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Biography
Born to the teenage actors Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe
Jr. (in a time when acting was a highly disreputable career),
Edgar Allan Poe was raised by a Richmond, Virginia, merchant
named John Allan when both his parents died. Allan sent Poe
to the University of Virginia, but he left after a quarrel
with Allan in 1827 and sought out his father's relatives
in Baltimore. In Baltimore he published his first volume
of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, and later secretly
married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. He
moved with his wife and her mother to Richmond, Philadelphia,
and then New York City, editing magazines and newspapers
in each city but finding it difficult to hold onto a job.
Poe's horror tales and detective stories (a genre he created)
were written to capture the fancy of the popular reading
public, but he earned his national reputation through a large
number of critical essays and sketches. With the publication
of The Raven (1845), Poe's fame was ensured, but he
was not succeeding as well in his personal life. His wife
died in 1847, and Poe himself was increasingly ill and drinking
uncontrollably. He died on a trip to Baltimore, four days
after being found intoxicated near a polling booth on Election
Day.
Explorations
In descriptions of American writing between 1800 and 1850,
Poe has been hard to accommodate. Preferring exotic settings
for his poems and stories, he rarely writes about American
experience. The emotional and psychological extremes which
pervade both his work and the Poe legend set him apart from
the sober and moderated temperaments which we have been reading
and complicate the question of how "seriously" to read him.
Is he a martyr for the unbounded imagination? A patriarch
of American gothic kitsch? A practical joker? An allegorist
of the unconscious? In both its Continental and its American
forms, Romanticism opened up problems related to the place
of dreams in the construction of art and the construction
of the self. Poe's work is radically different from anything
we have seen before, but it resonates as an address to these
and many other questions. The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), The
Philosophy of Composition (1846), and The Cask of
Amontillado (1846) allow us to try out ambitious readings
of popular gothic tales.
1. In The Fall of the House of Usher, we learn
little about why the narrator visits Roderick Usher, why
they were "boon companions" years before, why Usher and
his sister live in such a dismal structure, and why Roderick
and the narrator do nothing when they hear ominous noises
in the depths of the house. Similarly, in The Cask of
Amontillado, we have only a sentence or two about Montresor's
relationship with Fortunato. Why are such potentially important
matters about human relationships sidestepped in these
tales?
2. In both of these stories, we move from an outer world
into a dark inward place, join the company of obsessed
or deranged characters, and end up with a final contemplation
of horror. Should we read these tales as being about the
movement of the mind from the waking state into reverie,
dreams, and nightmares? Does doing so enrich a reading
of these tales? Or does that kind of reading seem needlessly
clever to you?
3. Perhaps as a put-on, The Philosophy of Composition arrives
almost mechanically at the ultimate subject for poetry
and at the idea of The Raven. Beauty and melancholy
are the perfect combined mood--therefore, a poem seeking
such a mood ought to be about the death of a beautiful
woman. Do you see any relationship between the idea of
art in The Philosophy of Composition and the construction
of these two stories? Do they work as stories about the
achievement of, or celebration of, an intense mood or psychological
state? How would you compare Poe's Romanticism to Bryant's, Longfellow's,
or Emerson's?
Other sites to consult:
Qrisse's
Edgar Allan Poe pages. The strength of this
site is its online texts anddetailed biography (indexed
for ease of use and divided into separate links by
age and events).
Edgar
Allan Poe's Site. An eclectic, in-depth site
with a comprehensive, annotated list of Poe's works;
a description of film adaptations; and numerous links
to Poe-related materials.
Edgar
Allan Poe. Features a detailed biographical
timeline of Poe's life and links to several poems
by Poe. (Maintained by Cody Hail.)
http://bau2.uibk.ac.at/sg/poe/Work.html:
Poe’s works online.
http:// www.eapoe.org: The Web site of the Edgar Allen Poe
Society of Baltimore. Contains transcripts of society-sponsored
lectures,
as well as Poe’s letters, criticism, and miscellany.
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