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EDGAR ALLAN POE Many authors literary works are often influenced by their own personal life experiences. Among these authors is Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most inventive writers of prose and poetry in the nineteenth century. The juxtaposition of Poe's life and work is most evident in the morbid personalities and melancholy themes of his literary compositions, similar to those of his life. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, had been widowed at eighteen, and two years after his birth she died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Poe's paternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, but his father, David Poe, had left the family to become an actor, and Edgar was left with nothing.
When his mother died, John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, at the urging of his wife, Frances Allan, adopted Edgar. She was devoted to Edgar, and in his childhood he enjoyed a security that was never to be his again after he left home. In 1815 John Allan took the family to England in the hope of furthering his business. During the next five years Edgar attended various schools, the most significant of which was the Manor House School at Stoke Newington. The gothic atmosphere of this school provided him with many details he was later to make use of in his fiction. He wrote about his impressions of the London school in a story called William Wilson. (Meyers, 1992, p. 12).
During the fall of 1823, when Edgar was fourteen years old, his classmate Robert Standard introduced Poe to his mother, Jane Standard, who was a beautiful and compassionate young woman. Edgar became devoted to her. He called her Helen, which to his ears sounded far more romantic than Jane. It was to Helen that Edgar went for solace when he had problems in school or at home. In many ways she became the mother he had lost so many years ago. (Meyers, 1992, p. 17). Tragically, Jane Standard was dying from a malignant brain tumor.
By the spring of 1824 she was confined to her bed and Edgar was not allowed to see her. When she died insane on April 28, Edgar was devastated. Like his mother, she had deserted him, dying a painful death at a young age. Helen became Edgar's ideal woman unattainable, beautiful, and doomed. In Edgar's mind, beauty was now forever linked with death. (Meyers, 1992 p. 17). Perhaps as a way of holding in to the memory of Jane, Poe composed To Helen, which eloquently describes his beloved, and the beauty and purity he saw in her.
In the first of the poems three stanzas, Poe compares Helens beauty to the ships of Nice, a city near the Sea of Marmara. In the second stanza he refers to her Naiad airs. According to Greek and Roman mythology a naiad is a spirit that occupies springs, fountains rivers, and lakes. Her Naiad airs, we are told, have brought the poet home To the glory that was Greece/ And the grandeur that was Rome. In the poems last stanza, he refers to Helen as Psyche, a Greek personification of the soul. Poe's ode to his first love, written at the youthful age of just fifteen, is one of his most famous compositions. (Krutch, 1926, p. 23 - 25).
In 1826, at the age of seventeen, Poe entered the University of Virginia. Although a good student he was forced to gamble since John Allan did not provide well enough. Having heard about Poe's gambling debts, Allan arrived in Charlottesville to investigate the matter himself. He was shocked to discover that his foster son owed more than $ 2, 500 in gambling debts and personal loans. Furious, Allan paid only those he considered important and refused to pay the others.
Poe was humiliated. Allan angrily withdrew Poe from school, and broke off his engagement to Sarah Elmira Royster, his Richmond sweetheart. After a particularly bitter argument, one night, a frustrated Edgar left home. He decided to head for Boston. He sailed north to New England on April 3, 1827.
Edgar Allan Poe arrived in Boston in 1827, filled with all the indignation and pride he could muster. He was determined to prove to his foster father, and to all those who doubted him, that he was capable of making his own way in the world. He persuaded Calvin F. S. Thomas to print some of his early poems in a small pamphlet.
It was called Tamerlane and Other Poems, and the title page said simply By a Bostonian. Unfortunately, the cost of publishing the book left Poe nearly destitute, unemployed, and probably in debt. Rather than face the humiliation of asking John Allan for more money he joined the U. S. Army. On May 26, 1827, Edgar Allan Poe enlisted under the name Edgar A.
Perry. He stated his age as twenty-two, although he was just eighteen. In his two years in the Army, he rose to be regimental sergeant major. But he wanted to become an officer, thinking that such advancement would restore him to Allan's favor. After the death of Mrs. Allan in 1829, Poe and Allan were temporarily reconciled.
With Allan's help Poe was granted an honorable discharge from the Army. He then sought enrollment in the United States Military Academy at West Point, N. Y. Poe waited for news of acceptance for more than a year. In the meantime he lived in Baltimore, Maryland, with his fathers widowed sister, Maria Clear, and her young daughter, Virginia. While there he published another volume of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829).
This time the book was published, not anonymously, but under the name Edgar A. Poe, where the middle initial acknowledged John Allan's name. On July 1, 1830, he was sworn in as a West Point cadet. He hated the discipline and the restraint of the school. When John Allan married again, Poe lost all chance of becoming his heir. He deliberately neglected his classes and duties and was expelled after eight months. (Meyers, 1992, p. 54 - 55).
Before Edgar left West Point he received financial aid from his fellow cadets to publish a third edition of the book. Edgar called it a second edition though and it was entitled Poems By Edgar A. Poe in which his famous poems To Helen and Israel appeared. These show of the musical effect that has come to characterize Poe's poems. In 1832 he won a $ 50 prize for his story MS. (Manuscript) Found in a Bottle in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. In 1835 Poe married his cousin Virginia, only thirteen years old at the time, and then left her and her mother in Baltimore, while he went on to Richmond, where he worked with Thomas White at the Southern Literary Messenger.
Most of Edgar's work with the Messenger was of critical nature but he also published some literary work such as Berenice and Morella. Both concern Poe's primary obsession: the death of a beautiful woman and the power of love and beauty to survive beyond the grave. In Morella, a husbands disliking for his wife exacerbates, and he longs for her death with great anticipation. Yet she seems to prophesied her destiny, as only Poe would have it: I am dying, yet I shall live. The birth of her child brings about her bodys decease, however the dead womans spirit is reincarnated in the body of her daughter when her husband names the child after her, calling her Morella during the Baptism. The young Morella grows up with great correlation to her deceased mother.
She is alluded to by the narrator as a worm that would not die, thus stating that she represents the satanic evil of the serpent and the torments of those who have transgressed against the Lord. After her death, her tormented father lays her in her grave and laughed with a long and bitter laugh as I found no traces of the first, in the charnel where I laid the second, Morella. Thus the primary Morella fulfills her prediction, sustaining her character and protracting her own life through the life of her child. (Meyers, 1992, p. 79). The question of whether Poe was in love with Virginia in a romantic or sexual sense has never been answered. That he felt destined to be with her, however, there is no doubt. Although Poe admired Virginia greatly and admits to having passionately loved her, many feel that a hint towards his feelings for her may be found in Morella, in which the author wrote: fate has bound us together at the altar; and I never spoke of love, nor thought of passion.
She however, shunned society, and, attaching herself to me alone rendered me happy. It is a happiness to wonder; it is a happiness to dream. The need for such emotional security motivated Poe to cling to Virginia, and the idea of leaving Baltimore drove him to distraction that summer. (Krutch, 1926, p. 51 - 55). Overwhelmed by loneliness and frustration, Poe drank to excess repeatedly.
It was the first time in many years that that he had overindulged in alcohol. It was a habit his system could not tolerate. His bouts would leave him sick for days, unable to work, unable to write and in deepest of despair. His work with the writing and editorial departments of the Messenger increased the circulation of the magazine, however his drinking habits forced White to eventually let him go.
Edgar moved around to New York and Philadelphia trying to establish a name in literary journalism but without any major success. Again he tried editing, first for Burton's Gentlemen's magazine, and then for Grahams Magazine. His work was praised but he was paid little. His efforts to fulfill his lifelong dream of organizing his own magazine, The Stylus (originally The Penn. ) were unsuccessful. For the next two years he turned to free-lance writing. Many of his best stories were written as part of his editorial work.
Those he sold for a fee rarely brought him more that $ 100 each but they gave him great publicity. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket was published in July of 1838. The fictional figure, Arthur Gordon Pym, seems to have a lot in common with Edgar Allan Poe. They have similar names, and both are born in New England. Pym arrives in Tall on January 19, Poe's own birthday. Pym is the son of a respectable trader in sea-store and gets a respectable upbringing, expecting to inherit his grandfathers wealth.
Many characters in Pym resemble people in Poe's surroundings, and the names are anagrams of real names, or at least resemble them. (Meyers, 1992, p. 97 - 99). In early 1839 Legeia appeared in a Baltimore magazine. In Legeia Poe perfected the tale of the revenant, the person returned from the Other World. The narrators one and only love dies and leaves him helpless as a child, which immediately makes him search for a new caretaker, Rowena. But he cannot love Rowena as he loved Legeia, and his efforts to forget Legeia conceal a stronger need to remember. Legeia rebirth tells of how the beloved lives within you, never dies and is always ready to return.
This shows of Poe's tendency to dwell over the past, and the failure of letting it go. (May, 1991, p. 61 - 64). During this time Virginia began to feel ill. On the evening of January 20, 1842, while Virginia was singing and playing the piano, she suddenly broke a blood vessel and began to hemorrhage. The blood gushed from her mouth and her life was evidently in danger. She was in the early stages of tuberculosis, the very illness that had taken his mother from him thirty-one years ago Virginias illness took Poe very hard and he did everything he could to help her.
His marriage to Virginia had meant a lot to Poe. It managed to keep him calm and kept him from drinking. While watching over Virginia, Poe wrote two Gothic tales that were published in Grahams. Life in Death is about a painter and his sick wife, whom strongly resembles Virginia. The painter refuses to see that his bride is dying as he paints her portrait.
The Mask of the Red Death is about Prince Property who tries to save his diseased country from this figure called The Red Death. A strong emphasis is placed on profuse bleeding and on the horror of blood, obviously related to Virginias terrifying hemorrhage merely four months before the storys creation. In Red Death Poe wrote, the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all which shows of an attitude that is very rare in Poe's work, because death is not normally a terminal thing for him. Both stories shows of a denial and a struggle to fight death, just as Poe refused to realize how serious Virginias condition was. (Meyers, 1992, p. 133; May, 1991, p. 102 - 103). In 1844 Poe and his family moved to New York City. There he wrote the Balloon Hoax for the Sun, and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.
P. Willis. By now Poe was well known in literary circles, and the publication of 'The Raven and Other Poems in 1845, enhanced his reputation. That same year he became editor of the Broadway Journal, in which he republished most of his short stories.
The couple was comfortable for a time, but his wife soon became sicker. Poe, deeply worried about Virginias failing health, wrote a number of strange stories about hypnotism and death. One of them, Mesmeric Revelation, concerned a man who dies while in a hypnotic trance and reveals the nature of Heaven and the cruelty of life on earth: All things are either good or bad by comparison. Positive pleasure is a mere idea. To be happy at any one point we must have suffered at the same.
Never to suffer would be never to have been blessed. The pain of primitive life of Earth, is the sole basis of the bliss of the ultimate life in Heaven. Poe, who had seen his wife suffer through poverty and now a painful illness, must have taken some comfort in the ideas expressed in this story. (May, 1991, 4 p. 5 - 47). In 1847, Virginias long struggle ended. She died on January 29, at the age of twenty-four, the same age Poe's mother had succumbed. A few days later, Virginia was buried in a mausoleum in Fordham.
Despite his family's attempts to comfort Poe, he was inconsolable. His first composition after his wifes death was the poem, Ulalume. The poem describes a mans visits to his lovers grave, during which he contemplates the conflicting possibilities he is presently faced with his souls desire to remain faithful to his deceased wifes memory, and his loves urging to find a new beloved. Although largely considered random and unstructured, this verse was clearly a reflection of the poets own state of mind. (Meyers, 1992, p. 211). In a vain attempt to find solace for the loss of his wife, Poe courted various women. Among these was Nancy (Annie) Richmond, of Lowell, Massachusetts, the inspiration of his For Annie, and Sarah Helen Whitman of Providence, Rhode Island, whom he called Helen.
In her honor, he composed a second To Helen. It speaks of the first time Poe had seen her, and the attraction that existed even before their first meeting. Poe describes her innocent beauty and the purity of her appearance, both of which seemed to mesmerize him. (Meyers, 1992, p. 227). After Helens mother broke off the engagement of Poe and her daughter, Edgar fell into a grave state of depression. He unsuccessfully attempted suicide by ingesting laudanum, only to drag on his life for a few more days, until the next time he overdosed as a result of excessive intoxication. Unconscious, Poe was brought to Washington College Hospital.
He regained consciousness for a time, during which he exclaimed The best thing his best friend could do would be to blow his brains out with a pistol. The last words Poe uttered before passing were, Lord, help my poor soul! . He died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5: 00 am. (Meyers, 1992, p. 254 - 255). Edgar Allan Poe's deplorable life was filled with unfortunate calamity, endless tragedies, and pathetic misery, which inevitably led to his pessimistic view on life and obsession with death. His personal mind frame is automatically conveyed in his essays, which for him was a primary form of expression. Thus, a strong emphasis on somber despondency has proven to be a thematic element of his literary career.
Krutch, Joseph Wood. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Alfred A. Know, 1926.
May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe; A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twaynes Publishing, 1991. Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe; His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.
Poe, Edgar A. The Complete Tales of Mystery and Imagination. New York: Octopus Books Inc. , 1981.
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