A History of American Literature

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) is one of the two American poets regarded with greatest respect by authors and critics in England and on the Continent. To Whitman respect is paid because he is so essentially American in his subject matter and point of view, it is yielded to Poe because his subject matter is so universal – located out of space and out of time – and because he was such a master craftsman in his art. Whitman was intensely national and local, looking on life, however broadly he may have seen it, always from his American vantage point. Poe was utterly detached in his creative writing, deriving his maturer tales and poems neither from past nor present, neither from books nor life, but evolving them out of his perfervid imagination and casting the best of them into incomparable form. Poe is therefore sometimes said to have been in no way related to the course of American literature; but this judgment mistakenly overlooks his unhappily varied career as a magazine contributor and editor. He has a larger place in the history of periodicals than any other American man of letters. His connection with at least four is the most distinguished fact that can now be adduced in their favor; and his frustrated ambition to found and conduct a monthly in “the cause of a Pure Taste” was a dream for a thing which his country sorely needed.

Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His parents were actors – his father a somewhat colorless professionalized amateur, his mother brought up as the daughter of an actress and moderately successful in light and charming rôles. By 1811 the future poet, a brother two years older, and a sister a year younger were orphans. Each was adopted into a different home – Edgar into that of Mr. John Allan, a well-to-do Richmond merchant, to whom he owed, more permanently than any other gift, his middle name. The boy was given the generous attention of an only child. From 1815 to 1820, while his foster father’s business held him in residence across the Atlantic, he was in English schools. Then for five years he was in a Richmond academy, and during 1825 apparently studied under private tutors. Up to the time of his admission to the University of Virginia he was handsome, charming, active-minded, and perhaps somewhat “spoiled.” Although only seventeen he had passed through a love affair culminating in an engagement, which was very naturally broken by the father of the other contracting party.

With his year at the university Poe entered on the unfortunate succession of eccentricities that blighted all the rest of his tumultuous career and hastened him to an early and tragic death. He did everything intensely, though he was methodical and industrious; but his method was not equal to his intensity, and from time to time, with increasing frequency, unreasoned or foolish or mad impulses carried him off his balance and into all sorts of trouble. Thus, at the university he stood well in his classes, but he drank to excess (and he was so constituted that a very little was too much) and he played cards recklessly and very badly, so that at the year’s end his “debts of honor” amounted to over two thousand dollars. Thus again, after a creditable year and a half in the army he had earned the office of sergeant major and had secured honorable discharge and admission to West Point, but in this coveted academy he neglected his duties and courted the dismissal which came to him within six months. Thus in one editorial position after another he met his obligations well and brilliantly until he came to the inevitable breaking point with his less talented employers. And thus, finally, in the succession of love affairs which preceded and followed his married life the violence of his feelings made him irresponsible and intolerable. Again and again just at the times when he most needed full control of himself he became intoxicated; yet he was not an habitual drinker, and in the long intervals between his lapses he doubtless deserved from many another the famous testimony of Nathaniel Parker Willis:

With the highest admiration for his genius, and a willingness to let it atone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led by common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties, and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on, however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious. With his pale, beautiful and intellectual face, as a reminder of what genius was in him, it was impossible, of course, not to treat him with deferential courtesy, and, to our occasional request that he would not probe too deep in a criticism, or that he would erase a passage colored too highly with his resentments against society and mankind, he readily and courteously assented – far more yielding than most men, we thought, on points so excusably sensitive.

Willis, however, was more considerate and far more intelligent than others, giving Poe no new ground for the “resentments against society and mankind” which he cherished against all too many with whom he had differed. On the whole he was a victim not of friends or foes or “circumstances over which he had no control” but of the erratic temperament with which fate had endowed him. He was like Byron and Shelley in his youthful enjoyment of privilege and good fortune, in his violent rejection of conventional ease and comfort, in his unhappy life and his early death. It is impossible to conceive that any devisable set of conditions would in the end have served Poe better. He was one of the very few who have been truly burdened with “the eccentricities of genius.”

The first milestone in his literary career was in 1827. Mr. Allan’s refusal to honor his gambling debts resulted in withdrawal from the university and the first clear-cut break with his patron. Shortly after appeared “Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F. S. Thomas … Printer, 1827, pp. 40.” It was a little book in which the passion and the pathos of his whole life were foreshadowed in the early couplet,

“Tamerlane,” the title poem, was a Byronic effusion without either structure or a rational theme, but with a kind of fire glowing through in occasional gleams of poetry and flashes of power. It was the sort of thing that had already been done by the youthful Drake in “Leon” and that Timrod was to attempt in “A Vision of Poesy,” but though all three were boyishly imitative, Poe’s was the most genuine as a piece of self-revelation. This volume was followed by “Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems” in 1829, shortly before his admission to West Point, and by the “Poems” of 1831 just after his dismissal, each largely inclusive of what had appeared before, with omissions, changes, and some new poems but no distinctively new promise.

Then for a while he settled in Richmond, receiving an allowance from Mr. Allan, with whom he had experienced two estrangements and two reconciliations. In 1832 five of his prose tales were printed in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier. The fruits of his unwearying devotion to authorship began to mature in 1833, when he was awarded a hundred-dollar prize for a short story in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, and when the first prize for a poem in the same competition was withheld from him only because of his success with the “MS. Found in a Bottle.” From then on his literary activities were interwoven with the development of American journalism. His poems, tales, and critical articles appeared in no less than forty-seven American periodicals, from dailies to annuals, and he served in the editorial offices of five.

First of these was the Southern Literary Messenger, with which he was connected in Richmond, Virginia, from July, 1835, till January, 1837. This monthly had already printed some fifteen poems and stories by Poe, and during his editorship included eleven more; but in that year and a half he discovered and developed his powers as a critic – powers which, though of secondary value, had more to do with advancing his reputation and building up the Messenger circulation than his creative verse and prose. He was writing in a period when abject deference to English superiority was giving way to a spirit of provincial puffery. In April, 1836, he wrote:

We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off with the most presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur all deference whatever to foreign opinion … we get up a hue and cry about the necessity of encouraging native writers of merit – we blindly fancy that we can accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider, that what we choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general application, precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from being ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better because, sure enough, its stupidity is American.

The fresh honesty of this point of view was doubtless reënforced by the local gratification which Poe afforded a body of Southern readers in laying low the New York Knickerbockers and worrying the complacent New Englanders. At all events, the circulation of the Messenger rose from seven hundred to five thousand during his editorship.

After his break with the proprietor, which came suddenly and unaccountably, there was a lapse of a year and a half before he took up his duties with Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, continuing in a perfunctory way for about a year (July, 1839-June, 1840) when, with much bitter feeling, the connection was severed. In the following April Burton’s was bought out and combined with Graham’s feeble monthly, The Casket, as Graham’s Magazine, and Poe gave over his own design to found the Penn Magazine to join forces with a new employer. In the year that ensued he wrote and published several analytical tales and continued his aggressive criticism, while the magazine, under good management, ran its circulation up from eight to forty thousand. Then suddenly, in May, 1842, he was a free lance once more, facing this time two years of duress before he secured another salaried position, now with the Evening Mirror and the tactful Willis, as a “mechanical paragraphist.” The months of quiet routine with this combination daily-weekly were marked by one overshadowing event, the burst of applause with which “The Raven” was greeted. It was the literary sensation of the day, it was supplemented by the chance publication in the same month of a tale in Godey’s and a biographical sketch in Graham’s, and it was reprinted in scores of papers. Such general approval, dear to the heart of any artist, seems for the moment to have lifted Poe out of his usual saturnine mood. “I send you an early number of the B. Journal,” he wrote to his friend F. W. Thomas, “containing my ‘Raven.’ It was copied by Briggs, my associate, before I joined the paper. The ‘Raven’ has had a great ‘run’ … – but I wrote it for the express purpose of running – just as I did the ‘Gold Bug,’ you know. The bird has beat the bug, though, all hollow.”

The reference to his new associate records another editorial shift. Poe’s position on the Mirror had been too frankly subordinate to last long, and with the best of good feelings he changed to an associate editorship of the Broadway Journal in February, 1845. With the next October he had realized his long-cherished ambition by obtaining full control; yet before the year was out, for lack of money and of business capacity, his house of cards had fallen and the Journal was a thing of the past. One more magazine contribution of major importance remained for him. This was the publication in Godey’s, from May to October, 1846, of “The Literati,” a series of comments on thirty-eight New York authors, done in his then well-known critical manner. His story-writing was nearly over; “The Cask of Amontillado” was the only important one of the last half dozen, but of the twelve poems later than the “Raven,” four – “Ulalume,” “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Bells” – are among his best known.

The personal side of Poe’s life after his last breach with Mr. Allan, in 1834, is largely clouded by poverty and bitterness and a relaxing grip on his own powers. His marriage to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in 1836 was unqualifiedly happy only until the undermining of her health, three years later, and from then on was the cause of a shattering succession of hopes and fears ending with her death in 1847. His relations to most other men and women were complicated by his erratic, jealous, and too often abusive behavior. Only those friendships endured which were built on the magnanimous tolerance or the insuperable amiability of his friends and associates. His nature, which was self-centered and excitable to begin with, became perverted by mishaps of his own making until the characterization of his latest colleague was wholly justified. Said C. F. Briggs to James Russell Lowell:

He cannot conceive of anybody’s doing anything, except for his own personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity, and entire unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this reason that he is so great an egoist… Therefore, he attributes all the favor which Longfellow, yourself, or anybody else receives from the world as an evidence of the ignorance of the world, and the lack of that favor in himself he attributes to the world’s malignity.

Under the accumulating distresses of his last two years the decline of will-power and self-control terminated with his tragic death in Baltimore in 1849. The gossip which pursued him all his life has continued relentlessly, even to the point of coloring the prejudices of his biographers, – commonly classified as “malignants” and “amiables,” – but only such facts and reports have been mentioned here as have some legitimate bearing on his habits of mind as an author.

Poe was first a writer of poems, then of prose tales, and then of analytical criticisms, and one may take a cue from his famous discussion of the “Raven” by considering them in reverse order. His theory of art can be derived from the seventy-odd articles on his contemporaries which he printed and reprinted, from the days of the Southern Literary Messenger to those of Godey’s, and from the summarized essays which he formulated in the three latest years. “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle” are equally well illustrated by his own poems and his comments on the poems of others. He accepts the division of the world of mind into Intellect, which concerns itself with Truth; Taste, which informs us of the Beautiful; and the Moral Sense, which is regardful of Duty. He defines poetry of words as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either with Duty or with Truth.” In the moods aroused by the contemplation of beauty man’s soul is elevated most nearly to the level of God; and the privilege of Poetry – one refrains from using such a word as “function” – is to achieve an elevation of soul which springs from thought, feeling, and will, but which is above them all.

For the composition of poetry, thus limited in its province, he developed a fairly rigid formula, a Procrustes bed on which he laid out his several contemporaries. Poems, he said, should be brief; they should start with the adoption of a novel and vivid effect; they should be pitched in a tone of sadness; they should avail themselves of fitting refrains; they should be presented, in point of setting, within a circumscribed space; and always they should be scrupulously regardful of conventional poetic rhythms. These artistic canons are largely observed in his poems and severely insisted on in his criticisms. He was immensely interested in detail effects, and hardly less so in the isolated details themselves. All the fallacious and inconsistent metaphors of Drake’s “Culprit Fay,” for example, by which the reader is distracted, he assembled into a final indictment of that hasty poem; and in the works of Elizabeth Barrett, of whom he was one of the earliest champions, he discussed diction, syntax, prosody, and lines of distinguished merit in the minutest detail. Seldom in these critiques does he rise to the task of expounding principles, and more seldom still does he discuss any principles of life. Always it is the cameo, the gold filigree, the miniature on ivory under the microscope.

It is not unfair to apply his own method to him, with reference, for instance, to poetic passages he most admired, by quoting a few of his quotations. From Anna Cora Mowatt:

From Fitz-Greene Halleck:

From Bayard Taylor:

From William Wallace:

From Estelle Anna Lewis:

And from Bryant the concluding familiar lines of “Thanatopsis.” These are the natural selections of the mind which evolved “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” His readiness to indulge in a “pleasurable melancholy” led him to delight chiefly in the mortuary beauties of his fellow-poets.

At times, to be sure, he responded to the beauties of entire compositions. “Thanatopsis,” “To a Waterfowl,” “June,” all appealed to him for the “elevation of soul” on which he laid critical stress, and so did poems hither and yon by others than Bryant. But for the most part even those productions which stirred or pleased him resulted in detailed technical comments on defects of unity or structure or style, and for the most part what he commended was not so much ideas as poetic concepts. He could lose himself in the chromatic tints from one facet of a diamond to the extent of quite forgetting the stone in its entirety. Hence it was that Poe was a poet in the limited sense of one who is highly and consciously skilled in the achievement of poetic effects, but by his own definition of poetry wholly uninspired toward the presentation of poetic truth. If the creative gift is “to see life steadily and to see it whole,” Poe was as far from fulfilling the equation as mortal could be – as far, let us say, as William Blake was.

This is not to say that Poe failed to appreciate or to write the kind of poetry in which he believed. It is an estimate of his own sense of values rather than for the moment of his performance. A letter to Lowell written in 1844 presents the negative background against which his theory and practice are thrown into relief.

I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate, – the vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity… I cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual in man the mass. – I have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a mere word… You speak of “an estimate of my life,” – and, from what I have already said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to give any continuous effort to anything – to be consistent in anything. My life has been whim– impulse – passion – a longing for solitude – a scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.

An estimate of his own plays and poems can be fairly made only in the light of this thing that he set out to do, a fairness of treatment, by the way, which he often withheld from the objects of his criticism. Not to paraphrase Poe’s minute analysis of “The Raven,” we may select the “Ulalume” of a year or two later as a production which satisfies the formula of “The Philosophy of Composition” and which is richer in meaning and in self-revelation than any other. In length and tone and subject and treatment it is according to rule. In ninety-four lines of increasing tension the ballad of the bereaved lover is told. The effect toward which it moves is the shocked moment of discovery that grief for the lost love is not yet “pleasurable,” but on this anniversary night is still a source of poignant bitterness. It is built around a series of unheeded warnings – as “The Cask of Amontillado” is – which fall with accumulated weight when the lover’s cry explains at last the mistrusts and agonies and scruples of the pacified Psyche. The effect is intensified by use of the whole ominous first stanza in a complex of refrains throughout the rest of the ballad. The employment of onomatopœia, or “sound-sense” words, is more subtle and more effective than in “The Bells” or “The Raven”; and the event occurs in the usual circumscribed space – the cypress-lined alley which is blocked by the door of the tomb.