READING POE

Poe as writer and Poe as a literary character are often woven together in people's imaginations. We won't dwell on the biography in class, but those of you whose interests run toward the psychoanalytic will find ample material in Poe, and much of the criticism on Poe does take this approach. Below are some of the highlights of Poe's colorful biography, drawn from Kenneth Silverman's introduction to New Essays on Poe's Major Tales.(1) Briefly, Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to actors Eliza Poe and David Poe, Jr. His mother was a rising star and his father a failure who deserted the family when Edgar was about two years old. His mother died during a theatrical tour a year later at the age of twenty-four, probably with her children present, according to Silverman.

Poe was raised (though never formally adopted) by a childless couple named John and Fanny Allan. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826, and did well academically, but was younger than the other students and had trouble with alcohol and gambling. He left after one year, owing two thousand dollars in debts from gambling and other miscellaneous expenses. He left the Allan home in March 1827. He served in the army, briefly reconciled with John Allan and was admitted to West Point, but left it after Allan remarried and wrote him saying that he wanted "no further communication" with Poe. Poe responded by dropping "Allan" from his name, and instead publishing under the name "Edgar A. Poe."

One source of Poe's notoriety is his relationship with Virginia Clemm, daughter of his aunt Maria Clemm. Having moved in with the Clemms in Baltimore when Virginia was nine, Poe fell in love with her. When she was thirteen, they took out a marriage license and may have been privately married. In January 1842 she contracted tuberculosis, which killed her in 1847.

Poe's life after Virginia's death helped to solidify his bad reputation. He seems to have sought a new wife by courting more than one woman at once. He may have tried to commit suicide. He was drinking heavily, enough to bring on illness and delusions. Then, perhaps to impress a prospective bride, he joined a temperance society and made a public pledge against alcohol. He left Richmond on September 27, 1849 to settle his affairs in New York, but on October 3 he was found in a Baltimore bar, raggedly dressed and only semiconscious. Hospitalized, he began to rave. He died on October 7, 1849.

While there's ample material in Poe's real life for literary gossips, Poe contributed to his own bad press, for example fostering legends that he had gone off to join the Greeks who were fighting for liberty. But he was also assisted by Rufus Griswold, who after Poe's death worked to destroy Poe's reputation, even rewriting Poe's letters so that Poe's friends would think that he'd said nasty things about them behind their backs.

Our discussion will not focus on Poe's biography. Rather, we'll be considering how Poe addresses many of the issues we've been discussing. For example, we've talked a great deal about the self. How does Poe represent the self in his stories? How, for example, might you compare the self in "William Wilson" with the self in "Self-Reliance"? What does "The Imp of the Perverse" suggest about the basic human instinct? Consider the form of "The Imp of the Perverse" as well. How would you classify the genre of this text? How do Poe's views of human perception compare with Emerson's and Whitman's? What's the relationship between dream and reality in "Ligeia," for example? How do the speaker's emotions shape his perceptions in "The Raven"?

Consider as well Poe's representation of women in his poems and tales. In his essay "The Philosophy of Composition," Poe writes that "the death . . . of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world" (1601-2). How does Poe treat the deaths of women in his stories?