Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe pursued a solitary way. As a man, he was destined to lead a tragic life; as an artist, he was doomed almost from the start and suffered neglect and abuse in his lifetime. His romantic nihilism was not at home in the culture of his times; his genius was for negativity and opposition, reacting against his age and writing in spite of it. He believed in a world of dreams, but he thoroughly disbelieved in any possibility of its realization. Everything related to his short unhappy life must have confirmed this attitude in him.
On 19 January 1809 he was born in Boston, the son of a pair of travelling actors. When his irresponsible father disappeared and his mother died of tuberculosis at twenty-four, he was adopted by John Allan, a prosperous tobacco merchant in Richmond, Virginia. Poe was raised to be a gentleman and took for granted advantages he was soon to be deprived of. By choice, he took Allan as his middle name and always emphasized his Southern background.
He had a period of schooling in England, and a year at the University of Virginia. However, instead of making profitable use of his studies, he learned to play cards, and soon owed money to merchants who had given him credit. When Allan refused to pay his ‘debts of honour’, Poe absconded to Boston and, under a new identity, began his literary career. Even though he could scarcely afford one night’s lodging, he published three volumes of verse at his own expense. Then, seeing a comfortable future on an officer’s pay, he enlisted in the army and enrolled at West Point, but he deliberately violated Academy regulations and earned a prompt dismissal. It was a crucial moment for him. The humiliating letters he had to write to his foster-father asking for financial support received no answer. By that time, Allan, whose wife had died, had already remarried thus leaving Poe no hope of a legacy. The penniless young orphan tried to make his own way in his precarious career as professional author. There would certainly be no parents in the tales he was to write.
Poe spent his adult life in American literary capitals that provide the urban context and the developing image of its human landscape in The Man of the Crowd (1840), one of his major achievements as a painter of modern life. He lived in Baltimore and in Richmond, where he was employed as assistant editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. Having contributed very little to the first issue of the magazine, he offered the editor-in-chief his longest and most ambitious tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), a romance of a fantastic voyage through the South Seas, culminating in the Antarctic; a voyage marked by endless catastrophes, including a particularly grisly instance of cannibalism. It was a failure at that time. Fired from the Messenger early in 1837 he moved first to New York and then to Philadelphia, where he worked at editing the popular monthly Graham’s Magazine.
Thus Poe entered the world of journalism bringing new life to the literary magazines of America and despising the sensationalism that had become popular in American journals. Later he parodied that fashionable way of writing in a burlesque entitled How to Write a Blackwood Article (1842), where an editor advises a certain Miss Psyche Zenobia to “pay minute attention to the sensations”; consequently, she writes an account of her own decapitation, continuing to chatter after losing her head!
While he was editor, he performed enormous editorial labours for ridiculously small salaries. Furthermore, due to the fact that his controversial reviews and unflattering critiques alienated many of his friends, he resigned from Graham’s in 1842 and tried unsuccessfully to found a journal of his own. These years of financial troubles saw the freelance publication of some of his most famous tales, but they also established the pattern of his miserable diet and the habit of drinking that eventually brought him to an early grave.
What all of us generally remember about Poe’s irregular life is that he married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm, before she turned fourteen. Modern biographers have attempted to prove that theirs was a brother-sister relationship. Nothing could be further from the truth. Poe was very much in love with his wife, and at least one observer noted that Virginia kissed him so passionately in public that he found it embarrassing. She had a beautiful voice and was trained as a singer. However, she burst a blood vessel in her throat and sank, spitting blood, into a state of prostration. In January 1847 she died, not yet twenty.
Despite his grief, Poe proposed marriage to the widowed poet Sarah Helen Whitman the year after Virginia’s death. The lady’s doubts might have been caused by rumours of Poe’s taste for alcohol, a vice that taxed his capacities, both physical and financial. When he was affected by alcohol, the suppressed rage that he felt for what he considered the injustices of an insensitive world expressed itself in vituperation and violence which often ended in quarrels. In any event, this marriage did not take place, nor did he survive to marry another widow, his childhood sweetheart Elmira Royster Shelton. He had also flirted with Nancy Richmond and, in a desperate letter to her, he wrote he had tried to commit suicide by taking laudanum.
Those were days when opium was frequently given in small doses for pain, and Poe may well have taken it for that purpose. In a fit of depression he obtained a certain amount and, on the morning of September 28th 1849 he went to a doctor’s office in Baltimore, noticeably intoxicated. He was just forty when he was found dying in a gutter. He was taken to the hospital where he remained delirious, speaking to imaginary objects on the walls. He died on October 7.
The controversy which had run throughout his life outlasted his death, for his literary executor and most invidious enemy, the Reverend Rufus Griswold, maliciously portrayed him as a depraved, neurotic and immoral figure. His “abominable lies” went unexposed for many years, poisoning every biographer’s image of Poe.
Poe’s greatest desire was to be known as a poet, the American Coleridge or Byron, and his poetry echoes those English Romantic forerunners. Whatever his early ambitions, fame in this direction was slow to come. Poe wrote relatively little verse, with the exception of the long prose poem Eureka (1848), which sets forth a vision of the entire cosmos, in its origins, its workings, and its eventual apocalypse. What this poem asserts is the “unified” body of external nature beyond both the spatial and temporal limits of human perception. Some of his poems, like the famous literary ballad The Raven (1845), are remarkable for their deliberate avoidance of conventional language and their insistent musicality. In his seminal essay, The Philosophy of Composition (1846), the poet demonstrated the manner in which he wrote and how we should read this poem.
When he discovered that poetry could not fulfil the high aims he had conceived for it, Poe turned to the writing of short stories. His first tale, Metzengerstein, a horrific account of castles and curses, appeared in 1832; and, in 1833, he won a fifty-dollar prize in a story contest with MS Found in a Bottle, a grim tale of death at sea. He became the first American to interpret the short story as an art form, tightly compressed and full of that kind of tension that is characteristic of poetry. In Poe’s view, a tale was like a poem in that it did not deal with ordinary life: its range was the limitless reach of the imagination into the mysteries of existence. The popularity and influence of Poe’s tales have been and remain immense; they represent a permanent part of Western literary culture.
The bulk of his work is in criticism and tale-telling. In his first collection of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839), Poe used the term arabesque possibly as a tribute to The Arabian Nights; while grotesque signifies the depiction of monsters as they spring from the free enterprise of the imagination and intuition, unobstructed by the presence of the moral dimension. On examination, the two modes do not seem mutually exclusive but appear, somehow, easily intertwined. In 1845 he published another collection, Tales, which had great difficulty in catching the American public’s attention. “I shall never compose anything again”, he radically claimed. Of course, we cannot take that statement very seriously. From 1832 to 1849, in a relatively short space of time, Poe published almost seventy tales in several styles, which we may roughly divide into two categories: mystery-detective and Gothic horror stories.
Had Poe created no other character than Monsieur Auguste Dupin, he would be remembered in literary history for his portrayal of the prototype for Sherlock Holmes. Faced with a difficult crime or puzzle, the analytical intellect of Dupin, an erudite French gentleman who interests himself in crime and works by association. In all three of the stories in which he appears he can reach simple yet ingenious conclusions by avoiding conventional mental operations. He accomplishes what the authorities are unable to accomplish.
That which gives Dupin a clue to the true nature of the murderer of two women in The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is exactly what prompts the police to claim the mystery cannot be solved, namely “the outré character of his features”. Dupin discovers in the unusual an aid to the solution: the murderer is not a human being, but an orang-outang brought ashore by a seaman returned from Borneo. After the brilliant performance in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Prefect of Parisian Police requests his help in solving the case of a girl whose body was found floating in the Seine (The Mystery of Marie Roget, 1842). Without leaving his study, Dupin is able to reconstruct as an intellectual exercise the murderer’s frame of mind. He explains, step by step, his method of analysis to the Prefect of Police, whom he handles as a foolish child from the start. Such reasoning, for Poe, is man’s highest power.
The rational explanation of method is also an intrinsic part in The Purloined Letter (1845), a tale which sets the pattern that all private eye stories have followed since. The much sought letter of the title, incriminating a woman of social prominence, is obviously stolen from her apartment by the Minister D., who has been blackmailing the lady, and who, by means of its possession, has in effect seized control of the government. Most men would hide a letter which the police are looking for, but only an imaginative one could have conceived the sagacious expedient of not attempting to conceal it at all. It was simply left, under the Prefect’s nose, in a card-rack as if it were not important. Poe called his detective stories “tales of ratiocination” because of meticulous attention to the rational process by which mysteries are unravelled. Whether or not we allow Poe the merit of having invented the modern short story, he most certainly did invent the detective story and was the principal exponent of its vogue in America.
Whereas the detective stories are developed with meticulous regard for rational credibility, the reverse commonly occurs in the tales of terror. Take Berenice (1835), for example, in which the narrator speaks of the “inversion” that took place in his mind where the realities of the world seemed to him visionary, “while ideas of the land of dreams” made up his everyday existence. The lunatic lover and dentist digs up the body of his cousin Berenice, wasted by her disease, and tears out the teeth from her jaws, bringing home in a small box the thirty-two ivory treasures and the realization that Berenice had been buried alive. At the end of the story, we realize that nothing at all may have happened in a conventional sense – other than in the completely deranged mind of the narrator. This could be said about all of Poe’s tales of horror. Stories like Ligeia (1838), regarded by the author as his best tale, and The Fall of the House of Usher (1839) still fascinate us because of the author’s skilful mixing of natural and supernatural events.
His conception of an ideal beauty to be worshipped made him assert that the death of a beautiful woman is the perfect theme in both poems and tales. This motif is stated unequivocally in a later tale, The Oval Portrait (1845), in which an artist-husband is able to endow his painting with life. But the touch that completes the portrait of his beautiful wife transfers the glow of life from her cheek to that of her image, and she dies. By painting her perfect likeness, his artwork outlives its subject. The need to destroy the beloved woman develops from the betrayal of the ideal with which she has been invested. Horror is part of the knot in Poe’s weird love tales. Such is the case in Ligeia.
Like so many of Poe’s heroines, Ligeia, a woman of dark beauty and invincible will, dies; her grief-stricken widower comforts himself, first with opium, and then with a second bride, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed” Lady Rowena. Unfortunately, he has little use for this replacement; she is afraid of him and he comes to detest her. She rapidly turns ill and dies. When the shroud falls from her face, he sees not Rowena, but Ligeia restored to life. Deep as is his love for Ligeia, deeper still is the certainty of the husband’s longing for her. Carried to an extreme form, it becomes monomania, the fixation upon a single desire. Critics who, doubting the narrator, necessarily believe that he himself murdered Rowena, have questioned this literal reading. However, it can reasonably be held that in some sense the tale contains, or at least permits, contradictory interpretations.
The theme of premature burial received a definitive statement in works like The Cask of Amontillado (1846) and, most memorably, The Fall of the House of Usher. From the beginning the narrator of the latter tale sees a relationship between the lonely, dilapidated, and melancholy House of Usher and its owner, his old friend Roderick Usher. The crack in the structure of the mansion emblematically represents the imminent collapse of Roderick’s ruined personality. His condition is complicated by the death of his sister Madeline, whose corpse he will preserve for a fortnight in a vault in the building rather than bury her under feet of earth. Throughout the tale he is in an acute state of terror arising from his “morbid acuteness of the senses” and “superstitious impressions” concerning the house. For several nights after Madeline’s death, the narrator and the self-tormented Roderick both suffer from nightmares, until the climax of the story is reached when Madeline, bloody and spectral, returns to life from the tomb and throws herself upon her brother. Collapsing to the floor, he dies crying hysterically, “We have put her living in the tomb!” Subsequently the house itself, which Roderick has blamed for exercising a malignant influence over the lives of himself and his family, sinks into the surrounding lake. Poe liked to repeat that his writings about human obsessions had transformed the clichés of Gothic fiction into a “horror of the soul”. His technique of spiralling intensification is here at its utmost perfection.
Interpretations still appear claiming that Roderick and Madeline reflect Poe’s fear of incest. Once again, in The Black Cat (1843), some critics have objected to his fantasizing up to the point of hallucination, believing that in this story Poe was probing his own disturbed state of mind. But one should avoid confusing the highly rational mind of Poe with those of his distraught characters.
The Black Cat is a classic tale of guilty conscience, where the murderer’s secret is given away by the cat that he accidentally walled up when he killed his wife. In creating the narrator Poe intended here to explore the depth of “the spirit of PERVERSENESS” which, we are told, “is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart.” And so, he distils horror from domesticity, subtly recognizing that every mind is either half-mad or capable of slipping easily into madness. In the ironic monologue of The Tell-Tale Heart (1843) in particular, the narrator bases his plea upon the assumption that madness is incompatible with systematic action, and, as evidence of his capacity for the latter, he relates how he has executed a hideous crime with rational precision. Beneath the placid surface of normal existence, the demon of intemperance lurks within us all.
The oscillation from insanity to rational control affects also Legrand, the misanthropic and mentally unbalanced philosopher of The Gold Bug (1843). His intellectual pastime is the collection of natural specimens, and when the narrator calls on him he finds Legrand making a sketch on a scrap of paper of his latest discovery, a gold bug. Exposing the paper to the heat of the fire, Legrand’s scientific mind brings out a secret writing, the interpretation of which leads him to the recovery of a hidden treasure. There is a method in his madness. The contents of the oblong wooden chest, whose total value he estimates “at a million and a half of dollars”, make him rich beyond his wildest dreams. The Gold Bug was based on a story that actually happened. A fool in California had found gold, and America had gone mad in the search for the gold that Legrand had so readily excavated upon his successful deciphering of the pirate letter.
Poe was not much concerned with the precise nature of madness but with the conditions and stages whereby madness manifested itself in otherwise average, commonplace human beings. Throughout his tales, Poe shifts attention from the grisly deed to the mind that is driven to it, peculiarly anticipating the Freudian speculation about drives or instincts. Poe’s gift of dramatization of the delicately harrowing relations between the world of common sense and that of the imagination is significantly displayed in The Pit and the Pendulum (1843). Placed in a dark pit, the narrator soon falls into unreasoning despair, while his own imagination torments him far more than do his captors. By close analogy, the same subjective “demons” are at work in the timeless terror of the mariner whirled around the abyss in The Descent into the Maelström (1841). The abnormal, in its various manifestations, the sinister, the diseased, even the disgusting were Poe’s natural themes, based on that great mystery of life – subconscious mental activity. Looking into the dark glass of both the human mind and soul, Poe sees only the ghosts that will not be laid to rest.
The story of the split personality that was to produce Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde is prefigured in William Wilson (1839), a tale admired by Dostoevsky and still central to the great fictional tradition of the double. What is curious is that in William Wilson’s history Poe reproduced episodes from his own life, and he also assigned to his fictitious narrator his own birthday. Wilson is tormented by a strange person who bears the same name; competes with him in class and sports; copies his dress and manner; and, as he says in a puzzled expression, “even my voice did not escape him.” Maddened by this “exquisite portraiture”, he forces the double into a duel, kills him, and hears – or perhaps even speaks – a final pronouncement, “You have conquered, and I yield. Yet, henceforward art thou also dead…. In me didst thou exist.” Wilson hates his double, but in the end submits to his “arbitrary will.” Despite a full awareness of his own actions, he cannot refrain from recalling that extraordinary circumstance in his life which he himself had never understood.
True, it would not be difficult to find proof anywhere in Poe’s writings of his fascination with the supernatural. In a tale where the unbelievable happens, such as The Masque of the Red Death (1842), the basic question is essentially the same: is the narrator’s word to be trusted? During a plague that is devastating the country, Prince Prospero summons a thousand lords and ladies to the extreme seclusion of one of his exotic abbeys. A masked ball is decided on so as to pass the time pleasantly. As in the world of fairy-tale, at the stroke of midnight a figure wearing the costume of the Red Death appears and horrifies the guests. The Prince is the first to fall dead; and after him, one by one the revellers expire until all lie dead.
Poe is a mental adventurer, and more than once he reminds us of his credo, “I believe because it is absurd.” When the French decadent poets of the latter part of the nineteenth century discovered an American source for their sense of the power of art, it was to Poe they looked, a writer for whom nature provided no security. At that time, the French symbolist poet Charles Baudelaire began to translate his work with a missionary zeal.
The more one reads Poe, the more one feels that he used only a limited range of emotions, but that he used them with extraordinary craftsmanship, supremely mastering his obsessive materials. The “literary artist”, as Poe himself wrote in The Poetic Principle (1850), conceives “a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out.” In a short tale the unity of effect can be stronger, since “brevity is in direct ratio to the intensity.” Its concentration helps him to keep “during the limits of a single sitting,… the soul of the reader under the writer’s control.” Frightened to death, the reader comes away from the story with nerves laid raw. Poe really was a haunted man, and as a writer, he had the power to haunt his readers. The great fantasist whose grave went without a tombstone for twenty-six years is now acknowledged as one of the classic American writers.