Poe Boy

Since I was a pre-teen, I have owned a massive copy of the entire collected works of Edgar Allen Poe. During that portion of my life, I read gregariously but often came back to Poe, drawn by his dark, Gothic, sometimes melodramatic, grotesque prose and his delightfully gloomy poetry. The classic American Gothic writer, on par with Nathaniel Hawthorne for his dark imagery and at a level of compositional genius with Shakespeare and Milton, Poe has defined an entire genre of literary art and by extension, artists. Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, Richard Matheson, Ray Bradbury, Jules Verne, HG Welles, and countless others have been influenced and inspired by Poes's sheer mastery of wit, language, and emotional gravity. We may perhaps even call him the master of Gothic literature.

A few years ago, feeling nostalgic, I downloaded the entire Poe collection as an audiobook from my favorite listening platform. I returned it when it proved to be intolerable to listen to. Disappointed, I searched around for other collections as complete as that one had been but found nothing except smaller compilations of his most popular and well-known stories.

Recently the same platform released a second and professionally recorded complete collection, read by two narrators. These fellows know how to read—most especially—Poe. They also have some skills in French and Latin, both of which figure prominently in his best work. Poe was a well-known Francophile.

He also read gregariously, spoke several languages and was assuredly a genius. I have immensely enjoyed reading (listening to) Poe again in this format. It takes a careful ear. I have had to pay close attention. He is always a challenge. 

For an able reader in my early teens, some of his writing was inaccessible. I still find some of it to be so, now. Because of its intensely narrow provenance, Poe's work can feel cumbersome. He wrote for Baltimore and Philadelphia and Richmond newspapers and periodicals and because he was endowed with prodigious acumen for using words, for allegory or comic allusions and satire that was nevertheless oppressively close to the historical moment, much of it will not make sense unless one has spent their entire life studying the swelteringly narrow confines of Poe’s early industry. An annotated collection would have to be fifty thick volumes. To a light reader, some of it is just opaque; composed in a time and with language that is arcane to us, at least from our modern vantage. 

Most of us think of Poe as a pitiable and intemperate writer, down at heel, staggering, begging for money, speaking to himself or holding imaginary conversations; looking for all the world like a hobo or vagrant in ill-fitting black clothing, trying to be taken seriously and getting an endless series of rejection letters. We think this for a reason. In actuality, he attempted to live by writing alone and sometimes fell afoul of a publishing world that didn’t pay well or at all. Also, around this time, more magazines were established than ever before. Few ever made it far, but Poe submitted his work to any publishers and editors he could. Since these publications were notoriously bad with cash, he was often not paid on time, if at all. This contributed to his somewhat vexing living situation early on. For all that, he maintained a breathtaking level of production, sending stories, articles and columns out daily.

He landed work at a magazine in Richmond but was fired for being drunk. He was eventually rehired, and lasted a while, but then moved to Philadelphia. Near this time, his novel, The Life of A. Gordon Pym of Nantucket was widely admired and received excellent criticism. Lovecraft's At the Mountains of Madness is a direct nod to this work. Poe worked and wrote and managed to survive fairly well (and married his 13-year-old cousin in the meantime) in Philly, at least for a while. 

He was considered an unflinching literary and social critic and his words directed at other literary figures of the time gained him much attention and respect. He published his weirder tales but often to mixed reception. Most of his darker stories were considered too bleak for the period and Gothic literature had yet to capture the American literary imagination.

Later, Poe nearly got a position working in the cabinet of President John Tyler. He considered himself a member of the Whig Party and was friends with Tyler’s sons. His alcoholism by this time had become quite unmanageable and Poe missed his meetings, claiming to be sick. Tyler wanted nothing to do with a drunk in his administration and Poe was never contacted again. Around this time, too, Virginia, Poe’s wife, contracted tuberculosis and he began to drink more heavily. He also became more acerbic in his literary criticism. He poked and prodded other writers of the time with his poison quill and may have alienated himself in the process. Despite the modern image, Poe became quite popular for his poem, The Raven, which was printed almost universally and made him a prominent name and sensation. He was paid only $9 for it.

Any lover of Poe will be familiar with his popular works, which even in his lifetime, were beginning to capture the national imagination. That he only garnered popularity and fame posthumously is a myth, at least partly. Much of his darker stories and mysteries didn’t gain larger appeal until after his death, when, and perhaps because he died, they drew on a national fascination with all things Edgar Allen Poe. 

In the complete works volume, some of the stories and poems are just bizarre or grotesque, and some seem to have no real bearing on anything that we understand today without the benefit of much context and history. It is nevertheless a worthy hobby to sit down and work through his writing. He serves as a wonderful example to emulate, if not his words or style, but certainly his breadth of understanding and his mastery of several lexicons. He can create imagery both rich and fantastic, and his tales are always fables with great moral lessons built in.

His influence cannot be overstated. We know, for example, that The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the Purloined Letter, and The Mystery of Marie Roget are the foundation upon which mystery and detective novels gained prominence in the later half of the 1800s. Poe's diminutive French detective C. Auguste Dupin is a direct literary precursor to Sherlock Holmes and Sir Arthur Conan-Doyle acknowledged this emphatically. The story Ligeia is considered to be one of the first science fiction tales, as the woman described by the narrator resembles what we now think of as an extraterrestrial. The Black Cat, the Tell-Tale Heart, Descent into the Maelstrom, MS. Found in a Bottle, The Gold Bug, and my favorite, The Cask of Amontillado, are brilliant fiction that not only capture the imagination but have become the literary gold standard for terror, madness, hauntings, revenge, guilt, adventure and the frailty of the human spirit.

The largest contributing factor to the mysterious persona of Edgar Poe was his bizarre demise. In October of 1849, Poe was found in a back lane in Baltimore in horrible condition and someone else's clothing. He was brought to a hospital and treated but died a short time later. 

No medical records survive and his death has remained one of the great mysteries of American literary history. General speculation suggests that Poe died from the consequences of his out-of-control drinking, but there is no evidence to support this. He certainly did have a serious drinking problem. 

His death was widely reported and Americans were shocked and appalled. At this time, there was a popular and awful precedent for “cooping”. This was a form of election fraud in which political candidates hired thugs to capture members of the public and force them to vote multiple times for the same candidate. The victims of cooping were often promised cash for drinks to lure them into inebriation. They were given other clothes (sometimes those of a recently deceased person) and disguises and forced to vote again and again. This theory goes a long way to filling holes in the mystery of Poe’s death, but even this isn't certain.

Our modern feeling about Poe being a poor and shiftless madman comes from his arch-enemy Rufus Wilmot Griswold who wrote an obituary for Poe under a pseudonym and which lampooned Poe and libeled him. The obituary was widely published and became the predominant, though false, view of Poe’s lifestyle and tendencies. Far from being a madman, though, and never being a destitute vagabond, Poe accomplished professional deeds that have echoed through history. Hamlet was correct, though, when he told Polonius, referring to playwrights who were often also performing literary criticism, “After your death, you were better to have a bad epitaph than their ill report while you live.” Poe’s life and works are known to us and beloved even despite Griswold’s heartless attempt to destroy a good man’s name. Ironically, almost no one has ever heard of Rufus Wilmot Griswold, which seems a fitting vengeance.

It is fruitless to wonder whether Poe would have been so tragically addicted to alcohol, had lived in a later period when the disease was better understood. Likewise, it is foolhardy to wonder if, had he lived today, he would have been far more famous and well-loved before his death rather than after. We cannot and we ought not to play such games. Poe’s life is what it is. One of his biographers, Arthur Hobson Quinn’s 1941 book, has gone to great lengths to disentangle the myth from the man. Many such writers have worked tirelessly to rework Poe and remove him from the shadows of legend. I’m not sure it does much good. The mystery of Poe’s death lends to his air of intense genius and tragedy, which in turn enhances the power and poignancy of his collected works. Perhaps we ought to let Poe be and rather than try to decipherr the man, enjoy the many tales he wrote.

[Author's Note]

My readers will notice that, of all the writers mentioned who loved and admired and were inspired by Poe, Mark Twain is not mentioned among them. It is a point definitely settled in Twain's own words in a letter to W.D. Howells, where he wrote,

“Howells,

I have to write a line, lazy as I am, to say how your Poe article delighted me; and to say that I am in agreement with substantially all you say about his literature. To me his prose is unreadable—like Jane Austin’s.” 

This lack of feeling from one of my most beloved authors is irritating. He goes on to say that it was a shame they let Jane Austen die a natural death. He is therefore somewhat less blockheaded toward Poe, but no less uncivil.