October 7, 2011
Edgar Allan Poe: Pioneer, Genius, Oddity
Edgar Allan Poe. Photo courtesy National Portrait Gallery
On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore in disarray.
“He’s muttering a variety of things that are indecipherable. Nobody really knows who he is, and he’s not wearing his own clothes,” says David C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery. “It seems pretty clear that he was suffering from some sort of alcohol or drug overdose.”
By age 40, Poe had written reams of poetry, attempted to start his own literary journal and become one of the first Americans to support oneself strictly as a writer. But eventually, his mental illnesses and alcohol abuse caught up with him. “He’s wandering around and they put him in the charity hospital, and he suffers four days of what must have been fairly awful trouble,” Ward says. On this day in 1849, America lost one of its most innovative and unusual literary figures to a death as mysterious as his life and works.
He was born to David and Elizabeth Poe, both Boston actors, in 1809, but his father abandoned the family when Edgar was just a year old, and his mother died soon thereafter of tuberculosis. He was taken into the home of the Allans, a wealthy Virginia family, but things continued going downhill for little Edgar from there. “He had a very tempestuous relationship with his surrogate father,” says Ward. After spending an uneasy childhood in both Virginia and Britain, Poe left home to attend the University of Virginia, where he only lasted a year.
“He ran up large gambling debts, and Mr. Allan refused to pay them, so Poe drops out,” says Ward. “Ultimately, Allan rejects Poe, so there’s this element of double rejection in his life.”
After a stint as a cadet at West Point, Poe decided to devote his life to becoming a writer. “He is the first American who tried to make a living just simply by writing,” says Ward. “At the time, the other writers were usually ministers, or professors.” Over the next two decades, he obsessively crafted dark, mysterious poetry, then turned to short stories in a similar vein.
Deeply critical of contemporary literature, he held posts at various literary journals and discussed plans to start his own. Transcendentalism was one of the most prominent literary and philosophical concepts of the day, and held that individual spirituality and a connection to nature could provide meaning and insight to anyone. “He hated transcendentalism—he thought that it was just moonshine and propaganda,” Ward says. “He hated Longfellow, the preeminent poet of the day, who he saw as a fraud.”
During this time, he secretly married his first cousin, Virginia Clem. “He marries his 13-year-old cousin, which is, to be blunt, a little bit creepy,” says Ward. Soon, she too would suffer from tuberculosis, leading many to speculate that the presence of even more misery in his life further contributed to the nightmarish focus of his work.
Poe’s fixation with the macabre and gruesome cut completely against the grain of 19th-century American literature. His stories typically featured death, corpses and mourning. “Poe is totally against everything that America seemed to stand for. He’s dark, inward-turning and cerebral. Death-obsessed instead of life-obsessed,” Ward notes. “If Whitman is the poet of the open road, Poe is the poet of the closed room, of the grave.”
Poe became a household name with the publication of the poem “The Raven” in 1845, but his lasting influence is evident in a number of genres. “In 1841, be basically invents the detective story, with The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ Ward says. “His detective, Dupin, is the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes: he’s a cerebral, brainiac detective who solves problems by his brain powers.” Other stories influenced Jules Verne, leading to the emergence of the genre of science fiction.
The 1847 death of Virginia, coupled with Poe’s increasingly heavy drinking, pushed him ever further into despair. But even in his final moments, he handed over a mystery, one that his fans have puzzled over for more than a century.
“The kicker to all this is that Poe supposedly left a large trunk of his archives, and that has disappeared,” Ward says. “Poe, the inventor of the mystery story, leaves this trunk behind that we would think might provide a clue to his life, but disappears. It’s this final tantalizing mystery.”
Sign up for our free email newsletter and receive the best stories from Smithsonian.com each week.
10 Comments »
RSS feed for comments on this post. TrackBack URI
[...] Interview: The Smithsonian profiles Edgar Allan Poe. [...]
I disagree with many of the comments by Mr. Ward. Much is made of the fact that his cousin was 13 when they married. That was not that unusual at that time and it was with the full consent of Virginia’s Mother, who lived with them. I agree that the death of his wife from TB affected his fiction, but so did the deaths of both his Mother and his foster mother from TB. Poe was often quoted that nothing was as tragic as the death of a beautiful, young woman.
While he did drink, many of those who knew him described the unusual effect that even the smallest amount had on his system. There is speculation that he was one of those people whose body couldn’t break down alcohol. It actually made him physically ill.
The theories on his death are legion–from being shanghied by local election fraudsters to pneumonia or rabies.
While it was true that he hated Transcendentalism, he had his own philosophical ideas (Eureka). He was a shameless self-promoter and very obstreperous when it came to literary criticism. He would attack any competition and his views on their work might change depending how threatened he felt.
As for the view that his macabre stories went against the grain of 19th Century literature, Mr. Ward must be speaking of the Literary Establishment’s opinions. Certainly the multitudinous newspapers of the age loved stories of death, murder and the macabre. Even Louisa May Alcott–a walking definition of Transcendentalism–wrote many tales of murder and twisted love before becoming known for LITTLE WOMEN and its sequels.
It didn’t pay much and it was impossible to live well by writing without another source of income. It tells you something of his tenaciousness and need for vindication that Poe lasted until age 40.
The genius of his carefully crafted lyricism–in his short stories as well as poetry–has made him one of the most famous American writers of the 19th Century. He wrote some of the earliest Fantasy and Detective fiction. The award for best Horror is called the Edgar in his honor. Vindicated and honored after death, he definitely still lives in our collective memories.
The commentator is mistaken: it was not normal in the early 19th century for a man to marry his 13 year old, first cousin. The marriage age for both men and women in the nineteenth century was roughly the same as it is now. And the taboo against first cousin marriage has always been in place, both customarily and judicially.
The blog was centered on the anniversary of Poe’s death, hence its emphases.
I have to agree with Mr. Ward. In the 19th century it was not normal to marry your 13 year old FIRST COUSIN. Though Mr. Poe was a master at his craft, he had his faults and made his own mistakes. He is regarded as one of america’s best writers and forever will be.
What makes the marriage to the first cousin worse is that Edgar moved in with her family when she was seven. The fact that her mother consented does not make it less creepy.
Edgar Allan Poe was not married to his first cousin BY BLOOD. She was a cousin by his foster family. It is said they were very much in love. Yes she was very young, but that didn’t matter. By the way, her age was changed on the marriage certificate.
Virginia Clemm was indeed Edgar A. Poe’s first cousin by blood–she was not a relation of the Allan’s (his foster family), but rather of the Baltimore Poes. Maria Poe Clemm, the younger sister of David Poe Jr. (Poe’s father), was Virginia’s mother, making Virginia and Edgar first cousins.
IIRC, marrying first cousins was far more common in early America; for what it’s worth, 1st cousin marriages are still legal in Maryland..
http://on.msnbc.com/wIAV5h
and, according to Wikipedia, in Virginia:
http://bit.ly/wdRcmK
A late response, but I must say this is shoddy work, though it’s hard to blame the author or the interviewee for merely perpetuating a number of schoolboy assumptions about Poe (and not merely the incorrect spelling of Virginia Clemm’s last name).
Poe’s writing was not particularly dark for the time (Hawthorne, Melville, and George Lippard come to mind immediately), nor are they particularly dark today. Poe’s own reasoning for writing a few horror stories was that they sold well. And, ultimately, his horror stories constitute only about 1/3 of his published prose; generalization of his entire body of work (i.e. “he obsessively crafted dark, mysterious poetry, then turned to short stories in a similar vein”) can only come from one who has not read much of his writing. Even Longfellow, that champion of wholesomeness, wrote just as often about death as he did about life. Death as a wholly negative or even taboo topic is a modern convention.
As for marrying his cousin, well, certainly it seems strange today. But many were doing it, including Charles Darwin, and Poe’s acquaintance and fellow poet Thomas Holley Chivers. Age was another matter: 13 was young. It was far more acceptable to wait until the age of 15 or 16.
I won’t even get into the “he must have been drunk” aspect of his death. That flat statement is so ambivalent of the various contemporary sources and more modern disputes that I can only assume it is parody. The same about Transcendentalism’s contemporary popularity, rather than it being a relatively small and isolated movement among a few friends.
I think what most frightens people today about Poe is the possibility that maybe, just maybe, he was fairly normal.
I personally find the idea of “cooping” to be plausible. As referenced by Wikipedia: http://books.google.com/books?id=LEd-z8zUpcEC&lpg=PA27&ots=1dwIK00w4_&dq=%22Cooping%22%20voting&pg=PA27#v=onepage&q&f=false
As far as “mental illnesses” are concerned, I think that mental illness needs to be distinguished from eccentricity. Poe, after all, lived in the early-to-mid- 1800s, and was an anomaly of his time. I find it more frightening that most people were unwilling to delve into anything dark and were complacent with the times.
Poe invented the detective story. He wrote about travel to the moon even before Jules Verne came onto the scene. Mystery & macabre are simply a fraction of his works. He may have hated Transcendentalism, but I would recommend that anyone wishing to see another side of Poe to read “Landor’s Cottage.”
i admire the xwrititngs of this genius so much. i am just 22 btu i started reading poe about seven years agao. he has inspred me greatly and i am doing well in writing gothic short stories. the narrative of Gordon Pym is a great work, one of the greatest short stories ever written in american literature and in english.
every genius has a self-destructive element in him or her and you must know this. there is hardly a genius without a mental problem. it may be just a small mental prob or a very big one, but trust me there are few geniuses without one. any body who calls himself a genius without acting at times abnormally is not a genius. just that geniuses have to transcend or go beyond the ordinary either for inspiration or solace.
i have had this problem since i began creative writing. many peoople have called me names, others praised me, otheres are indifferent but nonetheless i am an aratist an i have to identify with other artists and geniuses subconsciously.
so thumbs up to this great man for he was never artificial.