A
Quick Overview
Poe was born on Jan. 19, 1809, Boston, Mass., U.S. and died. Oct. 7, 1849, in Baltimore, Md. He was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His tale "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841) initiated the modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His "The Raven" (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature.
"Poe, Edgar Allan" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/472/74.html>
[Accessed 24 September 1998]
Comments: A brillian author facinated with the complex relationships between men and women. There is a strong michious side in all he writes so that one is never sure how serious to think of him.
Major Works
Short stories. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque 
Links
Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and
went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life.
To
talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass
of
sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to
intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to
the
conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony
he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long
prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as so
often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It
is
considered one inspiration of Herman Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he
became coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia.
There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write "William
Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," stories of supernatural
horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been
an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.
Later in 1839 his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared
(dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June 1840 but returned in
1841 to edit its successor, Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine,
in which he printed the first detective story, "The Murders in the Rue
Morgue." In 1843 his "The Gold Bug" won a prize of $100 from the
Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844
he returned to New York, wrote the "Balloon Hoax" for the Sun, and
became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a
lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of Jan. 29, 1845, appeared, from
advance sheets of the American Review, his most famous poem, "The
Raven," which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of
the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he republished
most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now forgotten
poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object,
but "Fanny's" indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great
scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales
came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now
part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey's Lady's Book
(May-October 1846) "Literati of New York"--gossipy sketches on
personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.
His wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year Poe went to
Providence, R.I., to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief
engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie
Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He
composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the
lecture "Eureka," a transcendental "explanation" of the universe, which
has
been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others.
In
1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to
Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then
the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or
two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an
unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.
Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore
late in September. There, after toasting a lady at her birthday party,
he
began to drink heavily. The indulgence proved fatal, for Poe had a weak
heart. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in
Baltimore.
Appraisal.
Poe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and
the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he
applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable
materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions
are
closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate
technique. His keen and sound judgment as appraiser of contemporary
literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as
a
storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a
prominent place among universally known men of letters.
The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange duality. The wide
divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point
to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was
gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism, found
him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack
of
principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from
harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or
from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?
Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in
ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked
brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of
others in
a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander
Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keep ing
a
pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more
striking.
On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal
was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitiveness to the
beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics ("To
Helen," "Annabel Lee," "Eulalie," "To One in Paradise") and the full-toned
prose hymns to beauty and love in "Ligeia" and "Eleonora." In "Israfel"
his
imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland.
This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his
life.
More generally, in such verses as "The Valley of Unrest," "Lenore," "The
Raven," "For Annie," and "Ulalume" and in his prose tales his familiar
mode
of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie
thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling
effects of his tales of death ("The Fall of the House of Usher," "The
Masque of the Red Death," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," "The
Premature Burial," "The Oval Portrait," "Shadow"), his tales of wickedness
and crime ("Berenice," "The Black Cat," "William Wilson," "Imp of the
Perverse," "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Tell-Tale Heart"), his tales
of
survival after dissolution ("Ligeia," "Morella," "Metzengerstein"), and
his
tales of fatality ("The Assignation," "The Man of the Crowd"). Even when
he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or
onto
the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death
as the means of causing the nerves to quiver ("The Pit and the Pendulum"),
and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny
play with the aftermath of death.
On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute
details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that
introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with
this
is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully
handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his
possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought
reading, problem unravelling, and cryptography that he attributed to his
Legrand and Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical tales, which
created the detective story, and his science fiction tales.
The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic
or
weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose
of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of
compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid
psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style.
In
Poe's masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and
of
his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the
more
effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.
As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre,
and
structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought
for
the ancient unities: i.e., the short story should relate a complete action
and
take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that
of
mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised
longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not
crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different
from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of
decidedly minor writers.
Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade
the world and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe's greatness than
the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé.
Indeed his
role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to
criticism. French Symbolism relied on his "Philosophy of Composition,"
borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the modern
theory of "pure poetry." (C.Ce. /T.O.M./J.Ba.) (see also Index: Symbolist
movement)
"Poe, Edgar Allan" Britannica Online.
<http://www.eb.com:180/cgi-bin/g?DocF=micro/472/74.html>
[Accessed 24 September 1998]