A History of American Literature/Chapter 11

Edgar Allen Poe stands solitary among the American men of letters. Although, by a strange chance, born in Boston, he had nothing in common with the New England group of authors, and although he passed an important part of his life in New York City, he was in no way a member of the Knickerbocker School. Whether viewed as poet, romancer, or critic, he stands by himself; he refuses to be classified; he seems out of place in American literature, like an importation from the Old World, a Pushkin, or Heine, or De Musset; like a brilliant exotic among the native wild flowers.

Life.—(Poe's writings were first collected in 1850 by Rufus W. Griswold in a four volume edition prefaced by a memoir. This sketch, written in a hostile spirit, was answered in 1859 in Sarah H. Whitman's Edgar A. Poe and his Critics, and later by John Ingram and by W. F. Gill. Prefixed to various editions of Poe's works have been notices of his life and genius by such writers as Willis, Lowell, Stoddard, Charles F. Briggs, James Hanny, Edmund Blanchard, and others. ​Poe's life has also been written by Eugene Didier and by George E. Woodberry. The latter work, which is one of the American Men of Letters Series, and which is the most accurate and impartial life of the poet that has yet appeared, is the only one that can be recommended without reserve for school use. The best edition of Poe's works is that published in six volumes in 1844, edited by R. II. Stoddard. This edition contains many fac-simile manuscripts, an excellent Life by the editor, and the essay contributed by Lowell at Poe's request to Graham's Magazine in 1845. A complete and final edition of Poe's works in twelve volumes, edited by G. E. Woodberry and E. C. Stedman, is at present [1895] publishing.)

In the biography of no eminent American is it so difficult to arrive at the unvarnished truth as in that of Poe. His own statements cannot be trusted for a moment. He gave, at various times, at least three widely different dates for his birth; he seemed to be proud of the reckless exploits of his youth, and magnified them when possible; and he sanctioned the wildest fables, like the story of his journey to St. Petersburg in 1827. His biographers have taken every standpoint, from that of Griswold, a bitter enemy, to that of Ingram, who goes to the opposite extreme of laudation.

Poe was born in Boston, Jan. 19, 1809. His father, David Poe, the son of a distinguished Revolutionary officer of Baltimore, had abandoned the law to become an indifferent actor, and in 1805 had married Mrs. Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, a pretty, young actress of con​siderable ability. During the three years ending in September, 1809, they had found steady employment in Boston, but in 1811 both died of quick consumption, leaving three destitute children, the eldest only five years of age. Their pitiful condition attracted the attention of the people of Richmond, where the mother had died, and Edgar, the second of the family, a bright, beautiful boy, was taken into the home of Mr. John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant. The child was given every advantage. When six years of age he was taken by his foster parents to England, where for five years he attended a private school near London. Returning to Richmond in 1820, he was provided with private tutors, and was ready in 1826 to enter the University of Virginia. By December of the same year he had contracted so many debts that Mr. Allan refused to furnish more money, and Poe was accordingly given a chance in the counting-room at Richmond. Becoming disgusted with this work, he soon left the city, and, pressing on to Boston, published, in 1827, a thin volume of poems under the title Tamerlane and Other Poems By a Bostonian. In May of the same year he enlisted in the regular army, where he served for two years, rising to the rank of sergeant major. In 1829, learning of the death of Mrs. Allan, Poe went home on a furlough, was forgiven by his foster father, and through his influence was appointed a cadet at West Point. In ten months he was cashiered for misconduct, and was immediately disowned by Mr. Allan, who, dying soon afterwards, made no mention of him in his will.

​The next period in Poe's career was passed in Baltimore, which, as it was then the literary capital of the South, had attracted the ambitious young poet. But his literary efforts were wholly without success until 1833, when he succeeded in winning the one hundred dollar prize offered by the newly established Saturday Visitor for the best short story. John P. Kennedy, who was one of the judges, afterwards declared that Poe's manuscript, which was as clean and legible as print, was decided upon almost at sight. Poe had submitted six tales, neatly bound, entitled Tales of the Folio Club, from which was selected for publication "The Manuscript Found in a Bottle." During the next two years Poe made his home with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and in 1835, through the efforts of Kennedy, secured a place on The Southern Literary Messenger, of which he soon became sole editor. In 1836 he was married to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, a frail, beautiful girl of fourteen, whose love was the brightest sunbeam that ever entered his sad life. Every prospect of happiness and success seemed before him; The Messenger became widely known, carrying everywhere his fame as a critic and story writer, but in eighteen months he was again a wanderer.

During the next five years Poe was employed in Philadelphia, first on the editorial staff of The Gentleman's Magazine and afterwards on that of Graham's Monthly. In 1842, he removed to New York, where the rest of his life was passed. He found employment for a time under N. P. Willis on The Evening Mirror and ​he afterwards became connected with The Broadway Journal, but his unfortunate habits rendered it impossible for him long to retain a position. "The Raven," which appeared in 1844, immediately gave him an unprecedented popularity, but his wife was wasting away with consumption amid all the accompaniments of abject poverty. In spite of his increasing fame and his steady hard work, he was obliged to receive pecuniary aid. After his wife's death in 1847, Poe seemed half insane and wholly reckless. Two years later he proposed marriage to a Mrs. Shelton, of Richmond, a friend of his boyhood, and, being accepted, immediately started south to make arrangements for the wedding, but falling in with old companions in Baltimore, he became crazed with drink, and was found unconscious several days later. He lingered until October 7, when he died in the forty-first year of his age. Such, in brief, is the sad and tragic story of Edgar Allan Poe.

1. As a Critic.—It should be remembered that Poe first became known to the reading public not as a poet nor as a story writer, but as a critic, and that it was in this role that he was best known throughout the greater part of his life. In 1835, by a single skilful review of a crude but popular novel, he placed The Southern Literary Messenger beside the best American magazines. Throughout his life it was in the service of criticism that his pen was oftenest used.

That Poe was an unfair and one-sided critic cannot be disputed; that his personal likes and dislikes had great influence upon his estimates, is all too true, yet in spite ​of all this his work in this department cannot be overlooked. In his work on The Southern Literary Messenger he certainly inaugurated "the new age in American criticism." All his honest criticisms have been proved by time to be strikingly correct. It was Poe who hailed Hawthorne as a novelist of the first rank when that shy genius was "the obscurest man of letters in America." Poe was quick to see the true worth of Longfellow and of many another American poet at a time when they were all but unknown. Of Poe's methods as a critic Mr. Woodberry says:

Poe failed of winning a high place as a critic, first, because of his inordinate vanity. He wished to be regarded as a profound scholar and accordingly disfigured his work with abundant allusions to occult and curious lore of which he really knew very little. He delighted to show the resources of his analytical mind by investigating minute and unimportant points. Secondly, he had a hobby,—the charge of plagiarism,—from which he never dismounted, and thirdly, he was not honest. His Literati of New York, while it contains very much valuable criticism, is justly to be regarded with suspicion from its senseless denunciation of its ​author's enemies and its sickening laudation of his worthless friends.

Stoddard's judgment of Poe's criticism is summed up in one sentence:

2. As a Poet.—(Stedman, 239; Richardson, II., 97–116.) Poe's fame as a poet rests on less than a dozen short"The Raven."
"The Bells."
"To Helen."
"The City in the Sea."
"The Valley of Unrest."
"The Haunted Palace."
"To One in Paradise."
"Ulalume."
"Israfel."
"The Conqueror Worm." poems. Few writers of any land have reached anything even approximating his literary position with so thin a repertory, yet had Poe written only "The Raven" his literary fame would still be secure. All that he wrote was distinctly his own, original in its melody and form, and permeated through and through with his peculiar personality. His sense of beauty was marvellously fine. Though his poems are all sombre in hue,—mere cries of despair, there is a haunting beauty in their melody which makes them cling in the memory, even against the will. There is something almost magical in the melody of such lines as

Poe has expressed his theory of poetical beauty in its highest manifestations by saying:

In accordance with this principle nearly all of Poo's poetical work was done. With few exceptions his theme is the same. With him poetry was a sacred thing," not a purpose but a passion," and he gave to it only his best.

3. As a Romancer.—(Woodberry, 117; Stedman, 252; Richardson, II., 116-136.) It was, perhaps, in the domain of the short prose romance that Poe was at his best, for here his imagination had free play. His tales, all of which are short, and which when combined scarcely make a volume of the size of Hawthorne's Twice-told Tales, may be divided into two classes: imaginative tales and analytical tales. Of the former only two, "Ligeia" and "The Fall of the House of Usher," need be mentioned. These mark the flood tide of Poe's creative achievement.

Now, by a finer touch, he incarnated the motions of the breeze, and the musical voices of nature, in the form of a woman: but the Lady Ligeia has still no human quality; her aspirations, her thoughts and capabilities, are those of a spirit; the very beam and ​glitter and silence of her ineffable eyes belong to the visionary world. She is, in fact, the maiden of Poe's dream, the Eidolon he served, the air-woven divinity in which he believed; for he had the true myth-making faculty, the power to make his senses aver what his imagination perceived. In revealing through 'Ligeia' the awful might of the soul in the victory of its will over death, and in the eternity of its love, Poe worked in the very clement of his reverie, in the liberty of a world as he would have it. Upon this story he lavished all his poetic, inventive, and literary skill, and at last perfected an exquisitely conceived work, and made it, within its own laws, as faultless as humanity can fashion."—Woodberry.

"The Fall of the House of Usher" is nearly as perfect in its art. (For Poe's idea of the short prose romance as a vehicle of artistic expression, see his review of Hawthorne's Tales, Works, Vol. VI.

The second division of Poe's tales may be understood best from his ingenious tale, "The Gold Bug." Poe's brain was keen and electric. He had the analytic faculty in a high degree, and he delighted in applying it to the solution of almost impossible problems. It is true that it is not hard to find the clew in a maze of one's own construction. Poe's ability as an analytic thinker has therefore been challenged, since he was free to make the web from which he was to escape. But one should not forget that it requires just as much skill to make a successful maze as it does to escape from one already constructed. Poe demonstrated fully his analytical powers by telling the complete plot of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, after reading the first magazine instalment of the novel, a feat that filled Dickens with amazement. With his tale, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," Poe may be said to have originated the modern detective ​story. "The Gold Bug" is a tale of the recovery of a vast buried treasure through the deciphering of an almost impossible cryptogram.

The rest of Poe's tales need not be mentioned. Their style is clear and seemingly definite, but the impression left on the reader is always vague and awful. Their domain is ghost land. Their very titles are fearsome. They teach no lesson and serve no purpose, save to chill the blood by mere revolting physical horror. In his best tales Poc's art is equal to Hawthorne's. His plots are arranged with great skill, and the reader is drawn rapidly to the climax in the way that will most completely unnerve him. Poe's one thought was of the effect he was producing on his reader. Instruction and moral lessons had, he maintained, no place in fiction.

Poe's Character and Rank.—The faults of no American author have been so paraded before the public as those of Poe. Griswold, his first biographer, dwelt at length upon his failings, but a more charitable view has been taken by later writers. Willis, who knew him intimately, declared that "he was punctual and industrious, quiet, patient, gentlemanly, commanding the utmost respect and good feeling." In his home Poe was at his best. Passionately devoted to his wife and her mother, his domestic life was well-nigh faultless. When sober he took the greatest pains with his productions. He rewrote his earlier poems many times, some of his most ​haunting melodies being the result of the most exacting effort.

Poe's grave in Baltimore remained without a mark until 1875, when a stone was raised to his memory. In 1885 a memorial tablet was placed in the New York Museum of Art with the inscription

"He was great in his genius, unhappy in his life, wretched in his death, but in his fame he is immortal."