Edgar Allan Poe has consistently been regarded by literary critics as one of the most important writers within the realm of American literature. Indeed, even the most novice of readers may identify the often familiar strains of his prose and poetry. Categorized with only a select few others, Poe is—perhaps—the foremost American author studied in high school classrooms across the country. His work has been revisited and parodied time after time by all manner of artistic mediums. Poe was a master of language and words, and he is accredited as coining over a thousand words, most of which are still commonly used today. He is attributed as single-handedly inventing the modern ratiocination narrative—detective story—with his Murders of the Rue Morgue in 1841. Unfortunately, however, the full range of his diversity seems to have become overshadowed by his apparent penchant for penning fictional tales and narratives that delve into the darker, more macabre elements of the human psyche and soul—stories such as The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, William Williamson, The Cask of Amontillado, and The Tell-Tale Heart, to name a few. In short, many today do not remember Edgar Allan Poe, the Romantic poet—the poet whose literary criticisms and self-disclosing commentary on poesy would become the quintessential how-to guide for creating relevant, poignant, and beautiful literature.
As is the case with the poet, the most potent tool in his arsenal is experience, and a brief look into the short and tragic life of Edgar Allan Poe will reveal much of the impetus for his poetry: experiences relating to death and women. Ergo, with these two topics in mind, we can begin to see the filter through which Poe feels, thinks, and writes—especially in his concept of beauty insomuch as its poetic context is concerned. In fact, he notes in his Philosophy of Composition:
Regarding, then, Beauty as my province, my next question referred to the tone of its highest manifestation—and all experience has shown that this tone is one of sadness. Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetical tones. (Poe, 2524)
Influences on Poe’s Early Life. Edgar Poe was born the second of three children on January19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts to parents David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both of whom were actors in a theatrical troupe known as the Virginia Players. Soon after Edgar’s birth, his father completely abandoned the family , leaving a sickly, single, pregnant wife and two infant children behind. Still struggling to maintain her role as an actress, Elizabeth Poe arrived in Richmond, Virginia with her theater company and rented a cheap, drafty, dilapidated room above a local tavern. On December 8, 1811 at only twenty-four years of age, Elizabeth Poe died of pneumonia . Edgar, then only a month shy of turning three years old, was adopted by a wealthy and childless couple, John and Frances Allan, though John Allan initially opposed this arrangement. The Allan’s, whilst still living in Richmond ensured Edgar receive a thorough education, although they each provided him with an interesting contrast in the role of parents—Frances was an extremely religious woman who frequently took Edgar to church where he, in turn, became familiar with the Bible and Christianity at large. Conversely, John Allan was a staunch rationalist who continually expressed a variety of opinions, no matter how divisive they were with respect to his wife’s personal beliefs. If John Allan had a major lasting effect on Edgar, it may well have been these unyielding opinions, which could have helped the latter become—as Hervey Allen stated—“one of the first poets in America to view the world minus the explanation of a miracle-working deity” (qtd. in Bonaparte, 10).
For five years from 1815-1820, John Allan moved the family to Britain for business necessities and to revisit Scotland, his native land. In England, Edgar received an even stricter education than he had received in Virginia, especially in the autumn of 1816 when he was sent to Manor House School—a boarding school—at which locale where, perhaps, “Edgar imbibed that romantic predilection for the medieval and neo-Gothic, for ancient dwellings and places which, later, he revealed in so many tales” (Bonaparte, 15). In 1820, John Allan moved the family back to Richmond where Edgar completed his primary education and later enrolled at the emerging University of Virginia in 1826. It was during his time at the university, a heated tension between Allan and Poe came to a head—one that had been caused by Edgar’s relationship to a young girl named Elmira Royster and further financial troubles. John Allen and Royster’s father sought to keep the impetuous young couple separated and, through repeated devious and underhanded misdeeds, eventually succeeded as Elmira eventually withdrew hope and married another man. Though several debates attempting some form of compromise between the Poe and Allan ensued, their relationship fell into disrepair; their relationship became completely severed. During this period, Poe fled to Boston and was able to publish his first volume of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1827. Less than two years later, Edgar experienced the next in a series of devastating events—the death of his foster mother, Frances Allan. Not only was Mrs. Allan’s death an emotionally profound detriment to Poe, but it helped note the beginning of his life as the ambitious, wandering, neurotic author whose remaining life would be characterized by the ebb and flow of his unique talents and creative vision—the momentary peaks of his success and joy, but mostly of the troughs of his disappointments and sorrow.
Influences on Poe, the Emerging Author. The extent to which the brief attachment and ensuing deaths of Edgar’s early two maternal figures—his mother and his foster mother—shaped his personality and his literary craft may never be know. Elizabeth Poe and Frances Allan were certainly crucial components of Edgar’s pathos, but certainly not the last nor, arguably, the most important.
After what would prove to be the climax of his falling-out with John Allan , Edgar Poe was left destitute and penniless. He moved to Baltimore, Maryland to live with his grandmother and his aunt, Maria Poe Clemm. Several years later, in May of 1836, Edgar married Mrs. Clemm’s fourteen year-old daughter—his cousin—Virginia Clemm. Insomuch as it may be juxtaposed with his earlier life, his marriage to Virginia—“the only woman Poe truly loved” (Chase, 73)—seems to have, at least, calmed his neurosis and provided him a time of relative stability during which he sought to publish more of his poetry, taking menial jobs as a copy writer and contributor to a number of small newspapers, magazines, and reviews. Though Poe eventually published a few works (i.e. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, Fall of the House of Usher, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque) during this interim period, he “burst onto the New York literary scene rather suddenly in January 1845 when James Russell Lowell’s favorable sketch of Poe’s life and works was followed by the publication of The Raven which was immediately copied, parodied, and anthologized” (McGill, 2460). If Poe’s sensationalized success with The Raven had an impact on the writer, the New York literati (whom he would later come to deplore) it connected him to would impact him even more, especially with such female acquaintances such as Ann Lynch, Frances Sargent Osgood , and—perhaps the most interesting and renown—Sarah Helen Whitman . Dr. Lewis Chase, in his study of Poe, notes “although it is true that a succession of broken friendships with literary women resulted in his cursing the class, yet women generally, of diverse temperaments, of all ages, and of all degrees of acquaintance, became, and usually remained, his devoted admirers” (74). In short, one should not let the simplicity of Poe’s love-hate relationship with these particular individuals undermine their influence on him. Though later romances and peculiar encounters with other women would still slowly and less potently fuse themselves into Poe’s perception of beauty and melancholy in his poetry, the last of the preeminent events to have a major outstanding effect on the author was the death of his beloved wife, Virginia, in 1847.
Poe’s Women, Beauty, and Melancholy in Poe’s Poetry. In an otherwise frail, mutable, and unpredictable existence, the chief constant Poe had come to loathe, albeit forced to understand so well, was the untimely deaths of the women in his life. Excluding his aunt and mother-in-law, Mrs. Maria Clemm who “loved and served him best of all” (Chase, 75), he had lost those female relationships, those intimate and delicate relationships which were the most important throughout Poe’s development—not only as a man, but as a human. It is, therefore, poignantly telling that Poe would express this aggrieved sense of loss as the ultimate catalyst for beauty in his poetry:
Now, never losing sight of the object of supremeness, or perfection, at all points, I asked myself—‘Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind is the most melancholy?’ Death—was the obvious reply. ‘And when,’ I said, ‘is this the most melancholy of topics most poetical?’ From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious—‘When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world—and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover. (Poe, 2525)
Literary scholars, critics, and historians have used the preceding quote as a magnification by means of scrutinizing a few in his meager catalogue of poems, constantly attempting to categorize their meaning, to identify their object, and to interpret their verse into a sort of biographical puzzle piece.
The most obvious reference in which we can see the true motion of Poe’s proclamation of beauty and melancholy—the death of a women as lamented by her mourning lover—is, in fact, The Raven. This, his defining masterpiece may be the most difficult to attribute to a single source, though some have been so bold as to speculate , but it is most likely a combination of several of the influences he had erstwhile experienced. However, if Poe had indeed postulated his conception of beauty and melancholy as aforementioned, he achieves it with great effect—both melancholy and beauty—by the lines:
Eagerly I wished the morrow; —vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
Interestingly, another of Poe’s poems is entitled, simply, Lenore. According to Fruit, “unmistakably there is a connection in thought between Lenore and The Raven” (62). This connection, if any, would be an important footnote to his theme of beauty and melancholy—especially when attempting to identify the specific influence—as Poe was not known for revisiting specific characters or storylines in his poetry.
In his poem, To My Mother, Poe commemorates his wife’s mother in verse. Nowhere else in his poetry is Poe so explicit in identifying the key influences in his life:
You who are more than mother to me,
And fill my heart of hearts, where Death installed you,
In setting my Virginia’s spirit free.
My mother—my own mother, who died early,
Was but the mother of myself; but you
Are mother to the one I loved so dearly….
This is, as Campbell notes, one of the “…few specific references to the objective facts of the poet’s life….” (131) found throughout the body of his work.
Perhaps the second most agreed-upon reference to a chief influence in Poe’s life is that of Annabel Lee, written almost as a eulogy, although his dear wife Virginia—while deathly ill and only short time from her demise—was not yet dead. Again, Poe assumes the role of the bereaved lover:
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we—
Of many far wiser than we—
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever by soul from the soul
Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE
If we may safely assume that Annabel Lee is, in fact, Virginia Poe, then we may also assume that Poe’s statement in The Philosophy of Composition concerning melancholy and beauty was bore out of necessity in prehumously eulogizing his wife, rather than an insightful created literary device. Thus, Poe may have been more sensitive and intuitive to his own sense of emotion that previously believed.
Several scholars have ventured enough to include Poe’s most unique poem, Ulalume as another lament for the death of Virginia. However, the beauty and melancholy of which Poe previously spoke coexist peaceably here as, true to form, the narrator is subconsciously led back to the gravesite of his lost love, Ulalume:
And I said—‘What is written, sweet sister,
On the door of this legended tomb?’
She replied—‘Ulalume—Ulalume—
‘Tis the vault of thy lost Ulalume!’
Conclusion. Though volumes could be—and possibly have been—written on the single subject of Edgar Allen Poe’s themes of beauty and melancholy in his poetry, a brief glance at a select few of his works will reveal the powerful influences interacting in his life to help create this particular facet of his literary genius. That a man who experienced so much death, pain, and separation could find such a unique voice to write about love and beauty through the scope of death and melancholy, speaks volumes of his own unique vision and experiences. As Yvor Winters speculates, Poe may have believed that “the proper subject-matter of poetry is Beauty, but since true Beauty exists only in eternity, the poet cannot experience it and is deprived of his subject-matter; by manipulating the materials of our present life, we may suggest that Beauty exists elsewhere, and this is the best that we can do” (186).
While Poe, now and in the future, may be remembered largely for his tales of horror and his darkly fractured take on human life, his diversity is must not be ignored and is evident for anyone who reads his poetry.
Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic
Interpretation. New York: Humanities Press, 1971.
Braddy, Haldeen. Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe.
Port Washington, NY: Kennikat Press, Inc., 1953.
Campbell, Killis. The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. New York: Russell & Russell
Inc., 1962.
Chase, Lewis. Poe and His Poetry. London: George G. Harrap & Co., 1971.
Fruit, John Phelps. The Mind and Art of Poe’s Poetry. New York: AMS Press, 1969.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Edgar Allen Poe: A Study in Genius. New York: Russell &
Russell Inc., 1965.
McGill, Meredith L. “Edgar Allan Poe.” The Heath Anthology of American
Literature. 5th ed. Vol. B. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
pp. 2459-2461.
Poe, Edgar Allan. “The Philosophy of Composition.” The Heath Anthology of American
Literature. 5th ed. Vol. B. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005.
pp. 2521-2529.
Winters, Yvor. “Edgar Allan Poe: A Crisis in the History of American Obscurantism.”
The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. pp. 176-204.
2 comments:
...Gosh damn, that was long. B-
CHIMAY!
In your paper, you come off as being very assiduous in your many referances to Poe's more obscure works.
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