Edgar Allan Poe, one of the central figures in nineteenth-century American literature and for late Romanticism, helped infuse new life into several forms of writing during the 1830s and 1840s, particularly the tale of terror, the detective story, science fiction, the short poem, and literary theory and criticism. While a somewhat controversial figure during his lifetime, and plagued with a lukewarm literary reception until the publication of his highly acclaimed poem “The Raven” in January of 1845, Poe has today become a major figure not only in American but in world literature. A master of the Gothic short story with its metaphysical intricacies, an effective practitioner of the proto-Symbolist poem with its emphasis on imaginary landscapes, and a strong critic who already by his contemporaries was dubbed a “scalper”, “tomahawk man”, and “the Comanche of literature” – Poe has become so influential as a writer, either directly or indirectly, that it is nearly impossible precisely to gauge his influence, which now reaches from North America to Western and Eastern Europe, to the near and far East, and includes such distinct writers as Charles Baudelaire, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Jules Verne, Stéphane Mallarmé, Arthur Conan Doyle, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, H. P. Lovecraft, Robert Bloch, Steven King, Hirai Taro (“Edogawa Rampo”), and many others.
Edgar Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 to actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Poe. David Poe Jr., son of “General” Poe who was active in the American Revolution and a friend of Lafayette, would eventually leave a law office to try his hand at being an actor; a mediocre actor at best and often hot-tempered, he would die sometime around 1811 of alcoholism. Edgar Poe’s mother, Eliza, on the other hand, was a highly praised actress on the Richmond stage in the early years of the 19th century; among her acclaimed roles was that of Ophelia in Shakespeare’s Hamlet. Eliza’s mother, Mrs. Arnold, had also been an actress, at Covent Garden, making her last appearance on stage in London in June of 1795, before leaving, together with her daughter Elizabeth, for America. Eliza Poe would die of tuberculosis in 1811, in Richmond, when Poe was barely three years old, but late in life he remarked that he owed his mother every gift of his intellect and heart.
Edgar Poe and his sister Rosalie (b. 1810) were soon taken in by foster families: Rosalie by the Mackenzies, and Edgar by Mr. John Allan’s family, both of Richmond, Virginia. John Allan was a prosperous merchant although a poor disciplinarian, and the young Poe was often described as well dressed but spoiled. Allan’s business dealings eventually took the family to England, from 1815 to 1820, and while there Edgar Allan Poe attended boarding schools, including that of the Reverend John Bransby, where he excelled in Latin and French. Poe’s stay at Bransby’s school would later provide some material for the plot of his classic doppelgänger tale, “William Wilson” (1839).
After the Allans returned to America, Poe attended a couple of more classical schools, excelling at Latin and Greek and, by 1824, writing some of his earliest verses (rhymed satires), one of which still survives (“Oh, Tempora! Oh, Mores!”). In 1826 he attended the recently opened University of Virginia and did well academically but gambled away $2,000 and was withdrawn by John Allan, who refused to pay the debt. Returning to Richmond, Poe found his sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster engaged. He quarrelled with John Allan and left for Boston where in 1827 he enlisted in the U.S. Army as “Edgar A. Perry”.
While in the army, Poe’s first collection of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), was published (a highly sought after and rare collection today, consisting of largely Byronic poems), and he was promoted to sergeant major by early 1829. Saddened by the death of John Allan’s wife, Mrs. Frances Allan, in late February, Poe returned to Richmond on leave, but a day after her funeral. However, he partially reconciled with John Allan, who eventually helped secure him an appointment at West Point in the summer of 1830. In the meantime, Poe’s second collection of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), was published, selling very little but receiving some positive critical attention. At West Point, Poe would again excel academically, particularly in French and mathematics, but would eventually get himself expelled in March of 1831 by not going to class and church; Poe’s “strike” was brought on by John Allan’s refusal to send him any allowance, which placed the young Poe in a financially precarious and self-conscious position, robbing him of the monetary conveniences that were taken for granted by the other young gentlemen at West Point. This was a major irritant for Poe since, at this time, as for much of his life, he preferred to see himself as a cultivated and quasi-aristocratic southern gentleman: a cultural relic in what were then years and decades of rapid urbanization and industrialization in the U.S., particularly in the northern states that seemed to have left the South far behind, locked in its own plantation system and mythology of a gilded past. Not that Edgar Allan Poe was unaware of the limitations of mythology, including that of the southern gallante, but John Allan’s refusal to send money was still felt as a slap in the face of a young man full of aspirations.
The years 1831-32 were climacteric for Poe, but our knowledge of precise events is limited: in 1831 his third collection, Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, was published, dedicated to some of his West Point cadets. It sold little and in 1836 Poe would refer to the collection as “printed for private circulation” but, notwithstanding its lack of success, it contained the first version of the now-famous lyric “To Helen”, and early versions of such notable poems as “The Doomed City” (later to become “The City in the Sea”) and “Irenë” (later to become “The Sleeper”). “The Sleeper” takes the neoclassical, female figure of beauty, present in “To Helen”, and transforms it into a Gothic one, complete with necrophilic undertones, morbid descriptions of worms that creep around Irenë, and an overall brooding atmosphere that hearkens back to the best work of the Graveyard Poets but with more emphasis on the personal loss of a beloved than on charnel visions as inspiration for broader socio-historical debate (such as that offered by the speaker in Thomas Gray’s “Elegy”). “The Sleeper”, written and published several years before Poe’s marriage to his young cousin Virginia, also disproves frequent psycho-biographical suggestions that most of the dead or dying women in his poems and tales were inspired by his wife Virginia’s affliction with, and early death, from tuberculosis. In July 1831 we know he was living in Baltimore with his grandmother, aunt (Maria Clemm), and younger cousin (Virginia), and it was from there that he submitted some of his stories to a contest announced in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. In August, Poe’s brother, Henry Poe (b. 1807), died at Mrs. Clemm’s residence. By 1832 Poe was declared runner-up in the Saturday Courier contest and had five of his stories published anonymously, including his early foray into the Gothic tale, “Metzengerstein”, and the comic “The Duc de l’Omelette”. Also, tales would eventually circulate of Poe’s travels abroad to Greece, Russia, etc., in this obscure year of his biography, but they are largely unfounded.
During 1833 Poe completed 11 stories often referred to as the “Folio Club Tales”. The projected frame-tale volume, Tales of the Folio Club, was never published, but the stories, which were exercises in the styles of then popular authors, eventually went on to be printed. One of them was “MS. Found in a Bottle”, which won first prize of $50 in a contest held by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and was soon published in the magazine. Another “Folio Club” tale was “The Visionary” (later to become “The Assignation”), a Byronic tale of Venetian intrigue that was sold late in 1833 to The Lady’s Book of Philadelphia and published soon after, though unsigned. The exoticism and decadence of “The Assignation” would be repeated in many of Poe’s tales of the 1830s, including more famous ones like “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. “The Assignation” itself presents a protagonist who is modeled on Lord Byron, whereas the tale’s narrator seems to approximate the role of Thomas Moore, Byron’s biographer who was at times more creative than accurate. Sometime early in 1834 Poe visited Richmond and called on John Allan who was seriously ill, but the latter shook his cane and ordered him to leave. Allan would die in late March of 1834, never mentioning Poe in his will. It is possible that Poe’s trouble with alcohol also began roughly around this time, while he was in his mid-20s – an affliction that would eventually lead to his early death at the age of 40 – but there is no direct evidence as to when or how Poe’s alcoholism began; it may have started as early as his West Point years, when the cadets would sometimes “make a run” to Benny Havens’ famous tavern, to enjoy a glass of warm rum and home-cooked food. Theories have been offered that Poe was a chronic alcoholic, that his drinking was more of the binge variety, and even that he was not a heavy drinker but because of metabolic sensitivity (possibly owing to such things as diabetes, a brain lesion, etc.) would undergo slight personality changes even after very light social drinking.
The mid-1830s would prove to be seminal years in Poe’s development as a writer. Throughout 1835 he published several of his better-known tales from this period, including two of his Gothic “women tales”, “Berenicë” and “Morella”, both in the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond. In July his grandmother died at Mrs. Clemm’s residence in Baltimore, and by October Poe had moved, together with his aunt and his cousin Virginia, to Richmond. He had already begun writing book reviews for the Messenger several months before (some of which were severe and controversial), and by December of 1835 was editor of the Messenger. Throughout 1836 he contributed many reviews to the magazine, including two in praise of Charles Dickens’ early work, and several attacks on authors who would now be entirely forgotten had Poe not disliked their work enough to comment on it. The other notable event of 1836 was Poe’s public marriage, in May, to his young cousin Virginia (not yet 14 years old), an event that was frowned upon by some people in Richmond, and quietly accepted by others. The nature of Poe’s marriage to his young bride, and relative, has often been debated, with no clear conclusions emerging – but the theme of incest would be treated in a literary context just a few years later in Poe’s best-known tale, “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839), where Roderick and his sister, Madeline Usher, appear to share more than a wholesome affection, and the final collapse of the House of Usher may signify moral punishment of some sort – although the narrator appears oblivious to the environment’s allegorical undertones, as is to be expected in a masterfully ambiguous Poe text such as “Usher”.
The January 1837 issue of the Southern Literary Messenger included an announcement of Edgar Allan Poe’s withdrawal as editor, a few more of his book reviews, two poems written the year before (“Ballad” [later “Bridal Ballad”] and “To Zante”), and the first instalment of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. A second instalment of Pym would follow in the February issue, but by this time Poe and family had moved to New York and were boarding with an eccentric and learned bookseller, William Gowans. Pym was eventually published in its entirety in July of 1838, by Harpers; it received somewhat favorable reviews but sold poorly, although copies did much better in England, where it was quickly pirated. Poe himself dismissed Pym in a letter to Philadelphian editor William E. Burton in June of 1840 as “a very silly book”, although modern critical reception of the novel suggests otherwise, having cemented Pym (next to “The Fall of the House of Usher”, 1839) as the central Poe text – perhaps indicating that Poe’s comment about his only novel was intentionally ironic. At any rate, Pym is all the more fascinating in that its main character, Arthur Gordon Pym, appears to live in and travel through a mirrored universe, where the demons of starvation, desperation, depravity, and the unknown reappear over and over again on the high seas; Pym eventually disappears from view with the novel’s abrupt, experimental conclusion – a strange journey and quick ending that eerily overlap with Poe’s own life, where similar factors, such as poverty and anxiety, would repeatedly rear their ugly heads in a world that for Poe was likely both fascinating and grotesque – both the source of his literary inspiration and the cause of his rough demise.
In the same month that Pym was published, Poe moved his family once again, this time to Philadelphia where he would spend some of the most productive years of his life. Poe’s Gothic tale of paranormal love, “Ligeia” (one he referred to as his “best tale”), was soon published in the Baltimore American Museum, followed by the publication a couple of months later, in the same journal, of his satirical “The Psyche Zenobia” and companion piece “The Scythe of Time” (later called “How to Write a Blackwood Article” and “A Predicament”, respectively). “The Psyche Zenobia” is a fascinating and crucial essay, but one often neglected by Poe readers since it sets out with clinical deliberation the ingredients needed to create a Gothic tale, similar to the way in which his “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846) would explain, several years later and in mechanical terms, how Poe wrote his famous poem “The Raven” (1845). “Zenobia” thus reveals that Poe was often a craftsman and highly rational, even when writing about the insane, and it therefore poses the question whether the neurasthenia that is so often his subject was merely a generic feature, or the expression of a deep personal disposition. Poe was by implication intellectually methodical and mathematical, but then so are some very disturbed people, and he was certainly fascinated with cryptograms, puzzles and detection, rational procedures for determining the deeper cause of the mysterious. Had Sigmund Freud already been born, they would very likely have had much to say to each other, and even their disagreements might have led to fruitful results. Looked at differently, Poe’s combination of intellectual method and peculiar topic, in many of his poems and tales, leads to works that are reminiscent of the pictorial creations of the Italian Mannerists, complete with strange perspective, elongation of proportion, and playful treatment of mirrors, as with Roderick Usher’s physical features and the tarn’s reflection of the mansion in “Usher” – all devices that question the nature of reality.
Beginning in May of 1839 Poe was co-editor, with proprietor William E. Burton, of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Poe wrote most of the book reviews for this magazine from July of 1839 to June of 1840, and also wrote for the newspaper Alexander’s Weekly Messenger during Burton’s association with it in early 1840. This newspaper published Poe’s first series of solutions to cryptograms, while Burton’s published such famous tales as his “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson” in 1839, and his “Philosophy of Furniture” and the anonymous serial “The Journal of Julius Rodman” in 1840, among other works. Also published in late 1839, in two volumes by Lea and Blanchard, was Poe’s classic collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesquethat included several of his better-known stories; however it received very few reviews and sold slowly. In this same year Poe met the physician (later editor and writer) Thomas Dunn English, with whom he would quarrel several years later, and was keeping company with Henry B. Hirst, a poet (and later lawyer) who kept a bird store and owned a raven. Sometime in late May of 1840 Poe drank too much and was discharged from Burton’s after a quarrel with its owner.
Poe and Burton may have patched things up since by November of 1840 Burton had sold his magazine to George Rex Graham, but had also recommended Poe to Graham. Thus, in the first issue of this new magazine, Graham’s Magazine, Poe’s enigmatic society tale “The Man of the Crowd” (in the manner of Dickens’ Sketches by Boz) was published. Soon after, by February of 1841, Poe was one of the editors of Graham’s Magazine. Published in its pages in 1841 were such works as Poe’s first ratiocinative tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (featuring the detective C. Auguste Dupin), and his adventure tale “A Descent into the Maelström”, followed in 1842 by the Hoffmannesque “Life in Death” (later called “The Oval Portrait”) and one of his classic Gothic tales, “The Masque of the Red Death”. In the meantime, Poe’s other well- known tale of terror “The Pit and the Pendulum”, together with his final “woman tale”, “Eleonora”, were published in The Gift (an annual for 1842).
Other important activities in the early 1840s included Poe’s meeting with Rufus Wilmot Griswold, who was preparing in 1841 his own Poets and Poetry of America, and to whom Poe sent three of his poems and an inaccurate account of his life. Griswold would much later be chosen by Mrs. Clemm as Poe’s literary executor; and although his malignant obituary and posthumous biography ruined Poe’s reputation for years, it helped sell Poe’s collected works in the 1850s and beyond. Also in 1841 Poe correctly forecast the outcome of Dickens’ Barnaby Rudge on the basis of the first few chapters, and later in the year began a new series on cryptographic writing for Graham’s Magazine. In January of 1842 Virginia Poe burst a blood vessel while singing and would remain in precarious health for the rest of her short life; and in March of the same year Poe would finally meet Charles Dickens in Philadelphia, while the latter was on tour in America, promoting his work and encouraging international copyright law. Poe quit being regular editor of Graham’s with its May 1842 issue, but not before publishing some important and discerning reviews – though marred with charges of plagiarism – of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales and Longfellow’s poems. The Hawthorne review would include Poe’s earliest theoretical account of the short story and its corresponding need for “unity of effect”, while “The Masque of the Red Death”, printed in the same issue of Graham’s, may have in part been inspired by Virginia’s ordeal in January (particularly owing to Poe’s choice of red as dominant colour for the tale).
Poe’s last few years in Philadelphia would continue to be productive ones. Late in 1842 he managed to put together an expanded collection of his tales, Phantasy-Pieces, which would remain unpublished. By November and December, the first and second instalments of his second detective tale, “The Mystery of Marie Rogêt” (based on the 1841 disappearance and murder of New-York cigar girl Mary Rogers), were published in Snowden’s Ladies’ Companion. 1843 rolled in with publication of his classic tale of terror “The Tell-Tale Heart” in James Russell Lowell’s Pioneer of Boston, and his poem “The Conqueror Worm” in Graham’s, to be followed soon after with the third and final installment of “Marie Rogêt” in the Companion, and the poem “Lenore” in Lowell’s Pioneer. In the Pioneer’s last issue, Poe’s “Notes Upon English Verse” was published, a technical essay presenting his thoughts on versification that would be expanded in late 1846 into “The Rationale of Verse”. Sometime in March of 1843 Poe visited Washington, D.C., to seek subscriptions for his projected magazine The Stylus (which was never published). He also looked for a government job but unfortunately went on a drinking spree and called on President Tyler with his cloak inside out.
Returning penniless to Philadelphia, Poe soon submitted his tale “The Gold-Bug” in a contest held by the Dollar Newspaper and won the first prize of $100; the story would be published in the newspaper two months later, becoming popular enough to be pirated in England and also translated into French by 1845. It was also Poe’s only story to be dramatized on stage during the author’s life, performed on the evening of August 8, 1843, at the American Theatre in Philadelphia. In the meantime, publication “in parts” of The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe had begun too, but only two of Poe’s tales were ever published as part of this serialization. The other significant tale published in 1843 was “The Black Cat” in the Saturday Evening Post, one of Poe’s classic studies of domestic violence and insanity. Late in the year he began his career as a lecturer, delivering his “Poetry of America” several times. His last few months in the city were marked with his lecturing, and the publication of two more works, the comic tale “The Spectacles” in the Dollar Newspaper and the mysterious “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains” in Godey’s Lady’s Book. Of particular note in Poe’s development as a writer around this time is that his tales of the 1840s were becoming more streamlined, economical, almost neoclassical in tone (although still dealing with disturbing themes), as compared with the elaborate and ornate offerings that were his Gothic stories of the 1830s, almost as if his increasingly disordered life was being counterbalanced through tighter control of subject and style in his short stories. The ratiocinative trilogy featuring C. Auguste Dupin is exemplary of this pull towards control, in a literary context.
Poe and his family’s move to New York in April of 1844 was inaugurated with the publication of his science-fiction tale “The Balloon-Hoax” and with his becoming subeditor of the Sunday Times. For the next several months other notable works and book reviews were published as well, including the poem “Dream-Land”, the creepy stories “Mesmeric Revelation” and “The Premature Burial”, the classic ratiocinative tale “The Purloined Letter”, the strange “The Oblong Box”, and “Thou Art the Man” (often recognized as the first comic detective story). Later in 1844 Poe would leave the Sunday Times to become subeditor of the newly opened Evening Mirror.
On January 29, 1845, Edgar Allan Poe’s famous poem “The Raven” was published in the Evening Mirror. Success was immediate, with the poem being copied, parodied, and even anthologized within a schoolbook just a few weeks after publication. Soon after, Poe’s comic tale “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade” was published in Godey’s, followed by his lecture on the “Poets of America” at the New York Society Library, in which he praised the poems of Frances Sargent Osgood. A romantic friendship between Mrs. Osgood and Poe would eventually develop, but rumors arose and he stopped seeing her after 1847. The other exciting event in 1845 was Poe’s becoming co-editor, in March, of The Broadway Journal; by October he would be owner and sole editor of the journal, which would eventually lose money and conclude with its January 1846 issue. Poe wrote mostly reviews for the Broadway, including a long study of Elizabeth Barrett’s work and five notorious articles on Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s “plagiarisms”. Also reprinted in its pages were many of Poe’s earlier tales and poems. New work published in 1845 included the poem “Eulalie”, the comic tale “Some Words With a Mummy”, the grotesque, medical science-fiction story “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”, all in the American Review: A Whig Journal, and the well-known story “The Imp of the Perverse” and comic tale “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether” (written in 1844) in Graham’s. Two collections of Poe’s work were also published in this same year: a dozen of his stories as Tales, in June, and The Raven and Other Poems, in November, both from Wiley and Putnam of New York. Meanwhile, in October, Poe was invited to read a new poem at the Boston Lyceum but, unable to compose one, he renamed his early poem “Al Aaraaf” as “The Messenger Star of Tycho Brahe” and read it instead; this hoax received mixed reviews and Poe may have been intoxicated for the occasion. The most important event of 1845 was of course publication of “The Raven”, a poem which not only secured Poe’s literary fame but refined Gothic motifs in new ways – suggesting that the theme of a beautiful woman’s death, although tied forever to Poe’s work after the publication of “The Raven”, was more a cultural topos specific to the times and worthy of a linguist’s office as much as of a bereaved lover’s chambers. This is obvious since the raven’s quoting of “Nevermore” is meaningless unless given significance by the speaker himself, who, when we meet him in the poem, has chosen to think of his lost Lenore and nothing more, thereby amplifying the raven’s utterance (or rather, separating the word “nevermore” from the raven, thus making of the bird a pest that, ironically, threatens to puncture the speaker’s unified state of mourning).
1846 opened with Poe’s heavy mingling in New-York literary circles, and with the publication of his satirical tale “The Sphinx”. On a brief visit to Baltimore in March of that year he met Dr. R. D. Unger who observed that he was drinking steadily but not excessively. Upon returning to New York, Poe published his imaginative exposition of how he wrote “The Raven”, entitled “The Philosophy of Composition”, in Graham’s, and struck a deal with Godey’s to publish six instalments of his series “The Literati of New York City” from May to October. Most of the sketches in this series were mild, but the June instalment attacked Thomas Dunn English (now cohort of the vengeful Elizabeth F. Ellet who had unsuccessfully pursued Poe the year before for literary advancement), which set off a nasty set of replies and counter-replies, published in the Evening Mirror and Philadelphia Spirit of the Times, respectively. Poe brought suit for libel against the Mirror and won, being awarded damages of $225 in February of 1847. Godey’s had ceased publication of the “Literati” series because of the ordeal, but in the pages of its November 1846 issue published what is possibly Poe’s best tale of horror, “The Cask of Amontillado”, a story of revenge that was in part a product of the “Literati” affair, disguising Elizabeth Ellet as “the Lady Fortunato”, Thomas Dunn English as “Fortunato”, a drunken fool, and Poe as the illustrious “Montresor”, an analytical and methodical man who happily walls up his foolish companion. Also in 1846, sometime during the summer, Poe and family would make their final move, to Fordham, a cottage district then located on the outskirts of New York.
On January 30, 1847, Poe’s wife Virginia died of tuberculosis. Poe could not bear to look at his wife in death and was seriously ill for a while, being nursed by family friend Marie Louise Shew. Upon recovery, he published his landscape sketch “The Domain of Arnheim” (an expansion of “The Landscape Garden”, 1842) and the poem “To M.L.S.---” (in compliment to Mrs. Shew). The summer months would mark his visits to Alexandria (Virginia), to R. D. Unger in Baltimore, and to Louis A. Godey in Philadelphia. Unger observed that Poe was depressed and drinking steadily, while Godey found him “quite sober”. To Unger, Poe had remarked that he was reading a translation of Fouqué’s Sintram, and that “every man had his own devil”. Back in Fordham, he was busy publishing once again. Poe’s second review of Hawthorne’s tales included a discussion of the role of allegory in fiction and came out in the November issue of Godey’s; and what is often considered his best and most haunting poem, “Ulalume”, came out in the December issue of the American Review. In these months Poe was also seeing Sarah Anna Lewis (“Stella”), a poetic lady from Brooklyn who was married to an attorney known to Poe.
In February of 1848 Poe delivered his lecture on cosmology, “The Universe”, at the New York Society Library, and was spending time early in the year with Mrs. Shew who contributed some opening lines (that he later reworked) for his famous poem “The Bells”, which he had just begun writing. About this time another of Poe’s poems was published: “An Enigma” (one of compliment to Mrs. Lewis, “Stella”). In the summer months Poe’s prose poem Eureka (an expansion of his lecture on the universe) was published by Putnam of New York, which in part caused Mrs. Shew to break off seeing him, owing to her orthodoxy and the poem’s pantheistic tendencies. Nonetheless, Poe was already lecturing in Lowell, Massachusetts, where he met Nancy Locke Heywood Richmond, wife of a prosperous manufacturer of wrapping paper. A romance began between Mrs. Richmond and Poe, but, after lecturing in Lowell, he continued his summertime travels to Richmond where he sold his “The Rationale of Verse” to John R. Thompson, editor of the Messenger (to be published later in the year), visited his sister and the Mackenzies, and called daily on a pretty widow, Mrs. Jane Clark, among other things. Poe returned to Fordham via Baltimore, where he met with R. D. Unger again. There has been some debate as to whether Poe’s womanizing in the late 1840s was of a Platonic nature or if more Epicurean tastes were as well practiced, one rumor suggesting that he fathered an illegitimate child with Mrs. Osgood, for example, but, at least while Virginia was alive, such inappropriate talk quickly evaporated.
Poe did not stay long in Fordham and was already travelling again by September. His first stop was Providence where he finally met the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman (with whom he had already been carrying on a literary romance for several months via an exchange of poems); he proceeded to Lowell, but, plans for a lecture having fallen through because of election excitement, he decided to visit Mrs. Richmond instead. Poe then continued to Boston but was back in Providence by November 3. Having experienced a bad night he purchased two ounces of laudanum, travelled back to Boston again, swallowed half of the laudanum and became ill. Miraculously, he was back in Providence by November 7 and met Helen Whitman who consented to a conditional engagement, provided he stop drinking. Relieved to hear this, Poe was back in Fordham by mid-November. The notable publication of this period was his second “To Helen” poem (in compliment to Helen Whitman, and published in the November issue of the Union Magazine). 1848 would end with Poe’s lecture “The Poetic Principle” that was delivered on December 20 before the Franklyn Lyceum of Providence, at the Earl House (to an audience of about 2,000 people). Poe unfortunately stayed awhile after the lecture and became intoxicated; he then visited Helen Whitman in this state and their brief engagement was called off. Poe’s laudanum incident of early November 1848 has also caused much lively debate among biographers and literary critics regarding possible opium addiction, particularly in relation to “Ligeia” (1838), a tale in which the narrator confesses to taking opium, but such discussion is fragile and ties Poe too closely to some of his narrators. While Poe’s troubles with alcohol are certain, occasional use of opium at that time was sometimes prescribed for various medical ailments and may not necessarily have been proof of addiction.
Edgar Allan Poe’s final year opened with publication in February of his science fiction tale “Mellonta Tauta” in Godey’s, a sombre work about lack of individual rights in the 29th century, which had been written in early 1848 and had some of its material quoted in his lecture “The Universe”. March and April would mark the publication of several of Poe’s works in the Boston Flag of Our Union, a magazine he despised but that paid well. First published were his grotesque fairy tale “Hop-Frog” and the classic poem “A Dream Within a Dream”, followed by a tale of the California Gold Rush, “Von Kempelen and His Discovery”, a poem of the Gold Rush, “Eldorado”, and the poem “For Annie” (in compliment to Mrs. Richmond, whom Poe called “Annie”). Other work published in the Union included Poe’s final landscape tale, “Landor’s Cottage” (a companion piece to “The Domain of Arnheim”).
By July of 1849 Poe was off on his summertime travels again, first visiting Philadelphia where he drank too much and experienced delirium tremens for the first time; editors John Sartain and Godey, the urban Gothic novelist George Lippard, and others, fortunately came to his aid. From late July to late September Poe was in Richmond where he lectured several times on “The Poetic Principle”, visited his sister and the Mackenzies, also the painter Robert Sully, and renewed his relationship with his early fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, by then a widow. He wrote little that summer other than the unfinished satire “A Reviewer Reviewed” and a fragment of an adventure story now referred to as “The Lighthouse” (both published posthumously several decades after his death).
Poe was intoxicated at least twice while in Richmond but was already visiting Baltimore in late September, toasting his hostess with wine at a birthday party. Events after September 28 are peculiar, however, much like the last few chapters of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. It is possible that Poe tried to take a train to Philadelphia again but chose the wrong one and was returned to Baltimore where soon after, on October 3 (an election day), he was found outside a tavern in a semi-conscious state and dressed in someone else’s clothing. Poe was taken by carriage to Washington Hospital in Baltimore and there he clung to life until the early morning of October 7, 1849. Just two days later his classic poem “Annabel Lee” was published in the New-York Tribune, followed in November by another of his well-known poems, “The Bells”, in the Philadelphia Union Magazine. Medical reminiscences of Poe’s final moments are inaccurate at best; some suggest that he died calmly, others that he left this world in a semi-delirious state, not able to separate reality from fantasy. Some sources have him saying “Oh Lord, help my poor soul”; others suggest that he was pointing to invisible figures and frequently screaming the name “Reynolds!”, perhaps referencing that writer’s work on south polar exploration, some of which inspired the plot of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Perhaps Poe was indeed in his last moments thinking of Pym’s last moments before the latter abruptly disappeared behind a curtain of whiteness, swallowed by a cataract that can either mark the termination or beginning of a circular journey – similar to a reader’s experience with Poe, where no reading can fully exhaust the rich possibilities on offer in such classic works as “Ligeia”, “The Man of the Crowd”, and “Ulalume”, texts which belong as much to antebellum American culture as they do to late Romanticism and all of world literature.
Posthumous critical reception of Edgar Allan Poe’s work was already in full swing by the 1850s, largely thanks to Rufus Wilmot Griswold’s quick compilation, in only six weeks after Poe’s mysterious death, of the first two volumes of The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe. A third and fourth volume were brought out eventually, and the collection sold steadily, even though Griswold had painted Poe’s character in a terrible light in his obituary and in the “Memoir” included in the third volume of The Works. Across the Atlantic, Charles Baudelaire was about this time already busy translating much of Poe’s work for a French audience, and the Poe legacy would in a few decades reach new heights on the continent, spreading to Germany, Italy, Spain, Russia, and other countries, largely owing to the rise of Symbolism in France (c. 1890) that presented Poe as the misunderstood, suffering literary genius who prophesied a new age in art.
In England, Poe found a prominent champion in John Henry Ingram whose work on Poe’s behalf, while arousing some controversy, resulted in a British publication of Poe’s collected works in the 1870s, and a full-length biography in 1880. Ingram’s work was a solid attempt at rectifying Griswold’s slurs and at raising the bar in Poe biography by introducing greater factual accuracy. America had a Poe defender in the poetess Sarah Helen Whitman as early as the 1860s but thorough critical appreciation of Poe’s work in the United States only really began after the Second World War, with articles published by Richard Wilbur, Allen Tate and other Poe enthusiasts.
The variety of critical appreciation of Poe’s work, particularly beginning with the second half of the 20th century, has been and continues to be extensive. From psycho-biographical readings of Poe’s tales in the 1930s (by Freudian disciple Marie Bonaparte), through readings as various as those that situate him as expressing characteristic problems of an introverted and “aristocratic” Southern culture, to the many European existentialist assessments of his stories and postmodern interpretations of such classic tales as “The Purloined Letter” (e.g. Jacques Lacan’s and Jacques Derrida’s intensive articles), and finally to the current crop of socio-historical, contextual, and gender-aware reflections on his oeuvre, what becomes obvious is that there is at least one constant in Poe Studies: no matter how controversial a figure or how disparate the assessments may be of his legacy, both Poe the legend and Poe the writer have never been neglected by the critical eye, let alone entirely ignored.
Whether we read him as the high priest of Gothic terror (e.g. “The Fall of the House of Usher”), the isolated deus ex machina of a perennial neoclassicism (e.g. the detective tales), a proto-existentialist thinker (e.g. Pym), or even a Biedermeier-era aesthete (e.g. “Landor’s Cottage”), Edgar Allan Poe’s many faces will allow his work to sit quite comfortably in the mixed-media, global environment of the twenty-first century.
Works Cited
Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (Vols. 1-3). Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1978. [See in particular “Annals,” Vol. 1.]
Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
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Citation: Sucur, Slobodan. "Edgar Allan Poe". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 08 September 2008; last revised 13 July 2025. [https://www.litencyc.com/php/speople.php?rec=true&UID=5080, accessed 15 December 2025.]
