The Romantics
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Week Eleven: The Romantics
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Edgar Allan Poe Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000
Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
R One hundred fifty years after his death, Poe is still among the most popular of American authors, but unlike most authors of extreme popularity, Poe has also exerted a continuous influence on writ- ers and critics.
He influenced the course of creative writing and criticism by emphasizing the art that appeals simultaneously to reason and to emotion, and by insisting that the work of art is not a fragment of the author’s life, nor an adjunct to some didactic purpose, but an object created in the cause of beauty—which he defined in its largest spiritual implications. This creative act, according to Poe, involves the utmost concentration and unity, together with the most scrupulous use of words.
This definition of sensibility was directly opposed to the view implicit in the prevailing American literature of Poe’s generation, as represented in general by the works of Emerson, Hawthorne, Longfellow, Whittier, and Holmes, all born in the years from 1803 to 1809. These oth- ers turned toward Wordsworth, while Poe took Coleridge as his lodestar in his search for a consis- tent theory of art. Hawthorne’s symbolism links him with Poe, but Hawthorne’s impulses were often didactic, while Poe taught no moral lessons except the discipline of beauty. Only in Melville, among the authors before the Civil War, does one find the same sensibility for symbolic expression. The literary tradition of Poe, preserved by European symbolism, especially in France, played a consid- erable part in shaping the spirit of our twentieth-century literature, particularly in its demand for the intellectual analysis and controlled perception of emotional consciousness.
The son of itinerant actors, he was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His father, David Poe, apparently deserted his wife and disappeared about eighteen months later. Elizabeth Arnold Poe, an English-born actress, died during a tour in Richmond in 1811, and her infant son became the ward of the Allan family, although he was never legally adopted. John Allan was a substantial Scottish tobacco exporter; Mrs. Allan lavished on the young poet the erratic affections of the child- less wife of an unfaithful husband. In time this situation led to tensions and jealousies which per- manently estranged Poe from his foster father; but in youth he enjoyed the genteel and thorough education, with none of the worldly expectations, of a young Virginia gentleman.
Allan’s business interests took him abroad, and Poe lived with the family in England and Scotland from 1815 to 1820, attending a fine classical preparatory school at Stoke Newington for three years. When he was eleven, the family returned to Richmond, where he continued his studies at a local academy. His precocious adoration of Jane Stith Stanard, the young mother of a schoolfel- low, later inspired the lyric “To Helen,” according to his own report. At this period he considered himself engaged to Sarah Elmira Royster. Her father’s objections to a stripling with no prospects resulted in her engagement to another while Poe was at the University of Virginia in 1826. Poe’s gambling debts prompted Allan to remove him from the University within a year, in spite of his obvious academic competence.
Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 10 vols., was edited by E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry, 1894–1895, and reprinted in 1914. Unless otherwise noted, this is the source of the present texts. Also reliable is the Virginia Edition, 17 vols., edited by J. A. Harrison, 1902. T. O. Mabbott, with the assistance of E. D. Kewer and M. C. Mabbott, edited the poems, tales, and sketches in Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 3 vols. 1969–1978. Burton J. Pollin edited Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 1981–. J. W. Ostrom edited The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1948.
A recent and thorough biography is Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance, 1991. For many years the standard scholarly biography was Edgar Allan Poe, by A. H. Quinn, 1941. Other biographical or critical works include Hervey Allen, Israfel—The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe, 2 vols., 1926; N. B. Fagin, The Histrionic Mr. Poe, 1949; E. H. Davidson, Poe, A Critical Study, 1957; E. Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe, The Man behind the Legend, 1963; E. W. Parks, Edgar Allan Poe, 1964; Daniel Hoffman, Poe, Poe, Poe * * * , 1972; David Sinclair, Edgar Allan Poe, 1977; Julian Symons, The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1978; Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe’s Fiction, 1987; Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson, The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1987; I. M. Walker, ed., Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage, 1987; and Jeffrey Meyers, Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, 1992.
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Edgar Allan Poe Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000
Unable to come to terms with Allan, who wanted to employ him in the business, Poe ran away to Boston, where he published Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), significantly signed “By a Bostonian”; then he disappeared into the army under the name of “Edgar A. Perry.” The death of Mrs. Allan produced a temporary reconciliation with Allan, who offered to seek an appointment to West Point for the young sergeant major. Poe secured a discharge from the army, and published Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). Before entering West Point (July 1, 1830) he again had a violent disagreement with Allan, who still declined to assure his prospects. Finding himself unsuited to the life at the Academy, he provoked a dismissal by an infraction of duty, and left three weeks before March 6, 1831, when he was officially excluded. Allan, who had married again, refused to befriend him; two years later his death ended all expectations. Meanwhile, in New York, Poe had published Poems (1831), again without results that would suggest his ability to survive by writing.
From 1831 to 1835 Poe lived as a hack writer in Baltimore, with his aunt, the motherly Mrs. Maria Poe Clemm, whose daughter, Virginia, later became his wife.
In 1832 the Philadelphia Saturday Courier published Poe’s first five short stories, a part of the Tales of the Folio Club. In 1833 his first characteristic short story, combining pseudoscience and terror, won a prize of $50 and publication in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. “MS Found in a Bottle” appeared on October 12, heralding the success of the formula for popular fiction which Poe was slowly developing by a close study of periodical literature. The prize story won him friends, and ultimately an assistant editorship on the Richmond Southern Literary Messenger (1835–1837). In September 1835, Poe secretly married his cousin, Virginia Clemm; the ceremony was repeated pub- licly in Richmond eight months later, when Virginia was not quite fourteen.
Poe’s experience with the Messenger set a pattern which was to continue, with minor varia- tions, in later editorial associations. He was a brilliant editor; he secured important contributors; he attracted attention by his own critical articles. He failed through personal instability. His devotion to Virginia was beset by some insecurity never satisfactorily explained; he had periods of quarrelsomeness which estranged him from his editorial associates. Apparently he left the Messenger of his own accord, but during a time of strained relations, with a project for a magazine of his own which he long cherished without result.
After a few months in New York, Poe settled down to his period of greatest accomplishment (1838–1844) in Philadelphia. There he was editor of, or associated with, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine (1839), Graham’s Magazine (1841–1842), and The Saturday Museum (1843). He became well known in literary circles as a result of the vitality of his critical articles, which were a by- product of his editorial functions, the publication of new poems and revised versions of others, and the appearance of some of his greatest stories in Graham’s. He collected from earlier periodicals his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840). His fame was assured by “The Gold Bug,” which won the prize of $100 offered in 1843 by the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper.
Unable to hold a permanent editorial connection in Philadelphia, Poe moved in 1844 to New York, where he found sporadic employment on the Evening Mirror and the Broadway Journal. For some time it had been evident that Virginia must soon die of tuberculosis, and this apprehension, added to grueling poverty, had increased Poe’s eccentricities. Even an occasional escape by alcohol could not go unnoticed in anyone for whom only a moderate indulgence was ruinous, and Poe’s reputation, in these years, suffered in consequence. His candid reviews and critical articles increased the number of his enemies, who besmirched his reputation by gossip concerning a number of lit- erary ladies with whom his relations were actually indiscreet but innocent. Yet in 1845 he climaxed his literary life. “The Raven” appeared in the Mirror and in The Raven and Other Poems, his major volume of poems. His Tales also appeared in New York and London. The Poes found a little cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City) in 1846, and Virginia died there the following January. Poe was feverishly at work on Eureka (1848), then deemed the work of a demented mind, but later considered important as a “prose poem” in which he attempted to unify the laws of physical science with those of aesthetic reality.
His life ended, as it had been lived, in events so strange that he might have invented them. In 1849, learning that Sarah Elmira Royster, his childhood sweetheart, was a widow, he visited
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Edgar Allan Poe Author Bio © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000
Richmond and secured her consent to marry him. About two months later he left for Philadelphia on a business engagement. Six days thereafter he was found semiconscious in a tavern in Baltimore, and he died in delirium after four days, on October 7, 1849.
During a short life of poverty, anxiety, and fantastic tragedy, Poe achieved the establishment of a new symbolic poetry within the small compass of forty-eight poems; the formalization of the new short story; the invention of the story of detection and the broadening of science fiction; the foundation of a new fiction of psychological analysis and symbolism; and the slow development, in various stages, of an important critical theory and a discipline of analytical criticism.
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Edgar Allan Poe The Premature Burial © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000
The Premature Burial
Edgar Allan Poe
There are certain themes of which the interest is all-absorbing, but which are too entirely horrible for the purposes of legitimate fiction. These the mere romanticist must eschew, if he do not wish to offend or to disgust. They are with propriety han- dled only when the severity and majesty of Truth sanctify and sustain them. We thrill, for example, with the most intense of “pleasurable pain” over the accounts of the Passage of the Beresina, of the Earthquake at Lisbon, of the Plague at London, of the Massacre of St. Bartholomew, or of the stifling of the hundred and twenty-three pris- oners in the Black Hole at Calcutta. But in these accounts it is the fact—it is the reality—it is the history which excites. As inventions, we should regard them with simple abhorrence.
I have mentioned some few of the more prominent and august calamities on record; but in these it is the extent, not less than the character of the calamity, which so vividly impresses the fancy. I need not remind the reader that, from the long and weird catalogue of human miseries, I might have selected many individual instances more replete with essential suffering than any of these vast generalities of disaster. The true wretchedness, indeed—the ultimate woe—is particular, not diffuse. That the ghastly extremes of agony are endured by man the unit, and never by man the mass—for this let us thank a merciful God!
To be buried while alive is, beyond question, the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen to the lot of mere mortality. That it has frequently, very fre- quently, so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think. 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? We know that there are diseases in which occur total cessations of all the apparent functions of vitality, and yet in which these cessations are merely suspensions, properly so called. They are only temporary pauses in the incomprehensible mechanism. A certain period elapses, and some unseen mys- terious principle again sets in motion the magic pinions and the wizard wheels. The silver cord was not for ever loosed, nor the golden bowl irreparably broken. But where, meantime, was the soul?
Apart, however, from the inevitable conclusion, a priori that such causes must produce such effects—that the well-known occurrence of such cases of suspended animation must naturally give rise, now and then, to premature interments—apart from this consideration, we have the direct testimony of medical and ordinary expe- rience to prove that a vast number of such interments have actually taken place. I might refer at once, if necessary to a hundred well authenticated instances. One of very remarkable character, and of which the circumstances may be fresh in the memory of some of my readers, occurred, not very long ago, in the neighboring city of Baltimore, where it occasioned a painful, intense, and widely-extended excite- ment. The wife of one of the most respectable citizens-a lawyer of eminence and a member of Congress—was seized with a sudden and unaccountable illness, which
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Edgar Allan Poe The Premature Burial © The McGraw−Hill Companies, 2000
completely baffled the skill of her physicians. After much suffering she died, or was supposed to die. No one suspected, indeed, or had reason to suspect, that she was not actually dead. She presented all the ordinary appearances of death. The face assumed the usual pinched and sunken outline. The lips were of the usual marble pallor. The eyes were lustreless. There was no warmth. Pulsation had ceased. For three days the body was preserved unburied, during which it had acquired a stony rigidity. The funeral, in short, was hastened, on account of the rapid advance of what was sup- posed to be decomposition.
The lady was deposited in her family vault, which, for three subsequent years, was undisturbed. At the expiration of this term it was opened for the reception of a sarcophagus;—but, alas! how fearful a shock awaited the husband, who, personally, threw open the door! As its portals swung outwardly back, some white-apparelled object fell rattling within his arms. It was the skeleton of his wife in her yet unmoulded shroud.
