The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Read online

  But Poe’s situation was not altogether hopeless. His tale “The Gold-Bug” won a hundred-dollar prize offered by the Dollar Newspaper. Reprinted in many papers, the story garnered more recognition for Poe than any previous publication; one Philadelphia theater immediately staged a dramatic adaptation. In August the author resumed a loose affiliation with Graham’s, his sporadic reviews serving to repay loans from the publisher. That same month the Saturday Evening Post published “The Black Cat,” Poe’s own temperance tale about the perverse compulsions incited by drink. As The Doom of the Drinker appeared in serial form, Poe found a new source of income: He became a public lecturer, speaking on American poetry to large crowds in Philadelphia, Wilmington, Newark (Delaware), Baltimore, and Reading. In early 1844 his staunch support of the copyright issue drew a letter from Cornelius Mathews of New York, who sent his pamphlet on that subject and perhaps an invitation to join the American Copyright Club. Having imposed too often on too many people in Philadelphia, Poe moved in April to New York.

  The author created an instant sensation in Manhattan when his “Balloon Hoax” appeared as a dispatch in an extra edition of the Sun. The public clamored for news about the transatlantic flight, but James Gordon Bennett of the rival Herald detected a ruse and forced a retraction. The uproar, however, only confirmed Poe’s talent for what he called “mystification” and excited his creativity. That summer he told Lowell of the “mania for composition” that sometimes seized him; since December 1843 he had composed “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Spectacles,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Purloined Letter,” “ ‘Thou Art the Man,’ ” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” as well as “The Balloon Hoax” and several shorter pieces. Like “The Gold-Bug,” most of the new tales portrayed American scenes, and Poe declared that he was writing a “Critical History of Am. Literature.” For a small Pennsylvania newspaper he was also writing a chatty column called “Doings of Gotham.” Once indifferent to American subjects, he manifested a pragmatic shift in focus. That spring Poe again proposed to Lowell coeditorship of a “well-founded Monthly journal” featuring American authors; he reminded Chivers of a similar offer, and in late October he cajoled Lowell a third time while sending proposals for both the magazine and a new, multivolume collection of tales to Charles Anthon, an influential New York professor.

  Disillusioned by Whig partisanship and cheered by the copyright campaign of Young America, a group of rabid Democrats, Poe lent token support to the Democratic Party in 1844, befriending the head of a political club and writing the lyrics to a campaign song. He commented wryly on the contest between Whig Henry Clay and Democrat James K. Polk in his metropolitan gossip column, and in November began contributing “Marginalia” to the partisan Democratic Review. But he privately mistrusted the expansionist agenda of Polk, and in a tale partly inspired by the election of 1844 satirized the chief rationale for U.S. imperialism—belief in Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority—in “Some Words With a Mummy.”

  Even as he was caricaturing the predicament of the American magazinist in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob,” Poe accepted a position in October with N. P. Willis’s Evening Journal, where his celebrated poem “The Raven” first appeared in January 1845. Widely discussed, reprinted, and parodied, the poem made Poe a celebrity, yet its evocation of unending melancholy also marked a rehearsal of his impending bereavement. He distracted himself from constant worry about Virginia by playing the literary lion in New York salons and by plunging into daily journalism. But his squibs for the Mirror and subsequent contributions to a new newspaper, the Broadway Journal, curbed his productivity in fiction, which in 1845 amounted to only four new tales, including “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” But his newfound fame, partly excited by Lowell’s biographical sketch of Poe in Graham’s, gave him greater editorial freedom, which he used to renew his attacks on Longfellow. He extended his assault on the professor poet in a well-attended February lecture on American poetry, but he also remained adamant about copyright, and that month published “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” his most searing analysis of literary property and the economic thralldom of American authors. Evert Duyckinck, leader of Young America, rewarded Poe’s advocacy of copyright by publishing first Tales and then The Raven and Other Poems in his Library of American Books.

  Soon after his “Prison-House” manifesto, Poe joined the staff of the Broadway Journal, which was owned by John Bisco and Charles F. Briggs. There he accelerated the Longfellow war by adopting a pseudonym (or so it appears) to stage a notorious debate with himself about the revered poet. Briggs initially countenanced Poe’s monomania on plagiarism, but by May became alarmed by his renewed drinking after a long abstinence. Lowell and Chivers, who both visited New York that spring, testified to his reckless dissipation. But Poe managed somehow to revise many of his tales and poems for reprinting in the weekly, and among his numerous reviews he celebrated the poet Mrs. Francis Sargent Osgood, with whom he was carrying on an ostensibly platonic, semi-public “amour” sanctioned by his ailing wife. Wishing to give the journal a “fresh start,” Briggs planned to relieve Poe of his editorial role and find a new publisher, but when his partner disagreed, Briggs withdrew, and Bisco named Poe editor, offering him half of the meager profits. The crisis came in October: that month Poe made his infamous appearance at the Boston Lyceum, reading not a promised new poem but rather the early, esoteric “Al Aaraaf.” The outcry from that fiasco had not subsided when Bisco capitulated and sold out to Poe, who through loans from friends became sole proprietor of a failing literary journal. Despite the attraction of his revised, reprinted works and his biting editorial commentaries— in which for weeks he taunted his Boston critics—the Broadway Journal was in a death spiral. Beset by debts, Poe ceased publication on January 3, 1846, the final issue ironically reprinting his early tale “Loss of Breath.”

  Illness, poverty, and scandal dogged Poe through 1846. For Graham’s he composed “The Philosophy of Composition,” an exaggerated account of how he wrote “The Raven.” A jealous Elizabeth F. Ellet stirred a controversy involving Mrs. Osgood’s love letters to Poe that ostracized him from the popular salon of Anne C. Lynch. The episode also provoked a bizarre scuffle with Thomas Dunn English, who had moved to New York and become an unlikely ally in the Longfellow wars but defied Poe at a volatile moment. Rumors of Poe’s insanity and Virginia’s worsening condition prompted their move to healthier surroundings in Fordham, where they rented a country cottage. Still unwell, Poe prepared for Godey’s a series on the “New York Literati,” flattering friends and abusing enemies in pithy sketches. He also continued his “Marginalia” series but composed only one notable new tale—perhaps inspired by his feud with English—titled “The Cask of Amontillado.” The “Literati” sketch portraying English as an ignorant charlatan elicited a slanderous reply for which Poe eventually received a legal settlement. But in 1846 he increasingly became an object of private gossip and public derision by “little birds of prey”; alluding to his latest renunciation of drink, he called Virginia his “only stimulus now to battle with this uncongenial, unsatisfactory, and ungrateful life.” In letters to Philip Pendleton Cooke and George W. Evelith, he nevertheless revealed his determination to publish The Stylus, the “one great purpose” of his literary life. But at year’s end that goal seemed remote; both Poe and Virginia were bedridden in Fordham, attended by Mrs. Clemm and Marie Louise Shew, a friend with nursing experience.

  For Virginia, the end came on January 30, 1847. On her deathbed she asked her husband to read Mrs. Shew a poignant letter from the second Mrs. John Allan, confessing that she had turned Poe’s foster father against him. Virginia’s death and burial prostrated Poe, and although he composed a poem (“The Beloved Physician”) for Mrs. Shew when she nursed him back to health, he wrote little else in 1847. His lawsuit against English briefly provided distraction from grief and, af
ter a favorable ruling, relief from penury. That summer Poe visited Thomas in Washington and called at the office of Graham’s in Philadelphia, perhaps to deliver a new review of Hawthorne that appeared in the November issue. His only significant literary composition since Virginia’s death, however, was “Ulalume,” a mystical poem transparently inspired by her loss. He received attentions from several literary women and composed for Sarah Anna Lewis the anagrammatic poem, “An Enigma.” Across the Atlantic his work had attracted the attention of Charles Baudelaire, the poet whose translations would enshrine Poe as a literary deity in France.

  Recovering his vigor, Poe turned again in 1848 to the grand, unfinished project of launching a monthly magazine; he printed a prospectus and planned a tour to attract subscribers. He intended to feature his long-deferred study of “Literary America,” providing a “faithful account” of the nation’s “literary productions, literary people, and literary affairs.” Simultaneously he was penning Eureka, a cosmological prose poem, to elaborate his insights into life and death, matter and spirit, God and humankind. To finance his tour he gave a lecture called “The Universe” in February, but according to Evert Duyckinck, his “ludicrous dryness” actually “drove people from the room.” Hoping to extract a salable tale from his magnum opus Poe sent the futuristic satire “Mellonta Tauta” to Godey’s, which published it thirteen months later. He also contributed more “Marginalia” to Graham’s and tried to ignore journalistic taunting by English. Having completed a year of mourning, Poe found himself increasingly pursued by literary women, and he contemplated remarriage. The kindnesses of Mrs. Shew (a married woman) inspired a valentine poem, and Poe drafted a version of “The Bells” at her home, but his pantheism so troubled her that she broke off the friendship. A widow, Sarah Helen Whitman, published a valentine poem to Poe in the Home Journal, and he reciprocated by sending her a poem recalling a glimpse of her in 1845. Another married poet, Jane Ermina Locke, came to Fordham to meet Poe and invite him to lecture in Lowell, Massachusetts. During a July visit there he lectured on American poetry and met Annie Richmond, a young married woman who quickly became his muse and confidante. The encounter inspired part of “Landor’s Cottage,” a landscape sketch composed later that year. Upon his return to New York, Poe found bound copies of Eureka awaiting him.

  Pausing in Fordham only briefly, Poe was on the move again, traveling to Richmond to secure support for his magazine; there he renewed his acquaintance with his first love, Sarah Elmira Shelton, by then a wealthy widow, and he contacted John Thompson, editor of the Messenger, who accepted for publication his longest essay on poetry, “The Rationale of Verse.” Poe was also, as Thompson later reported, getting drunk every night and—to the puzzlement of locals—declaiming from Eureka in the bars. On the eve of an extended tour of the South, however, he received an ardent letter and accompanying poem from Mrs. Whitman that changed his plans.

  Impulsively, Poe journeyed to Providence in September to court his admirer, a woman of romantic sensibility and ample means to whom he proposed marriage—two days after meeting her—as they strolled through a cemetery. Inhibited by her mother’s disapproval and her own misgivings, Mrs. Whitman declined the initial offer, but Poe persisted, returning one month later en route to Lowell. Again rebuffed, he went on to Massachusetts, where he sought affection and advice from Annie Richmond before returning to Providence. But torn between admiration for Mrs. Whitman and passionate love for Mrs. Richmond, tormented as well by the “demon” of perverseness, Poe bought laudanum and took the train to Boston, intending to kill himself or to make a scene that would bring Annie to his bedside. Instead, he became wretchedly ill before he could write to her. Returning to Providence three days later, he implored Mrs. Whitman to marry him immediately, and when she hesitated, he became inebriated at his hotel. Yet after extracting his pledge of future sobriety, she agreed to a “conditional engagement,” and a haggard Poe returned to New York, where Mrs. Clemm barely recognized him. The writer made two subsequent visits to Providence in December, and on the second occasion delivered a new lecture, “The Poetic Principle,” before a huge audience, inspiring Mrs. Whitman to accept his proposal. But the nuptials Poe arranged for Christmas day never took place. When Mrs. Whitman received an eleventh-hour, anonymous report of Poe’s recent drinking, her mother held a brief and ferocious interview with Poe that sent him slouching toward Fordham, never again to return to Providence.

  Poe’s break with Mrs. Whitman only sharpened his desire for Mrs. Richmond, to whom he wrote several impassioned letters in early 1849, dedicating as well a new poem, “For Annie,” which dramatized his November near-death experience. Despite recurrent headaches, he threw himself into daily writing with renewed energy and, responding to a publisher’s invitation, produced for the Boston antislavery newspaper Flag of Our Union such tales as “Hop-Frog,” “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” “Landor’s Cottage,” and “X-ing a Paragrab.” There he also first published the poems “Dream Within A Dream,” “Eldorado,” and “To My Mother,” as well as “For Annie.” In April he also resumed his “Marginalia” in the Southern Literary Messenger and in May and June published his “Fifty Suggestions” in Graham’s. But Poe’s commentaries on intellectual tidbits signaled a lapse in creative activity. He was depressed both by fears that he would never see Annie again and by ominous trends in the periodical trade: the Columbian Magazine had failed, and other journals (including the Messenger) were suspending payments to authors. At this low ebb he received a long-delayed letter from one Edward Patterson, a young newspaper editor in Oquawkwa, Illinois, who volunteered to become Poe’s partner in a magazine venture. Dubious about launching a distinguished journal from a frontier village, Poe nevertheless accepted the offer and sent Patterson a sample title page, proposing simultaneous publication in New York and St. Louis. His consuming desire to own and edit The Stylus seemed suddenly close to realization.

  But Poe was destined to be victimized again by his own compulsions. After a soulful week in Lowell with Annie and her husband, Poe set out in late June for Richmond, Virginia, planning now to secure subscribers and contributors before embarking on a tour of the West leading to Oquawkwa. Stopping in Philadelphia, however, Poe imbibed so heavily that he was briefly incarcerated in prison, where his hallucinations involved Mrs. Clemm’s dismemberment. Publisher John Sartain rescued Poe, bought two new poems—an expanded version of “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee”—and helped to collect funds to get Poe to Richmond. Soon after reaching Virginia, he called upon Sarah Elmira Shelton and, renewing a courtship begun in 1825, proposed marriage to her. Like Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Shelton initially demurred, and not until Poe had delivered a successful lecture (“The Poetic Principle”) and taken a sobriety pledge did she agree to marry him. Poe’s joining the Sons of Temperance marked a desperate bid to change his ways and repair his reputation. In poor health, yet sustained by Mrs. Shelton’s acceptance, he departed for New York, presumably to accompany Mrs. Clemm to Richmond for the wedding. But in Baltimore, his first stop en route, Poe imbibed excessively, and on October 3, an election day, he was discovered at a polling place “rather the worse for wear.” Transported to Washington College Hospital, he remained intermittently delirious for four days and died on October 7, 1849.

  In a checkered career of barely two decades Poe produced more than sixty poems, some seventy-odd tales, one completed novel, a long prose poem of cosmological theory, and scores of essays and reviews. He introduced into poetry, criticism, and prose fiction many innovations that altered literary culture. Poe’s greatest achievement as a writer, however, transcends his technical or formal innovations. Working in the context of U.S. nation building and territorial expansion, the rise of a capitalist market economy, the decline of religious authority, the development and secularization of mass culture, and the advent of modern scientific skepticism, Poe (in the words of Sarah Helen Whitman) “came to sound the very depths of the abyss,” articulating in his tales and poems “the unrest and fait
hlessness of the age.” As compellingly as any writer of his time, Poe intuited the spiritual void opening in an era dominated by a secular, scientific understanding of life and death. If Kierkegaard analyzed philosophically the condition of dread that accompanied the “sickness unto death,” Poe gave memorable literary expression to modern doubt and death anxiety. His Eureka may be seen as a late, desperate effort to construct from the laws of physics—from the implacable materiality of science itself—a theory of spiritual survival. In his most stunning poetry and fiction he staged the dilemma of the desolate self, confronting its own mortality and beset by uncertainties about a spiritual afterlife.

  Thanks in part to Reverend Rufus Griswold, the nemesis whom the author perversely designated as his literary executor, Poe’s posthumous reputation was originally clouded by moral condemnation. Griswold’s notorious obituary, recast as a preface to the otherwise reliable edition of Poe’s works he supervised in the 1850s, acknowledged his contemporary’s genius but also portrayed him as a morbid loner, a drunken lunatic wandering the streets muttering “curses and imprecations.” Poe’s early defenders included George Graham and N. P. Willis as well as Mrs. Whitman, who in 1860 issued Edgar Poe and His Critics, an acute estimate of his lasting significance. The publication of a multivolume edition of his works in French by Baudelaire established his fame abroad and made Poe the patron saint of the symbolist movement. Later in the nineteenth century John H. Ingram and George Wood-berry wrote pioneering biographies, and as the twentieth century began, James A. Harrison produced the first scholarly edition of Poe’s collected writings. During the twentieth century, new biographies by Arthur Hobson Quinn and more recently by Kenneth Silverman have incorporated fresh information and critical perspectives. John Ward Ostrom’s edition of Poe’s letters, and the compilation of the Poe Log by David K. Jackson and Dwight Thomas, as well as the definitive edition of Poe’s collected writings by T. O. Mabbott and Burton R. Pollin, have marked important milestones in scholarship, while critical studies of the past seventy-five years have enriched and complicated the appraisal of Poe’s work. Derogation of Poe’s achievements by such luminaries as Henry James, T. S. Eliot, and Aldous Huxley as well as Poe’s exclusion from several studies of the so-called American renaissance have underscored his problematic status. Yet he remains irresistibly compelling, the undying appeal of his strange tales and poems testifying to his enduring international significance.