The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Introduction

  TALES

  Predicaments

  Bereavements

  Antagonisms

  Mysteries

  Grotesqueries

  POEMS

  LETTERS

  CRITICAL PRINCIPLES

  OBSERVATIONS

  Notes

  Selected Bibliography

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  THE PORTABLE EDGAR ALLAN POE

  EDGAR ALLAN POE was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the son of itinerant actors. Orphaned in 1811, he became the ward of John and Frances Allan of Richmond, accompanying them to England in 1815 and then returning in 1820 to Richmond, where he completed his early schooling. In 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but gambling debts forced his withdrawal, and after a clash with his foster father, Poe left Richmond for Boston. There in 1827 he published his first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and enlisted in the U.S. Army as “Edgar A. Perry.” After tours of duty in South Carolina and Virginia, he resigned as sergeant-major, and between two later books of poetry—Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829) and Poems (1831)—he briefly attended the U.S. Military Academy. Court-martialed and expelled, he took refuge in Baltimore with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and there began to compose fantastic tales for newspapers and magazines; in 1835 he obtained a position in Richmond at the Southern Literary Messenger. Perhaps already secretly wedded to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, he married her publicly in 1836. At the Messenger Poe gained notoriety by writing savage reviews, but he also raised the journal’s literary quality and enhanced both its circulation and reputation. In 1837, however, economic hard times and alcoholic lapses cost Poe his job; he moved to New York, where he completed a novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, published in 1838. By then, Poe had relocated to Philadelphia, where he wrote “Ligeia” as well as “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.” During successive editorial stints at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine, Poe developed plans to establish a high-quality monthly periodical. He also published his first book, a volume titled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), and later produced the first modern detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” as well as the prize-winning cryptographic tale, “The Gold-Bug.” In 1842 his wife suffered a hemorrhage that marked the onset of tuberculosis. Poe returned to New York in 1844 and reached the peak of his productivity, publishing such tales as “The Premature Burial” and “The Purloined Letter.” He gained fame in 1845 with his poem “The Raven,” and that year also saw the publication of two books: Tales and The Raven and Other Poems. But the weekly literary newspaper he had managed to acquire, The Broadway Review, collapsed at the beginning of 1846. Moving to nearby Fordham, Poe continued to write and to care for Virginia until her untimely death in 1847. In his final years, he composed the sweeping, cosmological prose-poem, Eureka (1848), as well as some of his most renowned poetry, including “The Bells,” “Eldorado,” and “Annabel Lee.” After a ruinous bout of election-day drinking, Edgar Allan Poe died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849.

  J. GERALD KENNEDY is William A. Read Professor of English at Louisiana State University and a past president of the Poe Studies Association. He earned his doctoral degree at Duke University, where he was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. His books on Poe include Poe, Death, and the Life of Writing (1987) and “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” and the Abyss of Interpretation (1995), as well as two edited collections of essays, A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001) and (with Liliane Weissberg) Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001). In an early book titled The Astonished Traveler: William Darby, Frontier Traveler and Man of Letters (1981), he reconstructed the career of a prolific antebellum geographer and magazinist. Kennedy’s work on literary modernism includes Imagining Paris: Exile, Writing, and American Identity (1993) and two edited collections, Modern American Short Story Sequences (1995) and (with Jackson R. Bryer) French Connections: Hemingway and Fitzgerald Abroad (1998). He has served many years on the board of the Ernest Hemingway Foundation. Fellowships from the John Simon Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Humanities, and the Louisiana Board of Regents have supported work on an expansive study of national destiny and the cultural conflicts that vitiated American literary nation-building, 1820-1850.

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  Introduction

  An alien presence in the first generation of professional American authors, Edgar Allan Poe has fascinated generations of readers around the world while perplexing scholars. From the outset he overturned expectations and flouted conventions. The self-proclaimed need to “conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced” drove Poe to stretch the boundaries of literary representation. When an editor scolded him in 1835 for the disgusting particulars of an early tale, he coolly enumerated the narrative modes he meant to exploit: “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” Committing himself to an extreme art sometimes approaching “the very verge of bad taste,” Poe aimed to achieve celebrity by shocking the public. “To be appreciated, you must be read,” he insisted, justifying his tactics. While magazines and gift books purveyed sentimentalized images of death, he conjured subversive scenes of dissolution, dismemberment, and decomposition; his poems and tales defined a twilight zone of primal anxiety and endless melancholy. Dismissing a charge that he emulated the German romantics, Poe hinted at the origins of his own creativity when he observed in 1840 that “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” He rejected the assurance of contemporary religionists, making the condition of dread—and a corollary yearning for transcendence—his trademark as a writer. But he also mocked both Gothic terror and Transcendentalism.

  Poe’s paradoxical trafficking in corporeality and spirituality, in vul
garity and sublimity, in banal humor and mortal seriousness may have something to do with his wide appeal as well as his resistance to facile categorization. His compulsion to astonish or perplex led him to overturn familiar assumptions, as when his detective C. Auguste Dupin observes: “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.” Reversing the conventional logic of surface-depth relations, Poe suggests that the deepest truths are neither remote nor esoteric but instead obscured only by their immediacy. He vaunted his skill as a cryptographer and celebrated mental analysis in “tales of ratiocination,” yet he also parodied the investigative impulse and—in his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—caricatured scientific observation as self-delusion.

  He cloaked his uncertainties about the fate of the soul in farces that travestied human mortality, representing characters who survive hangings, beheadings, and premature burials. He developed a theory of fiction in which effect trumps moral enlightenment—he called didacticism a “heresy”—and contrived nightmarish “tales of sensation.” But he also satirized literary sensationalism and devised moral fables about pride and profligacy. Poe famously declared the death of a beautiful woman to be “the most poetical topic in the world,” yet in several tales he made her demise the horrifying “soul of the plot.” His penchant for mystification, for constructing hoaxes to dupe the reading public and assert his intellectual superiority perhaps compensated for grinding poverty and social obscurity.

  In an era of rampant optimism about his country’s future, Poe lampooned democracy as mob rule and refuted “human perfectibility” as well as the allied belief that civilization and progress culminated in the United States. Opposing literary nationalism, he scoffed at the tendency to overpraise “stupid” books because they were American, yet he quietly began to produce American tales himself in the 1840s. In temperament Poe embodied multiple contradictions, among which his compulsion to sabotage his own schemes for personal and professional advancement seems ultimately the most intriguing. He did not write about “the spirit of perverseness” by chance but rather struggled against its pull throughout his short, unhappy life.

  Brilliantly inventive yet contrarily at odds with himself, Poe sprang from modest origins. Born in Boston in 1809, he was the son of itinerant stage performers who left him an orphan before his third birthday. His father, the sodden David Poe, had abandoned the family and presumably died in Norfolk in 1811 just as tuberculosis (or “consumption”) claimed Edgar’s mother, the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe, in Richmond. Her middle child became the ward of a dour Richmond merchant, John Allan, and his wife, Frances, while baby Rosalie came under the care of the Mackenzie family and his older brother, William Henry Leonard, went to live with grandparents in Baltimore. Significantly, although the Allans spoiled Edgar during his childhood, they declined to adopt him. As a small boy he accompanied them on vacations to White Sulphur Springs and on visits to plantations near Richmond; he probably played with slave children at Allan’s country estate on Buffalo Creek. A precocious lad, he reportedly could read a newspaper at five, although his formal schooling commenced the following year. In 1815, he sailed with the Allans to England, where after visiting relatives in Scotland, John Allan opened a London branch of the mercantile firm he owned with Charles Ellis. The boy known as “Edgar Allan” attended boarding school first with the Misses Dubourg in Chelsea and then at Reverend Bransby’s Manor House School in Stoke Newington. His studies included Latin and French, and his experiences at the latter institution inspired details of English school life in one of his later tales, “William Wilson.” In 1819 Poe spent two months in Scotland; his travel there and about the English countryside provided those glimpses of ancient castles, abbeys, country houses, and cathedrals that long after his return to America recurred in dream and memory as the Old World of his childhood.

  Financial reverses in 1820 compelled John Allan’s return to Richmond, where his ward resumed the name Edgar Allan Poe in the city where Eliza Poe was buried. At Joseph H. Clarke’s academy the boy studied mathematics and geography, excelling in Latin and Greek; he also revealed a gift for verse satire, collecting his clever poems in a portfolio that he begged Allan to publish. His foster father pondered the request and consulted the schoolmaster but finally refused, wishing not to excite authorial vanity. When Clarke left in 1822, Poe entered the school of William Burke, where he was instructed in French as well as the classical languages. In adolescence, he became adventurous and mischievous, an “imperious” lad whose enthusiasm for pranks sometimes provoked Allan. Poe enjoyed sports, loved to box, and challenged schoolmates to long-jumping contests or swimming competitions. Though slight in stature, he was combative and scornful; classmates declined his leadership. His friends nevertheless included Ebenezer Burling, Robert Cabell, and Robert Stanard.

  At fourteen Poe turned to Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of his companion, for emotional comfort and understanding, later idealizing her in his poem “To Helen” after her sudden derangement and untimely death in 1824. Her loss intensified his own reckless impulsiveness: Not long afterward, he swam six miles in the James River against an incoming tide under a scorching sun to prove his indomitability. Hints of estrangement from his foster father lurk in Allan’s comment of 1824 that Poe “does nothing & seems quite miserable, sulky, and ill-tempered to all the family.” His lack of “affection” and “gratitude” galled Allan in light of the “care and kindness” he allegedly received. Poe fell into line—literally—when General Lafayette visited Richmond in 1824 during his American tour; the boy paraded with the junior militia that formed an honor guard for the Revolutionary hero who had known his late grandfather, Major David Poe of Baltimore. But the moodiness Allan noted was soon exacerbated by emerging romantic interests. For several years Poe had scribbled poems to local girls, and most had been bantering in tone until he met Sarah Elmira Royster in the summer of 1825. She lived opposite Moldavia, the Richmond mansion John Allan had bought that year with a huge inheritance left by an uncle, and she later recalled Poe as a “beautiful boy” with a “sad” manner who occasionally came calling with verses in hand. The two developed a mutual fondness, spoke of marriage, and remained close until Poe left Richmond to enroll in the University of Virginia early the following year.

  Classes at Mr. Jefferson’s university brought Poe in contact with some of the great minds of the young republic. The author of the Declaration was (until his death on July 4 of that year) very much an intellectual presence in Charlottesville, where he shaped the curriculum; the faculty included former presidents Madison and Monroe, who examined Poe in Latin and Greek. But the students were a brawling, hot-tempered lot who sometimes settled personal differences by dueling, and Poe (lacking sufficient funds from Allan) took to gambling and drinking. He also wrote poems, concocted stories, and covered the walls of his room with charcoal sketches; a classmate described him as “excitable & restless, at times wayward, melancholic, and morose.” Examinations intimidated him, but he performed well, excelling in “ancient languages” and French. By the end of the year, however, Poe was in deep trouble: summoned to testify about student gambling, he denied involvement but privately begged Allan to cover his losses. In late December, Allan journeyed to Charlottesville, settled the debts he deemed legitimate, withdrew Poe from the university, and hauled him back to Richmond in disgrace. To complete the debacle, Poe soon learned that Miss Royster’s father, having intercepted Poe’s love letters, had compelled her to break the engagement.

  A fateful clash with Allan soon ensued. Condemned to disciplinary toil in the office of Ellis and Allan, Poe accused his foster father of heartlessly “exposing” his youthful indiscretions and thus blasting his hopes for “eminence in public life.” Packing his bags and leaving Moldavia, he demanded funds to journey north to earn enough money to resume his university studies, and a few days later embarked on a perilous new life. In Baltimore he apparently visite
d his brother, and then he traveled on to Boston, where he assumed an alias to dodge creditors from Virginia.

  In the city of his birth, Poe led a dire, hand-to-mouth existence, working first as a clerk in a mercantile store, then briefly as a market reporter for a struggling newspaper, and in May he enlisted in the army as “Edgar A. Perry.” Through relocation and travail Poe had continued to write poetry, and during the summer he found a publisher willing to print his little volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems, ascribed to “a Bostonian.” Recasting oriental legend, the exotic title poem showed the influence of Byron as Poe concocted a thinly disguised version of the cruelties that had separated him from Miss Royster. But the book received little notice. Reassigned to duty at Fort Moultrie, Poe in November boarded a brig bound for South Carolina, where he arrived eleven days later after nearly perishing in a gale off Cape Cod.

  On desolate Sullivan’s Island, Poe became an artificer, maintaining the cannons and small artillery at the fort. He staved off boredom by writing verse and reading Shakespeare as well as other English poets; he also developed literary contacts in nearby Charleston, where he perhaps met writer-editor William Gilmore Simms. Military life proved irksome, however, and Poe contrived to shorten his five-year enlistment; when his unit was reassigned to Fortress Monroe, Virginia, in December 1828, he begged Allan to arrange his release even as he accused him of utter neglect. About his outsized ambition Poe defiantly boasted, “The world shall be my theatre.” A promotion to regimental sergeant-major, however, apparently inspired a different plan: While still seeking the discharge, he asked Allan to enquire about an appointment to the military academy at West Point. But in early 1829, just as Poe was refining this scheme, another blow fell: He learned that his foster mother, the sickly Frances Allan, had died of a lingering illness.