EDGAR ALLAN POE

(1809-1849)

"The want of parental affection," wrote Poe, "has been the heaviest of my trials." Edgar Poe was born in Boston, and he was, indeed, most unfortunate in his parents. His father, David Poe, was a mediocre traveling actor who drank heavily. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was a talented actress who was deserted by her husband when Edgar was an infant. She died soon after the desertion, leaving Edgar an orphan before his third birthday.

The boy was taken in by John and Frances Allan, a charitable and childless couple in Richmond. Although Frances Allan was sympathetic to Edgar, the boy grew up feeling both the lack of a natural father and the disapproval of his foster father. And John Allan made no secret of his disappointment in Edgar—in his idleness, in his indifference to business life, and in his literary ambitions. Surely Allan's unfavorable opinion contributed to Edgar's growing moodiness.

At seventeen, when he entered the University of Virginia, Edgar fell in love with and became secretly engaged to a girl named Elmira Royster. On discovering the romance, however, her family put an end to it—probably because they had heard that Edgar would never be the heir to John Allan's fortune.

At the university he did well in his studies. He tried to increase his income by gambling, he went deep into debt. On discovering this, Allan refused to help his foster son and instead withdrew him from college.

After a particularly bitter quarrel with Allan, Poe ran off to Boston to make his own way in the world. There, in 1827, he published a small volume of poems, Tamerlane, inspired by his ruined romance with Elmira Royster. The book did not attract much attention, and Poe could find no work. In despair, he joined the army. But he developed distaste for the enlisted man's life and appealed to Allan for help. At the request of his wife, who was dying, Allan interceded for Edgar (for the last time) and agreed to help him enter West Point.

Awaiting his appointment to the Academy, Poe published a second volume of poems. El Aa-raaf, in 1829 and received his first real recognition as a writer. The following year, while he was at West Point, he learned that Allan, now a widower, held married a wife young enough to provide him with children. Since this appeared to end all of Poe's hopes of becoming Allan's heir, he had himself dismissed from West Point. He moved in with an aunt, Maria Poe Clemm, in Baltimore. In 1835, he married her thirteen-year-old daughter, Virginias.

Poe found work as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and proved expert at it. He increased the circulation so dramatically that he was sought after by other magazines. He wrote when he could find the time, completing his only full-length novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, several years after his marriage. He decided that, however difficult it might be, he would support himself and his family by writing.

Many readers think of Poe as bringing to a peak the Gothic tradition. This was a central aspect of the European Romantic movement.

Gothic novels featured mysterious settings and had strong elements of the bizarre and the supernatural. Poe compressed these elements into the narrower confines of the short story.

Poe's reputation as a Gothic writer is justly earned in his tales of the ghastly and the grotesque: in "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and his own favorite, " Ligeia. " Death stalks in each story, pointing a bony finger and sending chills through one generation of readers after another.

In "The Gold Bug" and in the tales built around that intuitive sleuth Auguste Dump, "The Purloined Letter" and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe laid the foundations for the modern detective story. He inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle to create Sherlock Holmes, and he inspired Russian novelist Feodor Dostoevski (1821-1881) to explore the criminal mind. In fact, Poe was more admired abroad than at home. While his American contemporaries dismissed him as a lightweight, the French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) praised Poe's probings of the human heart and imagination. These excursions into the workings of the human mind make up Poe's primary contributions to literature. But despite his unquestioned mastery of terror and suspense, Poe was not merely a writer of horror stories. What he desired most in his writing was to cut tree from reality or actuality in order to enter the world of the imagination.

Poe created his imaginative worlds through a masterful use of ambiguity and atmosphere. He wanted to get behind the face of the everyday—to leave the tangible, sunlit aspect of the rational world and show us the truth that lies in the dark and irrational depths of the human mind.

Poe produced a considerable outpouring of poems and tales even as lie worked at a demanding career as a magazine editor, and in spite of humiliating poverty and the serious consequences of his drinking. The slightest amount of alcohol deranged him; yet he drank to escape a reality he found agonizing. Publication of "The Raven" in 1845 brought him some fame at last, but financial security still eluded him.

When Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847, Poe grew more unstable. In 1849, during a visit to Baltimore, he began to drink and disappeared for five days. He was found on a rainy sidewalk on October 3, delirious, his clothing torn. Hospitalized, he regained enough consciousness to say the words "Lord help my poor soul" before he died.

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