Edgar Allan Poe
(Encyclopaedia Britannica)
born Jan. 19, 1809, Boston, Mass., U.S.
died Oct. 7, 1849, Baltimore, Md.
American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is
famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre. His
tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the
modern detective story, and the atmosphere in his tales of
horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven”
(1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national
literature.
Life.
Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth
ArnoldPoe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After
his mother died in Richmond, Va., in 1811, he was taken into
the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his
godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to
Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a
classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11
months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but
his gambling losses at the university so incensed his
guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe
returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira
Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he
published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane,
and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under
the name of Edgar A. Perry, but on the death of Poe's foster
mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and
helped in getting him an appointment to the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new
volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems
(1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy,
where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week.
He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of
Poems, containing several masterpieces, some showing the
influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and Samuel
Taylor Coleridge. He then returned to Baltimore, where he
began to write stories. In 1833 his “MS. Found in a Bottle”
won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in
Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There
he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young
cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have
been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.
Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for
drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to
be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he
needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start
him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to
intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This
gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but
according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While
in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose
narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, combining (as
so often in his tales) much factual material with the
wildest fancies. Itis considered one inspiration of Herman
Melville's Moby Dick. In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine in Philadelphia. There a contract for a
monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and
“The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural
horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known
to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.
Later in 1839 his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton's about June
1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham's La
dy's and Gentleman's Magazine, in which he printed the first
detective story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In 1843
his “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper, which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he
returned to New York, wrote the “Balloon Hoax” for the Sun,
and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P.
Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror
of Jan. 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the
American Review, his most famous poem, “The Raven,” which
gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of
the Broadway Journal, a short-lived weekly, in which he
republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this
last year the now forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke
Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did notobject, but “Fanny's”
indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great
scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of
his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a
cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he
wrote for Godey's Lady's Book (May–October 1846) “Literati
of New York”—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day,
which led to a libel suit.
His wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year
Poe went to Providence, R.I., to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a
poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but
platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with
SarahAnna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed
poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published
the lecture “Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the
universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some
critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south,
hada wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond,
where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then
the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only
one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of
childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a
youngpoet, Susan Archer Talley.
Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for
Baltimore late in September. There, after toasting a lady at
her birthday party, he began to drink heavily. The
indulgence proved fatal, for Poe had a weak heart. He was
buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.
Appraisal.
Poe's work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the
occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own
feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of
shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With
an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are
closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an
elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as
appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and
musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller,
considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a
prominent place among universally known men of letters.
The outstanding fact in Poe's character is a strange
duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on
the manseems almost to point to the coexistence of two
persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and
devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism,
found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to
accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked,
a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from
the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling
graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe's unstable being?
Much of Poe's best work is concerned with terror and
sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a
pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of
literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a
voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and
Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a
visitor for not keep ing a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is
considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side,
he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the
ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His
sensitiveness to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired
his most touching lyrics (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,”“Eulalie,”
“To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to
beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his
imagination carried him away from the material world into a
dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic
of the later years of his life.
More generally, in such verses as “The Valley of Unrest,”
“Lenore,” “The Raven,” “For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his
prose tales his familiar mode of evasion from the universe
of common experience was through eerie thoughts,impulses, or
fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of
his tales of death (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The
Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M.
Valdemar,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,”
“Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and crime (“Berenice,”
“The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “Imp of the Perverse,”
“The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”), his tales
of survival after dissolution (“Ligeia,” “Morella,” “Metzengerstein”),
and his tales of fatality (“The Assignation,” “The Man of
the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into
the clutch of mysterious forces oronto the untrodden paths
of the beyond, he uses the anguishof imminent death as the
means of causing the nerves to quiver (“The Pit and the
Pendulum”), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses
and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.
On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close
observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and
in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or
constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is
his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic
and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to
impress the public with his possessing still more of it than
he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem
unravelling, and cryptography that he attributed to his
Legrand and Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical
tales, which created the detective story, and his science
fiction tales.
The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of
writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of
rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and
suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling
inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid
psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard
and dry style. In Poe's masterpieces the double contents of
his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a
oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more
effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.
As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of
language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the
short story, in which he sought for the ancient unities:
i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and
take place within one day in one place. To these unities he
added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these
views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes
thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely
presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very
different from hisown, and was sometimes an unexpectedly
generous critic of decidedly minor writers.
Poe's genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to
persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States,
of Poe's greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire
and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in Frenchliterature
was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism.
French Symbolism relied on his “Philosophy of Composition,”
borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate
the modern theory of “pure poetry.”
Charles Cestre
Thomas Ollive Mabbott
Jacques Barzun
Gustave Dore
born Jan. 6, 1832, Strasbourg, Fr.
died Jan. 23, 1883, Paris
French printmaker, one of the most prolific and
successful book illustrators of the late 19th century,
whose exuberant and bizarre fantasy created vast
dreamlike scenes widely emulated by Romantic
academicians.
In 1847 he went to Paris and from 1848 to 1851 produced
weekly lithographic caricatures for the Journal pour
Rire and several albums of lithographs (1847–54). His
later fame rested on his wood-engraved book
illustrations. Employing more than 40 woodcutters, he
produced over 90 illustrated books. Among his finest
were an edition of the Oeuvres de Rabelais (1854), Les
Contes drolatiques of Balzac (1855), thelarge folio
Bible (1866), and the Inferno of Dante (1861). He also
painted many large compositions of a religious or
historical character and had some success as a sculptor;
his work in those media, however, lacks the spontaneous
vivacity of his illustrations.
