Edgar Allan Poe
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Edgar Allan Poe, born in the early 19th century, emerged as one of America's most influential writers, poets and literary critics, best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is regarded as the foremost central figure in Gothic fiction in the United States, and of early American fiction at large, given he was the first truly well-known writer to attempt to dedicate himself to try and make a living out of doing such—regardless of the financial burden it placed upon him.
His works, including iconic tales like "The Fall of the House of Usher" and poems such as "The Raven," not only defined the Gothic genre but also pioneered the modern detective story, inspiring later, globally recognized works including the Sherlock Holmes stories themselves.
Poe's life was, for its part, one of eccentricity and tragedy, though perhaps it was these very things which gave the man his particular genius.
Early Life and Formative Years
Edgar Poe entered the world on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, the second child of traveling actors Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe Jr. Unstable as this already was, it soon grew more unstable still. In 1810, David Poe separated from Elizabeth, leaving her to raise Edgar and his siblings alone. Tragedy struck in December 1811 when Elizabeth died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, at age 24, orphaning them.
Poe's older brother, William Henry Leonard, was taken in by their paternal grandparents in Baltimore, while his infant sister, Rosalie, went to the Mackenzie family in Richmond. Edgar himself would be adopted to John and Frances Valentine Allan, a wealthy Richmond tobacco merchant and his childless wife, who informally adopted the two-year-old Edgar, renaming him what he would famously become known as later; Edgar Allan Poe.
Though never legally adopted, Poe grew up in relative comfort in the Allan household, which provided him with a classical education. In 1815, the Allans relocated to England for John's business ventures, sailing aboard the Annan. Poe, then six, attended boarding schools: first the Misses Dubourg's in Greenwich in 1816, then the esteemed Manor House School in Stoke Newington in 1818, where he excelled in languages and declamation (known today simply as speech giving).
The family returned to Richmond in September 1820 aboard
the Martha, a voyage that took six weeks.
Back in Virginia, Poe continued his studies under Reverend William Burke at a seminary for boys, where he honed his athletic skills in swimming, boxing, and running—prowess that earned him local fame, including a record swim of 11 miles up the James River in 1824. Despite what many may assume given his propensity for Gothic literature, Edgar Allan Poe was a fit, capable athlete in much of his time.
It was during this period that Poe experienced his first crush: one Jane Stith Stanard, mother of his schoolmate Robert, who inspired early poems like "
To Helen" before her untimely death in 1824, deepening Poe's fascination with loss and the ethereal elements of life, even holding a vigil by her grave.
Education, Teenage Rebellion, and Military Service
At 17, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia in February 1826, studying ancient and modern languages under Thomas Jefferson's curriculum and founding ideals. The University held strict rules against gambling, guns, tobacco, alcohol, and even horses, but these rules were mostly ignored and only loosely enforced, given Jefferson's unique system of student self-governing, exacerbating some of Poe's earliest struggles.
His time there lasted ultimately only 11 months. Plagued by gambling debts—estimated at $2,000 (or roughly $52,000 in today's American Dollar)—and clashes with the rather parsimonious John Allan, Poe left Charlottesville in December 1826 amid scandal. Compounding the turmoil, he learned that his teenage sweetheart, Sarah Elmira Royster, had become engaged to another, fueling a further darkening outlook on life.
Estranged from the Allans, the 18-year-old Poe fled to Boston in 1827, scraping by through odd jobs. In a bold move, he enlisted in the U.S. Army under the pseudonym Edgar A. Perry, rising swiftly to sergeant major while stationed at Fort Independence and later Fort Moultrie, South Carolina. That same year, he self-published his debut collection,
Tamerlane and Other Poems, a slim volume of 40 copies printed anonymously in Boston, showcasing his early Romantic influences from Lord Byron (legendary writer of Don Juan, who is covered in a separate Zevist article). Though it sold poorly at the time, it however marked Poe's entry into print. It's reported only 12 authentic copies exist of this work today. It was, for its part, a beginner work, not his finest, and yet a definitive showcase of poetic talent and a hand for melancholic prose.
Two years after the publishing of
Tamerlane, Frances Allan passes away, and Edgar mournfully arrives but one day late for her funeral. Nevertheless, Edgar's arrival prompts a brief reconciliation with John Allan, who helps secure Poe's discharge from the army. Poe then gained admission to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point in July 1830, hoping to forge a military career, but resentment toward Edgar Allan—exacerbated by the latter's remarriage—led Poe to deliberately court dismissal through neglect of duties.
Court-martialed in January 1831, he was expelled after just eight months. Before leaving, he published
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems in Baltimore, expanding his poetic oeuvre with the titular dreamlike narrative poem.
A third collection, simply titled Poems, followed in 1831, dedicated to his West Point classmates.
Relocating to Baltimore to live with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia (Poe's cousin), and ailing brother Henry, Poe turned to prose. Henry's death from tuberculosis in August 1831 left Poe, then 22, to navigate poverty and grief, perhaps only furthering Poe's unique relationship with death.
Breakthrough in Fiction and Editorial Rise
Poe's pivot to short stories bore fruit in 1832, when the Philadelphia Saturday Courier published five tales:
Metzengerstein,
The Duc de L'Omelette,
A Tale of Jerusalem,
A Decided Loss, and
The Bargain Lost—his earliest forays into the more iconically grotesque and supernatural.
These stories met modest acclaim but no financial reward. Undeterred, Poe entered a contest in 1833 with
MS. Found in a Bottle, a tale of nautical horror that won $50 from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, catapulting him, at last, into literary circles.
Two years later, John Allan himself passes away. It's said that Edgar went to visit him in his final hours, but John Allan refused, and Edgar was not included in his last will and testament. This severed the final tie Edgar Allan Poe had to his foster family.
In August 1835, Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond as a contributor, quickly rising to editor. His biting reviews of other works (he came to receive the nickname the
Tomahawk Man for just how harsh he could sometimes be) and stories, like
Berenice, boosted circulation from 700 to 3,500 subscribers.
That year, Poe brought Maria and Virginia to Richmond, marrying his cousin on May 16, 1836. It should be stated that Virgina was only a teenager when the two married, though it's often stated that their relationship was more akin to brother and sister; deeply loving, though considered at least somewhat platonic by many (perhaps made obvious by the fact the two did not have children). Even after she was of age, Virginia seemed to love Poe deeply, and vice versa.
Poe was dismissed from his editorial position in 1837 amid rumors of alcoholism (which he denied). The Southern Literary Messenger then serialized his sole novel,
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, an adventure tale blending fact and fiction that influenced later works like Jules Verne's famous novels.
In 1838, Poe and his family relocate to Philadelphia. Later that same year, Poe's next tale,
Ligeia—a story of love, death, and resurrection—is included in the significant American Museum Magazine.
Peak of Genius and Professional Struggles
By 1839, Actor and publisher William E. Burton hires Poe as assistant editor for
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, at the rate of $10 a week. During this time, Poe networks with some of Philadelphia's finest literati, and produces several of his seminal works, including
The Fall of the House of Usher, a Gothic, psychological horror about the intertwined collapse of a family and its ancestral home.
In 1940, Poe would publish his first collection of short stories,
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, though this would meet a mixture of highly positive and highly negative reviews, and he received little in the way of remuneration—the work neither selling well nor the publisher granting him much aside from 20 free copies of his own work. Though largely ignored, the collection still held gems like
Morella, which served as an exploration of themes regarding obsession, reincarnation and identity, originally inspired by the works of German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling.
After a bout of sickness in later 1840, Poe was forced to abandon plans for the publication of his own journal,
The Penn Magazine, having circulated a prospectus after leaving Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. As such, in 1841, Poe finds further editorial work, now for
Graham’s Magazine, at the salary of $800 a year. Here, he debuted
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, considered the world's first detective story, introducing the analytical sleuth C. Auguste Dupin and revolutionizing the mystery genre.
Sadly, Poe's life takes another tragic turn as Virginia becomes ill with tuberculosis, even coughing up blood during a piano performance of his work. Poe turns heavily to drinking, and workplace disputes result in him resigning from Graham's Magazine, replaced by Rufus W. Griswold—one of the aforementioned literati that Poe had met during his time in Philadelphia. Griswold goes on to release
The Poets and Poetry of America, only featuring three of Poe's own poetic works. At Griswold's request, Poe writes a review of of the work, though it was not ultimately the laudatory one Griswold expected, instead simply fair and even handed.
Even with how fraught his life was, the same year brought more of Poe's works.
The Masque of the Red Death, a plague allegory;
The Pit and the Pendulum, a Spanish Inquisition horror; and
The Mystery of Marie Rogêt, Dupin's second case.
Settling in Philadelphia's Spring Garden (now a National Historic Site) in 1843, Poe published
The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe No. I (previously having been published in the Boston Magazine)—containing the now worldly famous "
The Tell-Tale Heart" and "
The Black Cat," masterpieces of psychological guilt—and won $100 for "
The Gold-Bug," a cipher-driven treasure hunt tale that sold 300,000 copies of its newspaper.
Poe, at this stage, also resumed soliciting investors for his own magazine, now titled
the Stylus. In Poe's own mind, his journal was precisely the sort America of the time needed. In his own words:
In Poe's own mind, America's literary scene was lacking, compared especially with its European contemporaries. Most of all, Poe oft compared himself to Charles Dickens and Lord Byron himself, and witnessed the lifetime of struggles he had endured to truly put his works out there into the public forum. In his opinion, Poe considered himself the ideal champion to rigorously shape a new literary American tradition, where works he felt were not derivative or lacking for inspiration would be illuminated, and the general public would be enriched for having experienced them.
Though this process lagged, Poe nonetheless joined
the Evening Mirror, a daily New York newspaper, having now relocated there with his wife in 1844, already having begun a literature tour late the prior year (its Philadelphia show selling out in its entirety).
Here, Poe goes on to pen the somewhat infamous
The Balloon-Hoax, which was initially published anonymously, and lead the general public to believe a fabricated, fanciful hot air balloon flight over the Atlantic Ocean really transpired.
The Purloined Letter would also be published, marking the third tale of detective C. Auguste Dupin, and often considered the strongest of the set, and thus the true forerunner to the modern detective story.
Poe's fame however, finally crested in 1845, with the release of what many hail as his magnum opus,
The Raven, first being published in
The New York Mirror, mesmerizing the public and earning both lectures and parodies alike. It tells of a distraught lover, mourning the loss of his beloved Lenore, who is paid a visit by a mysterious raven that repeatedly speaks a single word—nevermore. The raven sits upon a bust of Pallas Athena and seems to antagonize the man, who feels unable to escape the shadow of his grief.
The Raven would go on to be published alongside
The Valley of Unrest and
The City in the Sea as part of
The Raven and Other Poems, his works now even being published in England. For a period of about a year, Poe briefly owns
The Broadway Journal, a New York newspaper, thought after it ceases publication, Poe in his own words notes that it had fulfilled its destiny, and was really a temporary adjunct to other design, meaning the establishment of his own magazine.
Poe described it as the one great purpose of his literary life, and, quite prophetically, added: "
undoubtedly (unless I die) I will accomplish it."
Loss, Final Years and an Enigmatic End
By 1846, Edgar, Virginia and Maria move together to a cottage in the New York countryside. Though gossiping newspapers were quick to jump on the matter and claim he was suffering from "brain fever", Poe himself had to admit he was indeed experiencing a bout of ill health, which he attributed to his packed schedule in the wake of
The Raven's release.
Part of
The Broadway Journal's closure stemmed from the mounting debts Poe had been facing, and clashes with other literati and publications had brought Poe to court more than once (with him notably winning a libel case for defamation of his character, though his relationship with Rufus Griswold had soured to the point that he had launched one against Poe himself).
In 1847, however, the darkest moment yet had come, as Virginia lost her battle with tuberculosis. Poe was, in no simple terms, utterly devastated, and honored her in poems like
Annabel Lee, published posthumously after his own death. As well as this, it's commonly believed Lenore of
The Raven was inspired by Virginia, and that perhaps Lenore's death within it was a means of coping with what may have seemed to be her inevitable young demise before the fact.
A friend of Poe's said of him: "
the loss of his wife was a sad blow to him. He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week or a year; she was his all."
Poe himself wrote to a friend that he had experienced the greatest evil a man can suffer when, he said, "
a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before" had fallen ill. Another friend, Charles Chauncey Burr wrote: "
Many times, after the death of his beloved wife, was he found at the dead hour of a winter night, sitting beside her tomb almost frozen in the snow."
Poe had turned to drinking, having abstained for quite some time. He had even gone as far to edit his first published story,
Metzengerstein, to remove the narrator's line, "
I would wish all I love to perish of that gentle disease", which was itself a reference to tuberculosis.
The next year, Poe began to court other women, though even among those he tried to woo, one confessed to believing that Virginia was the only woman he ever
truly loved. For Poe, perhaps, pursuing marriage was a means of staying afloat economically, that he may continue pursuing his work and his dream of establishing a magazine of his own.
In 1848, Poe courted poet Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, Rhode Island, in a tumultuous engagement broken by her family and his rumored opium use, or, in alternative suggestions, broken by her request that he remain sober, which he ultimately did not. Around this time, Poe attempts suicide by taking an opium tincture, but survives, and goes on to deliver lectures on
The Poetic Principle and published
Eureka, a cosmological prose poem blending science and philosophy that anticipated relativity theories. Platonic muses around this time like Annie Richmond and Sarah Anna Lewis offered much needed emotional and financial solace, inspiring such poems as
For Annie.
Reuniting with Elmira Royster Shelton (now a wealthy widow) in Richmond, Poe became engaged in 1849, enjoying a sober summer of lectures and revisions.
On September 27, he departed Richmond, Virginia, where he had been lecturing and visiting his fiancée, Elmira Royster Shelton, intending to travel to Philadelphia and then New York to handle editing work and prepare for his upcoming wedding. However, he never reached Philadelphia. Instead, on October 3—coinciding with a local election day in Baltimore—Poe was discovered in a dazed and disheveled state outside a tavern called Ryan's Fourth Ward Polls (also known as Gunner's Hall).
He was wearing ill-fitting, shabby clothes that were not his own, including a cheap palm hat and mismatched attire, which contrasted sharply with his usual neat appearance.
A printer named Joseph W. Walker found him and alerted Poe's acquaintance, Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, via a note that read: "
There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress."
Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital (now Church Home and Hospital), where he remained semi-conscious and delirious for the next four days. He repeatedly called out for "Reynolds"—a name whose identity remains unknown, though speculations range from an explorer he admired to a possible hallucination.
Hospital staff noted his trembling, fever, and inability to coherently explain his predicament. He succumbed early on the morning of October 7, reportedly uttering his last words: "Lord help my poor soul."
Poe was buried quickly in an unmarked grave at Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, with only a handful of attendees at his funeral. Adding to the intrigue, Poe's medical records from the hospital were lost. Rufus Wilmot Griswold, Poe's literary rival even in death and posthumous editor, further muddied the waters by publishing a defamatory obituary that portrayed Poe as a depraved drunkard, which influenced early narratives about his death.
Theories have ranged from disease, substance abuse, to foul play, but Poe's death still defies a resolution. His own words from "
The Premature Burial" eerily foreshadow the intrigue: "
The boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague."
On October 1st, 1875, his body was reburied with fanfare, and today, sites like the Poe Museum honor his genius amid adversity. Attendees of his reburial included Neilson Poe, who gave a speech and called his cousin "
one of the best hearted men that ever lived".
Zevist Legacy
Though Poe's work has an enduring legacy in the mainstream, truly understanding the nature of his work requires a deeper knowledge of classical philosophy that may surprise those who are only familiar with his work in a surface level context.
Poe's critical theory, as outlined in essays like
The Philosophy of Composition, echoes Aristotelian principles of unity and effect, where a work of art must achieve a singular, harmonious impact on the reader. He argues that a poem or tale should be crafted with deliberate precision to evoke a unified emotional response, much like Aristotle's
Poetics insists on structural coherence in tragedy to produce a sense of catharsis in the reader.
Poe extends this to a metaphysical level, influenced by Plato's concepts of dualism—The World of Forms (the true reality of abstract notions like beauty, justice and the Form of the Good) and the Sensible World experienced through sense of imperfection and entropy. In Plato's
Republic and
Phaedrus, the soul ascends toward eternal forms of beauty and truth, a concept Poe adapts in his notion of "poetic sentiment" as an innate longing for supernal beauty that transcends the material world.
Nowhere is this more clear in Poe's own
To Helen, where Helen of Troy is poetically regarded as Psyche, both in the sense of her beauty and the desire she sparked, but also that Psyche herself represented the soul (her name quite literally meaning soul, life, spirit and anima). Poe is comparing Helen to the very soul of "
regions which are Holy Land" meaning the soul of Greece from which our ideals of beauty, philosophy and civilization arise from in the first place. The "
agate lamp" described as being within her hand refers to not only how Psyche, in myth, learned of Cupid's identity by shining a light upon him, but also refers to the enlightening knowledge of the ancient world.
Pythagorean ideas of cosmic harmony also permeate Poe's cosmology. Pythagoras viewed the universe as an ordered whole governed by mathematical proportions (the "music of the spheres"), which Poe incorporates into his prose poem
Eureka. Here, Poe posits a universe originating from a primal unity—a divine "volition" that diffuses into multiplicity before contracting back to oneness. This draws from pre-Socratic atomic theorists like Leucippus and Democritus, who saw matter as composed of indivisible particles in constant motion, but Poe infuses it with a psychic dimension: atoms are not merely physical but possess a "spiritual" affinity for reunion (especially fitting, given Poe himself fixated on themes of both love and loss).
Eureka further asserted in its poetry that "
God became all things at once" further illustrated ideas of pantheism—that the Godhead was synonymous with nature, something more in like with the works of Giordano Bruno (himself burned at the stake for his evangelizing of a truly infinite and transcendent Godhead), than the Abrahamic YHVH and unnatural concepts like that of original sin, as divinity was inherently part of nature and beauty, and not monopolized by a personal Jewish savior.
Eureka was, for its part, utterly reviled by many of its contemporaries. Poe's own friend Marie Louise Shew, who had helped his wife Virginia on her deathbed, broke off their friendship entirely. Another Christian even called it a "
damnable heresy." And yet, regardless of whether such theories end definitively true,
Eureka also anticipated modern cosmological ideas of expansion and contraction, and even theorized the existence of black holes, all without Poe himself having any particular education in the sciences. In his mind, it was the most important of his works, and the one he wished to be remembered for, even dramatically stating that "
I have no desire to live since I have done Eureka. I could accomplish nothing more," and he believed that, even if his contemporary generation did not appreciate it, that perhaps another one, "two thousand years later", may.
The Hellenistic influences across all of Poe's works are essentially bottomless, and some have correctly theorized
Eureka is something of a key to more broadly understand Poe's work collectively. Even in something as commonly invoked as
The Raven, many still miss its deeper themes due to a modern lack of understanding of the Gods.
The titular raven itself, rests upon the bust of Pallas Athena—the narrator of
The Raven implied to be a scholar, given
he is "
pondering over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore", with this and Athena herself representing wisdom and rationality. The narrator's struggle and his grief however, is entirely
irrational, and override all sense of logic and reason, as the raven's shadow stretches far across his own.
The narrator finds himself torn between a desire to forget, and a desire to remember. He takes some small pleasure, in remembering the enormity of his loss, though also finds it unbearable to exist with. At one stage he implores
"Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!"—nepenthe being a magical substance the aforementioned Helen of Troy gives to her guests, bringing them out of their sorrow with a state of temporary forgetfulness.
The Raven's narrator however, is denied this, by fate or by his own will, the Raven simply responding "nevermore" as it always had, causing him to decry it, telling it to return to the "
Plutonian shore."
Certainly, one can see that the raven itself is a reference to Odin's own ravens, Huginn and Muninn, which represent thought and memory respectively. Even the Greek Titaness of memory and remembrance, Mnemosyne, is the mother of the Muses, which themselves preside over poetry; musical and tragic alike, something that would not have been lost on Poe, given that this, and many other poems, were his own way of coping with the slow loss of his beloved Virginia.
One can, and should, regard Poe's works as a Gothic, Romantic, American continuation of the ancient project to reconcile reason and beauty against the human perception of death, Stoic and otherwise.
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Sources
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy – Jeffrey Meyers 1992
Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography – Arthur Hobson Quinn 1941
Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance - Kenneth Silverman 1991
The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore –
https://www.eapoe.org/index.htm
https://poestories.com/index.php – A collection of Poe's works referenced in this article and other resources.
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