Edgar Allan Poe Lecture Notes

The details of Edgar Allan Poe’s biography are well known. Much of what is included in this lecture can be found in Stephen Peithman’s introduction to The Annotated Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (©1986 by Stephen Peithman); J. Gerald Kennedy, A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe (©2001 by J. Gerald Kennedy); and the website of the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, (©2009 by the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore).

I. Early Life

 Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the second son of traveling actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe.

 In 1811, Elizabeth Poe died, likely of tuberculosis, thus orphaning Poe and his siblings. (Poe‘s father had abandoned the family prior to Elizabeth‘s death.)

 Poe was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia.

 Although John and his wife Frances never adopted Poe, they did raise him as their own son, coddling and spoiling him as a child. The Allans baptized Poe with the middle name of Allan, thus Edgar Allan Poe.

 In 1815, Poe moved with his foster parents to London, where John Allan established a branch office of his tobacco trade firm. There Poe attended two boarding schools, where he earned high grades in Latin and became acquainted with William Shakespeare and other British authors.

 After his business failed in 1820, Allan resettled his family in Richmond.

 Poe often showcased his athletic skills by challenging classmates to running races, boxing matches, and jumping contests. Possibly on a bet, Poe once swam six miles, against the tide, down the James River.

II. The University of Virginia and West Point

 In 1826, at the age of 17, Poe entered the University of Virginia. The university‘s student body was rowdy and poorly behaved, and drinking, fighting, and gambling were common. In one particularly bad fight, Poe suffered several deep bites on his arm.

 Poe pursued language studies exclusively, excelling in Latin and French. Allan wanted Poe to study mathematics as well.

 Classmates remembered Poe taking long walks in the afternoons and entertaining friends in the evenings with poetry readings that included his own works. They also remember Poe experimenting with alcohol, although it was said that finishing one drink ―used him up.‖

 Classmates described Poe as ―a very good looking fellow.‖ Poe was about 5'8", and his frame was small. ―His eyes were large and full, gray and piercing.‖ He had a fair complexion, and ―his hair was dark as a raven‘s wing.‖ Although Poe‘s clothes were clearly worn, he was always neat. Poe spoke with a soft southern accent.

 Although he had high academic expectations for Poe, Allan failed to provide adequate funding for Poe‘s education. Poe turned to gambling to try to raise needed funds.

 By 1827, Poe had accumulated $2,000, or the equivalent of two years‘ salary, in gambling debts. Poe asked Allan for the money, but Allan refused him. This caused a division between Poe and his foster father.

 Poe left the university and enlisted in the United States Army under the name Edgar A. Perry (to evade creditors). Poe remained in the army for three years.

 When Poe was 21, Allan helped him secure an appointment at West Point. Again, Poe received very little financial support from Allan.

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 Financial hardship, along with the realization that writing was his true vocation, led Poe to try to resign from West Point. When Allan, acting as Poe‘s guardian, refused to allow Poe to resign, Poe pursued the only other option available to him: dismissal. Poe was released after he purposely ignored roll calls and missed mandatory drills.

III. Poe’s Relationships

 Poe‘s foster father was not a consistent disciplinarian, and he and Poe were constantly at odds.

 Frances Allan died in 1829, and for awhile John Allan and Poe were reconciled due to their shared grief.

 From 1821 to 1825, Poe was engaged to Elmira Royster, despite objections from both families. The engagement was broken off after his return from the University of Virginia.

 Poe was twenty-seven years old when he married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm; they lived in Richmond, Virginia.

 Poe and Clemm did not have children. For the first two years of their married life they pretended to be brother and sister.

 Poe and Clemm were married eleven years; for six years before she died, she suffered from tuberculosis (a disease of the lungs that is transmitted through the air by coughing or sneezing).

IV. Poe’s Time Period

 The field of medicine as we know it now was in its infancy. Medical students paid young men to dig up corpses to study. This was illegal and had to be done under the cover of darkness. During the time period it was sometimes uncertain whether a body in a coffin was dead; in some cases a bell was placed inside a coffin so it could be rung by the ―deceased.‖

 The U.S. government‘s policies toward African Americans and Native Americans made these times particularly turbulent. In 1820, Congress passed the Missouri Compromise, which admitted Missouri to the union as a slave state and Maine as a nonslave state but also outlawed slavery in areas north of the latitude that comprises Missouri‘s southern border. In 1830, Congress ratified and implemented the Indian Removal Act, which created the forced migration of eastern Indian tribes to western lands. One of the worst of these migrations was the 1838 Trail of Tears, on which 4,000 of 15,000 Cherokee Indians lost their lives due to hunger, disease, exposure, and exhaustion.

 Spiritual uncertainty was deepening. In the 1830s, geologists began to question scriptural accounts of the creation of the world. By the middle of the century, higher criticism, a kind of literary criticism that investigates the origins of a text, began to throw into question the inerrancy of the Bible.

 Pseudosciences, including phrenology, cryptography, and mesmerism were popular. Phrenology claimed that studying the shape of a person‘s skull could reveal that person‘s personality, morality, and intelligence level. Cryptography was the science of solving secret codes or ciphers. Mesmerism is the act of inducing hypnosis.

 Society was undergoing massive industrial transformation due to the rise of science and technology.

 Poe‘s writing can be grouped with other Romantics, who drew inspiration from and expressed a faith in Nature, and who envisioned a Golden Age in which humanity and Nature coexisted harmoniously.

 Richmond, Virginia, was at the center of debates over slavery. With the founding of William Lloyd Garrison‘s abolitionist newspaper The Liberator in 1831 and the publication of pamphlets by the American Anti-Slavery Society in 1835, Southerners who had been divided among themselves over the issue of slavery perceived an increasing public scrutiny of their internal debates. As Poe came to understand, there was a heightened pressure to maintain a united, proslavery front in the South. Poe also wanted to maintain his Northern readership, however, and so he aimed to articulate a tepid view of slavery that would offend as few white subscribers as possible. Poe

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himself favored a gradualist approach to ending slavery, opposing both immediate abolition and the indefinite continuation of the institution.

V. Poe’s Career

 Poe was one of the first American writers to try to make a living solely by writing. Poe often wrote anonymous pieces to prompt others to read his work.

 Poe‘s career was hurt by the absence of an international copyright law: instead of paying American writers, publishers often simply reproduced British works for their magazines.

 Poe worked for some time as an editor for The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia. He left the magazine in 1839, then worked for a series of newspapers, magazines, and journals, publishing short stories at the same time.

 Although Poe began his career during a boom in publishing, most periodicals did not last long, and publishers often refused to pay their writers. The ―Panic of 1837,‖ a financial crisis that ushered in a five-year economic depression, also had a particularly bad impact on the industry.

 In his time, Poe was known as a poet and a literary critic who also wrote stories.

 With the emergence of modern poetry and its emphasis on free verse, Poe‘s poetry fell out of public favor. Although he wanted to be a poet, Poe soon turned to prose in order to support himself.

 Poe‘s best known fictional works are Gothic, a genre that played to the public tastes of the time. He also wrote satires, fantasies, comedies, science fiction, a play, and a textbook on the study of shells.

 The comic side of Poe‘s work is often overlooked. He saw both the tragedy and the absurdity of life, and sometimes put them in the same story.

 Poe is considered the father of the detective story. He also earned the nickname ―The Man with the Tomahawk‖ for his biting literary criticism.

 Some critics consider Poe a writer of Southern sensibilities, influenced by the South as it existed before the Civil War. He published during an era when writers from New England were predominant in the publishing world.

VI. Poe’s Death

 On October 3, 1849, Poe, semiconscious, was identified at a local tavern. His clothes were dingy and ill-fitting, which led many to believe that his original clothing had been stolen.

 Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he drifted in and out of consciousness for days, but never recovered enough to explain how he had arrived at his condition.

 On October 7, Poe calmly prayed ―Lord, help my poor soul‖ and died. His cause of death was ascribed to

―congestion of the brain,‖ although no autopsy was performed.

 Poe was 40 years old.

 Theories of the cause of Poe‘s death include the following: beating, epilepsy, dipsomania (a uncontrolled thirst for alcohol), heart, toxic disorder, hypoglycemia, diabetes, alcohol dehydrogenase, porphyria, delirium tremens, rabies, murder, and carbon monoxide poisoning.

 Every year since 1949, on the anniversary of Poe‘s birth, an unknown visitor known as the ―Poe Toaster‖ leaves a partial bottle of cognac and three roses on Poe‘s grave. While the significance of the cognac is unknown, the three roses are assumed to signify the three people buried under the monument: Poe, his mother-in-law Maria Clemm, and his wife Virginia.

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VII. Poe’s Influence

 Poe‘s writing influenced a range of authors, including Robert Frost, Rudyard Kipling, and William Faulkner. The detective story ―The Murders in the Rue Morgue,‖ featuring the character C. Auguste Dupin, inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle‘s famous Sherlock Holmes mysteries. The French poet Charles Baudelaire translated Poe‘s prose, grew obsessed with the American author, and came to see him as his alter ego. The influence of Poe‘s short stories is also apparent in the works of gothic authors such as H. P. Lovecraft and Ambrose Bierce.

 References to Poe and his literary works are still widespread in popular culture. For example, The Simpsons has parodied ―The Raven,‖ with Lisa reading the poem to Bart and Maggie. The Lemony Snicket series A Series of Unfortunate Events portrays Poe as the guardian of the Baudelaire children. The NFL‘s Baltimore Ravens are named after Poe‘s famous poem. The film Poe: The Last Days of the Raven won the 2008 grand prize for best feature film at the Cinema City International Film Festival in Los Angeles. Poe‘s life is also the subject of an upcoming movie entitled Poe, written and directed by Sylvester Stallone and scheduled for release in 2009. At one point, it was even rumored that Michael Jackson was reviewing scripts with a view to playing the writer.