthur Hobson Quinn , Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography , rev. ed. with foreword by Shawn Rosenheim (1941; rpt., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998).

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 219, 255.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 629.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 350, 592, 693–694.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 533.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 557.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 770; see also 282.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 278–282, 443–450; see also 647.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 450.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 449.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 259n.

76. John Ward Ostrom , comp., Check List of Letters to and from Poe , University of Virginia Bibliographical Series, Number Four (Charlottesville, VA: Alderman Library, 1941).

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 333; see also 373.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 266.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 695.

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 697–724. Reading this nearly forty years ago, I first learned that Poe’s mother performed in the play Tekeli .

Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe , 766, 768.

82. Marie Bonaparte , Edgar Poe: Étude Psychanalytique , avant-propos de Sigmund Freud , 2 vols. (Paris: Les Editions Denoël et Steele, 1933) ; The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation , foreword by Sigmund Freud , trans. John Rodker ( London: Imago Publishing , 1949).

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 1n.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 87; see also 22, 37, 45, 103, 104, 107.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 104.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 86; see also 104.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 44, 81, 130, 147, 164, 194.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 65–66.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 77; see also 123.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 79.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 151.

Bonaparte, Life and Works , 205–206. For her fuller discussion of Pym , see 290–352.

93. William Bittner , Poe: A Biography (London: Elek Books, 1962), 124 (“great pleasure”), 141 (“envy”).

Bittner, Poe , 125 (Ariel adventure), 221–224 (Poe’s writing “Ulalume”).

95. Edward Wagenknecht , Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend (New York: Oxford University Press, 1963), 76 (“inability to compromise”), 148 (“implicit” morality), 190 (“moral and emotional center”).

Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe , 214 (“religious frame of reference”), 215 (“a sense of reverence”).

Wagenkencht, Edgar Allan Poe , 217.

Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe , 220.

Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe , 221.

PL: 15 (Poe’s baptism and David Poe Jr.’s death) and 49 (the Allans’ move from the Ellis home).

101. The Mabbott/Pollin/Levines edition of Poe’s works and the Ostrom/Pollin/Savoye edition of Poe’s letters are the latest standard editions, employed in this volume. Fisher’s Poe in His Time has been previously cited. The final volume is Michael J. Deas , The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989).

102. Kenneth Silverman , Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance (New York: HarperCollins, 1991). For my review of the book, see Richard Kopley , review of Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance , by Kenneth Silverman , American Literature 64 (June 1992): 373–374.

Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 451 (David Poe), 473–474 ( Pym ), 495–497 (Osgood).

Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 464 (Bonaparte), 505 (Thomas and Jackson).

Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 67 (“Allan’s fault”), 119 (“prose architecture”), 133 (“brilliant last paragraph”), 154 (“collection of short fiction”).

Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 209.

107. Jeffrey Meyers , Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992). For my review of the book, see Richard Kopley , review of Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy , by Jeffrey Meyers , Studies in the Novel 25, no. 4 (1993): 491–493.

Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe , 128–130.

Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe , 115. Since 1992, the story’s reputation has risen.

Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe , 217–218.

111. James M. Hutchisson , Poe (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005), 136 (“Eleonora”), 165 (“The Raven”), 270 (Paulding-Drayton review), and 271 (“The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and Native Son ). For Ridgely’s commentary on the Paulding-Drayton review, see “The Authorship of the ‘Paulding-Drayton Review,’ ” Poe Studies Association Newsletter 20, no. 2 (1992): 1–3, 6 ; and P 5: 153–154. For discussion of the influence of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” on Native Son , see Dan McCall , The Example of Richard Wright (New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, 1969), 70 ; Linda T. Prior , “A Further Word on Richard Wright’s Use of Poe in Native Son ,” Poe Studies 5, no. 2 (1972): 52–53 ; and Seymour Gross , “ Native Son and ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: An Addendum,” Poe Studies 8, no. 1 (1975): 23. See also Richard Kopley , Edgar Allan Poe and “The Philadelphia Saturday News” (Baltimore: Enoch Pratt Free Library, the Edgar Allan Poe Society, and the Library of the University of Baltimore, 1991), 10, 25.

Silverman, Edgar A. Poe , 172–173.

113. Silverman , “Mather, Poe, Houdini,” in The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions , ed. Dale Salwak (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996), 107–116 (see esp. 113).

Silverman, “Mather, Poe, Houdini,” 116.

Allen, Hervey , and Thomas Ollive Mabbott . Poe’s Brother: The Poems of William Henry Leonard Poe . New York: George H. Doran, 1926 .

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Deas, Michael J.   The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe . Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1989 .

Fisher, Benjamin Franklin , ed. Poe in His Own Time: A Biographical Chronicle of His Life Drawn from Recollections, Interviews, and Memoirs by Family, Friends, and Associates . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013 .

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Salwak, Dale , ed. The Literary Biography: Problems and Solutions . Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1996 .

Smith, Geddeth.   The Brief Career of Eliza Poe . Rutherford, NJ: Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1988 .

Stedman, Edmund Clarence.   Edgar Allan Poe . Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1881 .

Tane, Susan Jaffe.   Evermore: The Persistence of Poe: The Edgar Allan Poe Collection of Susan Jaffe Tane . New York: The Grolier Club, 2014 .

Thomas, Dwight Rembert. “Poe in Philadelphia, 1838–1844: A Documentary Record.” PhD diss., University of Pennsylvania, 1978.

Thomas, Dwight R. , and David K. Jackson , eds. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 . Boston: G. K. Hall & Co., 1987 .

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