For generations, the nightmares of millions have been fueled by the demons of one man. From childhood's hour I have not been as others were. I have not seen as others saw. I could not bring me passions from a common spring.
And all I loved, I loved alone. Then, in me childhood, in the dawn of a most stormy life, was drawn from every depth of good and ill the mystery which binds me still. From his youngest days, Edgar Poe saw women as angelic figures.
His earliest memories were of his actress mother, Eliza, charming audiences. She never came on stage, but a murmur ran through the house. What an enchanting creature.
Heavens, what a form. What an animated and expressive countenance. Never was anything half so sweet. Norfolk Herald, 1811. Poe's father, David Poe Jr. abandoned his family when Edgar was only a year old.
Eliza struggled valiantly to support her three young children, performing dozens of roles in theaters from Boston to Charleston. And then while touring in Richmond, Virginia, she was struck down with a dreaded scourge of tuberculosis. Everyone in Richmond knew of her career, knew of her sickness, and were very, very sympathetic, even though the society looked down on the profession of actress. She was very well thought of, and people sympathized a great deal with her play. Desperately poor, Eliza lay dying in a squalid boarding house, and young Edgar watched helplessly as she coughed up blood and sank into delirium.
On this night, Mrs. Poe, lingering on the bed of disease and surrounded by her children, asks your assistance, and asks it for perhaps the last time. Richmond Inquirer, 1811. When Eliza died on December 8th, she was 24 years old. Edgar was not yet three.
For his entire life, Poe carried with him a small miniature of Elizabeth Poe. And I doubt that Poe had any actual tangible memory of his mother at all. But he had a kind of bone-deep memory of her presence.
And he certainly had a bone-deep memory of the experience of being separated from her, never to see her again. Orphaned by desertion and death, the three Poe children were scattered to different foster homes around Richmond. Young Edgar was taken in by the Allen family. Mrs. Allen was very fond of Mrs. Poe, and she and John Allen had no children.
So you can almost imagine Mrs. Allen... Mr. Allen by saying, oh, let's take the dear child in. Mr. Allen, who was a tough, up-from-under, successful Scots merchant, raised young, unadopted Edgar about as well as a child. could be under the circumstances, with good schooling, a good education, fine manners, a young southern gentleman of his time.
And that then an enormous gap existed between this precocious, brilliant, polished, well-educated young poet and this rough and ready tobacco merchant who had raised him. Mrs. Allen showered Edgar with affection, guiding him into a confident young adulthood. He was a very athletic young man, sports he was very interested in. Of course, later on in life, he would downplay any sort of physical activity, saying that a baboon could do it just as well. But when he was a young man, natural leader, an athlete.
When he was 15, Poe swam six miles against the current in the James River, a feat that made him renowned throughout Richmond. Cheerful, vigorous, and brilliant, his sensitive nature drove him to seek kindred souls. Jane Stannard was a mother of a boyhood friend of his, and she seems to have been his adolescent first love.
She died of brain cancer. She died when he was about 15. And he was absolutely broken up. He ended up crying at the grave a lot.
This was one of several times he would end up weeping at the grave of a woman he loved and who died at an early age. Still grieving for Jane Stannard, Poe learned that his foster mother was stricken with tuberculosis. Her long illness would deepen the rift between him and John Allen.
His own wife was dying of tuberculosis, and while she was dying of tuberculosis, John Allen was having numerous affairs in his own house. And maybe this was accepted behavior for that time period, but poor young Edgar knew of this. It seemed like everybody knew about it.
And Edgar believed that women should be treated with respect and courtesy. Eager to conduct his affairs in peace, in 1827, John Allen sent Edgar off to the University of Virginia, then in just its second year of existence. The place was a wild school. They were continually having to call in the police. There was a professor who was murdered there.
This was a rough and tumble place. At the university, Poe's dazzling imagination captivated his classmates. He would draw all over the walls and the ceiling of his room and fellow students would come and he would read to them from his stories and show them his artwork and according to one reminiscence it wasn't clear to the students at that time whether Paul was going to be a great writer or a great artist. Poe soon found himself in desperate financial straits. What John Allen did was he gave Poe just enough money to get there.
Gave him no money for food, no money for clothing, no money for the basic necessities that a young man needed. Destitute, Poe tried to make money gambling and soon found himself $2,000 in debt. He pleaded for help from his wealthy foster father, but Alan, already eager to disown him, refused to cover the debts.
The proud young poet was reduced to smashing the furniture in his room and burning it to keep warm. He left University of Virginia with debtors pursuing him. And debtors'prisons did exist in those days. And Allen did not rescue him.
He ran away and joined the Army under an assumed name because he was afraid he'd end up in a cold stone cell somewhere over the debts that John Allen wouldn't cover. Richmond and the United States were too narrow a sphere, and the world shall be my theater. If you determine to abandon me, here I take my farewell. Neglected, I will be doubly ambitious, and the world shall hear of the son whom you have thought unworthy of your notice.
Letter to John Allen, 1828. That was the end of any relationship between him and John Allen. After that, he was on his own. He was young, he was a genius, he was broke, and he was out there on his own.
Poe fled to Boston, the hometown of his natural parents, and enlisted in the Army under the name of Edgar A. Perry. He excelled as a soldier, rising swiftly to the highest enlisted rank, and later briefly attending West Point. But military life was merely a way station on the path to his most treasured goal. I'm young, not yet 20. I am a poet, if deep worship of all beauty can make me one. I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination.
Letter to John Neal, 1828. By age 20, he had used his own meager funds to publish two books of poetry. Unfortunately, life kept providing inspiration for his work, and early in 1829, Francis Allen succumbed to the ravages of tuberculosis. Her death affected him terribly.
It was the third older woman whom he had loved, it's even safe to say worshipped, who died, and the second one to die of tuberculosis. And, of course, the great irony was that this was not the last time it was going to happen in his life. Orphaned by two mothers, rejected by two fathers, Poe searched mightily for a safe haven. In 1831, he moved into the Baltimore house of his Aunt Maria Clem and her eight-year-old daughter, Virginia. Here, finally, was the loving and supportive home he had so long been denied.
The concept of family was incredibly important to Poe. Half his life was spent searching for that ideal family, which I think he found in his life with Virginia and her mother, Mariah Clem. Supporting himself as a writer had been all but impossible, and now Poe was burdened with providing for his new family.
There were no copyright laws to speak of, and if you were desperate and you were starving, and the publishers knew this, they would set the terms. He had a hard time selling the Telltale Heart because publishers thought it was too loud. They wanted more quiet stories.
So he was at the mercy of the publishers. Amid his struggles to survive as a writer, in 1834, Poe was summoned to the deathbed of John Allen. When he went into John Allen's room, John Allen took up a cudgel and waved it and threatened from his deathbed the foster son, whom he considered so ungrateful. John Allen left Poe out of his will.
He left a lot of money to illegitimate children, but absolutely nothing to Poe. Determined to pursue his literary ideals, Poe would spend the rest of his days battling poverty and often losing. In 1835, he temporarily left the Clem home to assume the position of editor at the newly created Southern Literary Messenger. He was a marvelous success as an editor as well as a writer. Unfortunately, he was headstrong, he was sometimes arrogant, and almost always ended up in conflict with his bosses.
When he criticized someone, he was ruthless, he was brutal. He had the nickname of the Tomahawk Man or the Comanche of Literature because of his brutal slashing reviews. This book is a public imposition.
It should have been printed among the quack advertisements in a spare corner of the newspaper. Book Review, 1836. He was always one to get into literary skirmishes. He had started that pattern early by accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of being a plagiarist. That made almost everybody in America mad at him. He was a very...
combative personality. And I've always felt that Poe's own battles in the literary world were rooted in that early antagonistic relationship with John Allen and his need to prove himself and his need to exact some kind of revenge. Shortly after moving to Richmond, Poe faced a devastating In crisis, Maria Clem wrote him of plans to have his cousin Virginia, then 12 years old, live with another relative. At this point, Poe had his first terrible drinking episode.
He crashed into a horrid depression. He went on a drinking binge. Damn near lost his job. And he realized he could not lose Virginia. He was in love with her.
He wrote a hysterical letter to Muddy, pleading with her not to let her do this, pleading with Virginia not to do this. It's a very emotional letter, almost paranoid in its intensity. I'm blinded with tears while writing this letter.
My last, my last, my only hold on life is cruelly torn away. I have no desire to live and will not. I love, you know I love Virginia passionately, devotedly.
Letter to Maria Clem, 1835. In that letter, Poe appended a revealing postscript to Virginia in which he assigned her a variety of female roles. My love, my own sweetest sissy, my darling little wifey, think well before you break the heart of your cousin Eddie. To what extent he was troubled by the fact that he married his first cousin, I don't know.
But it certainly is curious that in circumstances like this, he apparently thought of her as cousin and sister and wifey all at once. The next month, Poe and Virginia were married. He was 26, she not yet 13. To avoid scandal, the marriage document was falsified, listing her age as 21. While the intimate details of their relationship remains a mystery, they were clearly a devoted and loving couple. When you were with the Poe family, you couldn't see a happier couple.
They were always playing games. There's one story when Poe was living in New York where they were playing hop frog across each other's backs, and Poe split his pants. because he jumped too high and he squatted too fast.
Poe was so embarrassed that his face got red and Virginia couldn't stop giggling because Eddie had split his britches. Many people can't imagine Poe playing in the garden, playing with animals, teaching Virginia how to play the flute, teaching her algebra. He was a very devoted, very loving and caring husband. But the private Poe was very different from the public Poe. His life as a writer and critic was an unending series of bitter quarrels and financial humiliations.
Poe's life was a constant struggle to make ends meet. Many times his mother-in-law begged for him. She would go out and try to solicit either work or loans of money for the family.
Poe was often his own worst enemy, sabotaging his efforts as they verged on success. In 1842, he secured a meeting with U.S. President John Tyler to request a government job. He showed up for the appointment quite intoxicated.
He was wearing his cloak inside out. He was disheveled. And fortunately for Poe, the president's son, Robert Tyler, intercepted him first and said, why don't you come back in a few days?
When Poe showed up for the second meeting, he was quite sober and conducted himself very well at first. But then, through some bizarre quirk, he decided to use the opportunity of this meeting not just to secure the president's help in getting a position in the Customs House, but to solicit magazine subscriptions from him. He was driven to sink his own ship, as if that early experience of being abandoned himself created a kind of chronic pattern of...
needing to do himself in, in some strange, perverse way. Through his many trials, Poe persevered, using his imagination as a defense against a pitiless world. In the peaceful setting of his happy home, he put pen to paper, creating works that reveal the morbid fears and unspeakable longings of Edgar Allan Poe.
Only Edgar Allan Poe, who knew intimately the tortures of madness, could create such ever-increasing suspense. Beneath their sensationalism, Hollywood depictions of Poe do contain a central truth. The themes of his stories are firmly rooted in the grim realities of his life.
Besieged by premature deaths of those he loved, he yearned for a connection with the afterlife. The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins? The Premature Burial, 1844 Poe is a seeker of forbidden knowledge. Underlying all of these kinds of forbidden knowledge is the one knowledge that is forbidden to everyone.
To die and to be able to come back with word about what dying is like. What exists, if anything does, on the other side of death. It is evident that we are hurrying onwards to some exciting knowledge, some never-to-be-imported secret whose attainment is destruction. Manuscript found in a bottle, 1833. If the mind and if life is all this richness built up, if it is all the beauty of nature, all these things comprehended in a memory, that memory is going to go out like a candle. And that's the kind of knowing quality in all those stories about death.
Death can't be this way. It can't be annihilation. It can't be oblivion. Poe grappled with the mystery of death and the capriciousness of life. He lived in a time when it was terribly, terribly difficult to make any kind of living with the printed word.
He lived with the illness and death and misfortune of himself, his relatives, friends, you name it. There was almost no catastrophe that didn't touch his life at some point. Poe, like his characters, was forever caught in a struggle between rationality and irrationality, order and chaos.
Logic was very important to Poe. He created the detective story because of his need for order and logic in his life. Some people have said he may have created the detective story in order that he not go mad. In 1841, Poe published The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first detective story and a direct forerunner to Sherlock Holmes.
His French detective, Auguste Dupin, uses analytical reasoning to investigate a series of hideous slashing murders. The final solution defies all logic. The murders have been committed by a razor-wielding orangutan. In The Telltale Heart, the narrator loudly proclaims his sanity and then calmly tells us how he murdered and chopped up an old man. True, nervous, very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am, but why will you say I'm mad?
Hawken, and observe how healthily, how calmly I can tell you the whole story. The Telltale Heart, 1843. Like many of Poe's characters, this narrator is driven by guilt to confessing his crime. Poe's thinking was strikingly modern, almost 20th century, in the way he expressed psychological introspection. In many of his stories, a tortured narrator would delve into deep wells of guilt, and through exploring that guilt, I think Poe approached something very close to modern psychoanalysis. Perhaps no story struck closer to Poe's soul than the Mask of the Red Death.
No pestilence had ever been so fatal or so hideous. Blood was its avatar and its seal, the redness and the horror of blood. The Mask of the Red Death, 1842. Consumption, which now is known as tuberculosis, was responsible for the death of so many people that Poe loved.
And that illness involved the coughing up of a great amount of blood. And I think that identification was impressed on Poe's brain at a very young age. And to him, consumption was, I think, the Red Death. And now was acknowledged the presence of the Red Death. He had come like a thief in the night, and one by one dropped the revelers in the blood-bedewed halls of their revel, and died each in the despairing posture of his fall.
And darkness, and decay, and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all. When Poe wrote The Mask of the Red Death, he had already lost his mother, his stepmother, and brother to tuberculosis. Only in his worst nightmare could he have imagined where the dread disease would strike next.
Over the years, Poe and his beloved wife, Virginia, grew ever closer. Her companionship sheltered him from the storms of literary life. Poe and Virginia interacted together, sitting at the piano, playing, laughing.
Virginia would go outside of the cottage and pick flowers and skip rope. They would take walks together in the garden and talking and singing and come back in and fix dinner together, always together. Poe delighted in her soprano voice and often asked her to sing at home. One fateful night in 1842, he and Maria Clem watched her perform. As she was singing, there was a slight cough, and then there was a drop of blood that appeared on her lips.
And Poe realized that, like his mother, like his stepmother, like his brother Henry, that Virginia had consumption, tuberculosis. He knew what that meant. That was a death sentence. It was the beginning of a very long and quite horrible struggle and probably only her youthful energy kept her alive as long as she managed to fight on which was about five years and those were five years of hell for Edgar Allan Poe. Poe tried very hard to make his wife comfortable.
He would have to physically carry Virginia sometimes from the bed to the table when she wanted to go to the table to eat and sometimes he would bring her her food. In the midst of his private hell, Poe achieved his greatest public fame. In January 1845, his poem, The Raven, appeared in the New York Evening Mirror. When The Raven was published, it was an overnight sensation, and his nickname became The Raven. It was the talk of the town.
It was sensational. It was scary. It was horrifying. People were having nightmares. They were having dreams of...
a raven coming through their windows at night. Children would follow him on the street, flapping their arms like the raven. And of course, he would just play along with it. He would say, nevermore, and they would run away, and then they would come back, and they would be taking sticks and hitting each other.
hitting his heels and he would turn around and say nevermore and they would run away again so he loved it he loved the fame that it brought to him but it didn't bring him any fortune he earned $14 for the Raven He was very poor. He only had one coat for many years, and he didn't have a fresh shirt to wear under it, so he wore the coat buttoned to the collar. His dress may have seemed rather austere, but there was nothing austere about him. He was raised as a southern gentleman, and that meant he was raised to be social. He was raised to be convivial, he was raised to be charming, to be entertaining, to be polite.
And he was indeed all of those things. Audiences flocked to see the mysterious romantic Poe give dramatic renditions of the Raven. His lecture was a rhapsody of the most intense brilliancy.
His eyes glowed like that of his own raven, and he kept us entranced. Monselle B. Field, 1845. The Raven tells the story of a poet longing for his lost love, a tragic role that Poe knew he would soon be playing himself. Ah, distinctly I remember, it was in the bleak December, and each separate, dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow, vainly I had sought to borrow from me books a cease of sorrow, sorrow for the lost Lenore, for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore, nameless here, forevermore. Poe is projecting ahead to his own loss of Virginia, and the circumstance in the poem is of a writer who is trying to forget, desperate to repress or deny or somehow let go of the terrible weight of this loss. And yet he asks that question at the end, when will I see my beloved Lenore, quote the raven, nevermore? Prophet, said I, thing of evil, prophet, still if bird or devil, by that heaven that mends above us, by that God we both adore, tell this soul. With sorrow laden, if within the distant Aden, it shall clasp a sainted maiden, whom the angels name Lenore.
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden, whom the angels name Lenore. Quoth the Raven. Never more.
That poem is a kind of rehearsal for his own bereavement. The circumstances are too immediate. As he writes that poem in another room of the house, his own wife is dying.
Six years ago, a wife whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood vessel in singing. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever, and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially. and again I hoped.
At the end of the year the vessel broke again. I went through precisely the same scene, and again, again, again. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death. I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.
During these fits I drank. God only knows how often or how much. Letter to George Everleth, 1848. In 1846, Poe moved his dying wife to a quiet cottage in Fordham, New York, where the poverty-stricken family struggled through a bleak winter.
The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompanied the fever of consumption. She lay on the straw bed, wrapped in her husband's great coat, with a large tortoiseshell cat on her bosom for warmth. Mary Grove, 1846. One of the things that almost sent Poe over the edge during those years was that as he watched Virginia get better, get worse, get better, get worse, very often he literally, despite working 16 hours a day, could not raise enough money to keep her. well-fed, to keep her warm, to keep a fire going, to buy her medicine, to even to keep a roof over her head.
And he went through terrible spasms of helpless rage and guilt. And finally, of course, the ultimate defeat, he could not keep her from dying. Poe would never recover from the loss of Virginia. He entered a mental twilight world, wandering out to lie on her grave at all hours, crying himself to sleep. And later, in the last year of his life, he would summon the strength to immortalize his child bride in the poem Annabelle Lee.
I was a child and she was a child in this kingdom by the sea. But we loved with a love that was more than love, I and my Annabelle Lee. With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me. And this was the reason that long ago in this kingdom by the sea, a wind blew out of a clide, chilling my beautiful Annabelle Lee.
Yes, that was the reason, as all men know in this kingdom by the sea, that the wind came out of the clide by night, chilling and killing my Annabelle Lee. For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle Lee. And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes of the beautiful Annabelle Lee.
And so... O'er the night-tide I lie dine by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea. The skies they were ashen and sober, the leaves they were crisped and sear, the leaves they were withering and desear.
It was night in the lonesome October of my most immemorial year. Eulalume, 1848. Poe's fortieth and final year was a furious struggle to recapture the ideals of his youth. I shall be a literateur at least all my life. Nor would I abandon the hopes which still lead me on for all the gold in California. Letter to F.W.
Thomas, 1849. But his professional goals were dashed by a tormented personal life. With Virginia gone, it became clear that he could not survive without the aid of a feminine soulmate. Suddenly, Poe's life becomes a kind of chaotic chase in which he is moving from place to place, romancing several women at once, and sometimes almost literally writing them the same. same letters, using the same phrases to try to court them. I don't think he was being insincere.
I think it's a mark of how fundamentally confused he was in the way he was trying to arrange his own life. Poe said that women have been angels of mercy to me, tenderly leading me from the verge of ruin while men stood aloof and mocked. And I think he meant that very sincerely.
He became wildly enamored of Helen Whitman, a poetess and a wealthy society figure, and pursued her relentlessly. As your eyes rested upon mine, I saw that you were Helen, my Helen, the Helen of a thousand dreams. If you died, then I would clasp your dear hand in death and willingly, joyfully, joyfully go dine with you into the night of the grave. Letter to Helen Whitman, 1848. Poe is drawn to that woman in part out of a desire to share the experience of death. Poe imagines that dying with a beautiful woman or being with the dead beloved other will in some way ease his passage out of the world.
Poe proposed to Ellen Whitman in a cemetery, and after an initial reluctance, she accepted, and it seemed that he was rescued. But his growing reputation as a drinker doomed his hopes. Sarah Helen Whitman's mother actually drew up a document that she wanted Poe to sign saying that Poe had no claim on any of Sarah's estate, and this was intolerable to Poe.
This was an insult, and he took it as an insult. So this was really the thing that broke off the engagement. Poe didn't take it.
I mean, he gave it right back to her, said no, and that was it. Even before breaking with Helen, he had been writing passionate love letters to Annie Richmond of Massachusetts, the married woman. He even made the comment in one of his letters to Maria Clem that there's no good news she can tell him except perhaps that Mr. Richmond has died.
Poe was spiraling out of control. He was often sick or drunk or both, and his once riveting lectures became humiliating fiascos. The drinking became much worse during that period.
Towards the end, he had bouts of insanity, during which he thought that people were after him to assassinate him. At one point, he had a friend of his shave off his mustache, so he wouldn't be recognized. His never-ending hunt for a bride brought him to a figure from his childhood.
Poe renewed his romance, rekindled his romance with the widow Shelton, the lady that he'd been engaged to years, years before when he was 17. By late September 1849, Poe and Elmira Shelton were engaged. Eager to inform Maria Clem of the happy news, he set off for New York. People who saw him last in the city of Richmond, the last thing they remember is commenting on how sick he looked, how pale, how ashen gray his face was.
Poe was entering his final nightmare. He disappeared for several days. His whereabouts were a mystery. And then, on October 3rd, he was found lying semi-conscious on a Baltimore street.
They found him in a delirious condition. He wasn't even wearing his own clothing. He was wearing someone else's clothing that didn't fit him, that was soiled. We really don't know what happened to Poe.
One theory... is that he was a victim of a political kidnapping. It was election day in Baltimore, and frequently thugs were hired by the politicians, and they would go out and kidnap people, and they would give you drugged liquor and use you as a repeat voter. He was carried inside to a nearby tavern.
And the tavern owner recognized him and sent a message to somebody that he knew was acquainted with him and said, I have a gentleman here, rather the worst for wear, which was an understatement. And Poe was then rushed in a carriage to Washington College Hospital. He was delirious.
They said he was talking to phantasms on the wall, in a feverish delirium. And then, of course, early Sunday morning, October the 7th, about five o'clock in the morning, he regained consciousness, and he said, God help my poor soul, and then he died. One of the reasons why Post speaks to us so clearly is that he constructs a world of uncertainty, a world that's precarious, a world in which one yearns for an afterlife.
yearns for some image of heaven to believe in, but is confronted by violence and cruelty. Poe didn't live into the second half of the 19th century, and he couldn't have imagined all of the horrors that have unfolded in the 20th century. But I think there is something in Poe's fiction that looks beyond his own time and guesses what we will face in ours.
Thank heaven, the crisis, the danger is past, and the lingering illness is over at last, and the fever called living is conquered at last. The moaning and Sighing and sobbing are quieted now, with that horrible throbbing. The sickness, the nausea, the pitiless pain have ceased with a fever that maddened me brain, with a fever called living that burned in me brain.