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Authors
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)
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The single most useful reference book on Poe is The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849 (1987), edited by Dwight Thomas and David K. Jackson. There is no complete modern scholarly edition of Poe, although there are a number of facsimile reprints of early editions as well as modern editions of the poems by Floyd Stovall (1965) and by Thomas O. Mabbott (1969). Burton R. Pollin continued Mabbott’s long-projected edition of the Collected Writings; the first volume appeared in 1981. G. R. Thompson’s Library of America volume Edgar Allan Poe: Essays and Revisions (1984) makes many elusive documents readily available. John W. Ostrom edited The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe (1966). Partly because of forgeries and calumnies by Poe’s literary executor Rufus Griswold, Poe biography has remained enmeshed in legends. John Carl Miller’s Building Poe Biography (1977) lucidly traces the gradual emergence of documents concerning Poe. Arthur Hobson Quinn’s Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941) has not been wholly superseded; the best recent biography is Kenneth Silverman’s Edgar A. Poe (1991). An essential source is the 1997 The Poe Encyclopedia, edited by Frederick S. Frank and Anthony Magistrale; see also J. R. Hammond’s An Edgar Allan Poe Chronology (1998). Elizabeth Wiley prepared a Concordance to the Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe (1989). Poe’s early reputation is traced in Eric Carlson’s The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe (1966) and Jean Alexander’s Affidavits of Genius: Edgar Allan Poe and the French Critics, 1847–1924 (1971). Esther F. Hyneman’s Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 (1974) lists a century and a half of criticism. Modern collections of criticism, such as I. M. Walker’s Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage (1986), are largely superseded by Graham Clarke’s four-volume Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Assessments (1991). Valuable recent collections include Kenneth Silverman’s New Essays on Poe’s Major Tales (1993), Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman’s The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1995), Eric W. Carlson’s A Companion to Poe Studies (1996), J. Gerald Kennedy’s A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (2001), Kennedy and Liliane Weissberg’s Romancing the Shadow: Poe and Race (2001), and Kevin J. Hayes’s The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe (2002). See also G. R. Thompson’s Norton Critical Edition of The Selected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe (2004). Fresh information is in Terence Whalen’s Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America (1999). Scott Peeples’s compact overview, Edgar Allan Poe Revisited (1998), is excellent. On Poe and the marketplace, see Meredith L. McGill’s American Literature and the Culture of Reprinting, 1834–1853 (2003).
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.
"The Cask of Amontillado" (If you do not have Acrobat Reader, download here. )
Questions for Discussion and Writing
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?
