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One of the saddest and yet one of the most irritating stories in all literature is the narrative of the life of Poe. Endowed with talents of extraordinary power, he ruthlessly squandered and debauched them, and his life closed with but a beginning of the magnificent fruition which rightfully should have been his. Yet, the genius of the man survived in spite of the man.
Poe's early life was such as would try the mettle of far more stalwart souls. Left in the hands of unwise persons, he was led into those excesses toward which his excitable nature too easily prompted him, and which finally ruined his pathetic yet brilliant career. If ancestry be worth anything, he was fortunate in his; for his grandfather, David Poe, was the Revolutionary general over whose grave Lafayette murmured, Ici repose un coeur noble." In 1803 the old hero's son, also named David, deserted his profession as a lawyer to join a company of players in Charleston, South Carolina, and three years later he married a member of the troupe, a beautiful widow, Mrs. Elizabeth Hopkins. Thus it happened that while the company was filling an engagement in Boston early in the year 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in that city, January 19.
Within two years the father was lying dead in Richmond, and the mother soon followed him. Three children were left to the charity of the city, and Edgar was taken by John Allan, one of the wealthiest men in the city. Thus the boy came to be called Edgar Allan Poe. And thus, also, the seeds of future ruin were sown; for the foster-father, proud of his brilliant charge, habitually had the boy brought before visitors to drink their health and make surprising speeches. The taste for liquor afterwards became the pursuing demon of his life, while the exalted, extravagant opinion of his own talents and of his own importance, gained as a child, never deserted him in manhood, and caused his days to be filled with bitter disappointments. In his early scholastic training he was fortunate. At the age of six he was taken to England and entered Manor House School, Stoke-Newington, and there the opportunity was his to wander through the streets of strange, old London and breathe in that love of the quaint and of the weird in which his soul already so abounded. During the five years spent in the English school, he was praised among the masters because of his ability in Latin and French, and among the boys because of his prowess in out-door sports, while through personal characteristics he gained the love of none.
We find him, in 1821, once more in Richmond, and here, under the training of private tutors, he remained until 1826. Then began the tragic scenes of the man's career. He entered the University of Virginia, immediately gained notice in the study of languages, began to drink and gamble, contracted heavy debts, entered a counting-house of Allan's, ran away, and at length reached Boston. All this, too, within one year, be it remembered. While in Boston he published his first volume of verse (1827), and there, too, under the name of Edgar A. Perry, he enlisted in the regular army. He served near Boston, Charleston, and Fortress Monroe (where he obtained ideas for scenes in his Gold Bug), and proved in all occasions such an excellent soldier that he soon rose to the rank of sergeant-major. He kept his identity hidden very successfully for a time; but in 1829 Allan, whose heart had been softened by the death of Mrs. Allan, sought him out and during the next year had him entered at West Point. But Poe was not born to be a soldier. A student in the Military Academy thus wrote of him: "He was a devourer of books; but his great fault was his neglect of and apparent contempt for military duties. His wayward and capricious temper made him at times utterly oblivious or indifferent to the ordinary routine of roll-call, drill, and guard duties. These habits subjected him often to arrest and punishment and effectually prevented his learning or discharging the duties of a soldier." Of course such conduct could not long be tolerated at so strict an institution as West Point; and we find Poe discharged in March, 1831.
From this time forth his life was devoted to literature, and to literature only. His talent as a verse-writer had become known among his fellow-cadets, and before leaving the school he had secured subscriptions enough to issue the volume which appeared shortly after his discharge and which was entitled simply Poems (1831). Here we find promise of something decidedly worth while. The music of the verses astonished all readers, and although they contained no depth of thought and no strikingly sincere sentiment, they possessed a weirdness, a tone of romance, and a luxurious appeal to the ear that immediately charmed the reader. Of philosophy there was little or none. Poetry, he stated in this collection--which contained also his first publicly expressed theory of verse--has as its immediate object "pleasure, not truth." It is opposed to romance in "having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure... to which end music is an essential, since the comprehension of sweet sound is our most indefinite conception."
But in spite of the rather novel theory and the beautiful poetic structures built according to it, the volume did not have a large sale, and Poe soon left New York, where it had been published, and returned to Richmond. Here again he met with discouragement. Mr. Allan would have nothing whatever to do with him, and he soon drifted on to Baltimore. In 1833 The Baltimore Saturday Visitor offered a prize of one hundred dollars for the best story submitted by an American writer, and from the hand of Poe there came a piece of fiction that surprised the literary circles of the South--Manuscript Found in a Bottle. It was a tale, strange in its plot and masterful in its presentment; it announced in Poe a new and peculiar writer. Now was the tide in his affairs which taken would have led to success. John P. Kennedy ... took notice of him, and in 1835 secured for him a position on the newly established Southern Literary Messenger. Within a few months he became editor; the circulation of the magazine suddenly rose from seven hundred to five thousand; and his prose was rapidly gaining him a wide fame. Here, too, he began to write a ratehr ferocious form of criticism and to display unfortunately a cheap learning so evidently shallow that he fully deserved the words of Lanier: "Poe didn't know enough." But, at the same time, his arguments were so filled with literary insight and undeniable though unpleasant facts that readers were compelled to admit their usefulness and were always anxious to read more.
During the next year he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. She was but a child, only fourteen; yet their married life was ideal in its pure devotion, and she was ever a help and indeed an inspiration to the irresolute husband. Life indeed looked fair. But suddenly he gave himself into the clutches of liquor; his position as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger was lost; and the remaining thirteen years of his life form but a disheartening succession of brief attainments and dismal failures. One year in New York, six in Philadelphia, back to New York, South again, and then death in a dreadful form--such is, in brief, the closing history of his career.
Writers in literature have given various reasons for Poe's losing so quickly this first editorial position and later in life various other positions of the same nature. Some have said that dissipation caused the frequent changes; others, meagre support of the magazines; still others, the fact that he desired to found a magazine of his own. Probably all of these reasons had much to do with the matter. Eighteen months from the time that he began to work on the Southern Literary Messenger, we find him in New York, and there in 1838 he published another story of startling character, his Adventures of Arthur Gordon Pym. That same year he went to Philadelphia, where The Gentleman's Magazine had just been established by the comedian, Burton, and, having secured a place on the staff, he again soon found himself in the editor's chair. Again, too, the same literary and financial prosperity attended the change; but within a few months he was once more adrift. In 1840 Graham's Magazine was established at Philadelphia; Poe was selected as editor-in-chief; and the circulation quickly bounded from five thousand to fifty-two thousand. All this time he was writing desperately perhaps, yet well, and thrilling stories and trenchant criticisms poured forth in abundance. Most of his work, it is true, was in prose; for he considered poetry not a purpose but a passion, and never attempted verse unless passion was present. But what prose it was! The literary world of America had not seen such art before.
Eighteen months passed, and again he had lost the position of editor. After a brief period spent in miscellaneous work he returned, badly discouraged, to New York. Yet, the most productive years of his career were those spent at Philadelphia. Here, in fact, were written several of his masterpieces. Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget,--stories which from that years, 1843, when they appeared as The Prose Romances of Edgar Allan Poe, have influenced a notable line of the world's writers, Sardou, Verne, Kipling, Doyle, and many another.
Such graphic description, such morbid yet powerful imagination, such minuteness of detail, such logical structure, such plausibility carried to probability had rarely been evidenced in American Literature. Poe found himself an object of admiration and of wonder. When, in 1844, The Raven appeared, the admiration and wonder redoubled. Readers in other lands began to speak of him, and Mrs. Browning wrote that a friend of hers who had a bust of Pallas, could not now bear to look at it. Indeed, from that day foreign critics, especially among the French, have had an inclination to place him at the head of the American school of writers, and some have declared that he alone among all the poets of the New World was an originator and a true artist.
However gratifying all this praise both at home and abroad may have been, the act remains that Poe was drifting morally and financially from bad to worse. In 1845 he joined the staff of The Broadway Journal, published in New York, soon gained complete control of it, and brought it to financial ruin within three months. Then, accepting a position with Godey's Lady's Book, he proceeded to make enemies on every hand by writing in that magazine a series of articles entitled The Literati of New York. It so happened that shortly after the publication of The Raven and Other Poems, the Boston Lyceum invited him to recite a poem at one of its public meetings, and, having forgotten about the occasion until it was too late to compose something new, he went before the dignified body and recited Al Aaraaf, a boyhood effort, published in the first volume shortly after his abrupt departure from the University of Virginia. The rendition of this poem was followed by great applause, but when, a little later, Poe divulged the secret of the poem's origin, the Lyceum felt highly insulted. Poe now took occasion to declare that he did this to insult the "genius" of "the Frog Pond." He further stated that he himself was born at Boston, "a fact he was very much ashamed of, but for which he was in now wise responsible." He criticised with unsparing ferocity Griswold's well-known book on American poets and so wounded the man's feelings that when the same author was afterwards selected to write a biography of Poe, human nature overcame the sense of fairness, and Poe's memory among men was darkened by the resulting work. Utterly devoid of policy, the eccentric nature of the poet made him numberless enemies.
He now published a full edition of his poems; but poetry is not a money-making art, and, although he received much praise, he was in the direst poverty. The last days of his life in the great city were most miserable. In January, 1847, his wife died. The pathos of that scene is almost insufferable. "There was no clothing on the bed, which was only straw, but a snow-white counterpane and sheets. The weather was cold, and the sick lady had the dreadful chills that accompany the hectic fever of consumption. She lay on the straw-bed, wrapped in her husband's great-coat, with a large tortoise-shell cat in her bosom. The wonderful cat seemed conscious of her great usefulness. The coat and the cat were the sufferer's only means of warmth, except as her husband held her hands, and her mother her feet."
Poe was now a mere wreck. In 1849 he wandered back to Richmond, remained there a brief time, and then went to Baltimore. Here, it is said, he was drugged and taken to the polls to be voted, and then left half dead, upon the streets. Fever came on, and he died Sunday, October 7, 1849. We may well close the strange story with the words carved on the memorial tablet in the New York Museum of Art: "He was great in his genius, unhappy in his life, wretched in his death; but in his fame he is immortal."