Data Bases • Custom Term Papers • Free Term Papers • Free Research Papers • Free Essays • Free Book Reports • Plagiarism? Links • Top 100 Term Paper Sites • Top 25 Essay Sites • Top 50 Essay Sites • Search 97,000 Papers @ DirectEssays.com • Search 101,000 Papers @ ExampleEssays.com • Search 90,000 Papers @ MegaEssays.com Free Essays • Term Paper Sites • Chuck III's Free Essays • Free College Essays • TermPaperSites.com • Free Essays • My Term Papers • Essay World • Planet Papers	Search Lots of Essays Back to Subjects - English Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe "The boundaries which divide Life and Death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where one ends, and where the other begins?" Edgar Allan Poe, The Premature Burial (Bartlett, 642). To venture into the world of Edgar Allan Poe is to embark on a journey to a land filled with perversities of the mind, soul, and body. The joyless existence carved out by his writings is one of lost love, mental anguish, and the premature withering of his subjects. Poe wrote in a style that characterized the sufferings he endured throughout in his pitiful life. From the death of his parents while he was still a child, to the repeated frailty of his love life, to the neuroses of his later years, his life was a ceaseless continuum of one mind-warping tragedy after another. From the very dawning of his existence, Edgar Allan Poe lived a life of hardship; a quality which was reflected in his writings. Poe was born the son of a pair of traveling actors. His father, David, was at best a mediocre actor who soon deserted his wife and son. His mother Elizabeth, on the contrary, was a charming woman and talented actress. His life, no doubt, would have been much different were it not for the fact that she died of tuberculosis in 1811 when Poe was not quite three. This event scarred him for life, for he would always remember "his mother vomiting blood and being carried away from him forever by sinister men dressed in black." (Asselineau, 409). After the traumatic passing of his parents, Poe was placed into the custody of John and Frances Allan – hence his middle name. The childless couple reared him as their own son, even though they would never officially adopt him. He never got along with his foster father, but grew alarmingly close to his foster mother in a classic "Oedipal" relationship. Poe was shuttled off to live and attend school in England. He never fit in with his classmates, but he fell in love with the young mother of one of his friends, Mrs. Jane Stanard, the memory of whom inspired his poem, "To Helen." When this relationship proved to be implausible, he turned to someone his own age, Sarah Elmira Royster (Asselineau, 410). This relationship too was doomed, as her parents did not approve of his lack of social standing. The tale of his scholastic tenure is one of repeated expulsions, gambling debts, and, eventualy, drinking. This is not to say that Poe was a poor student. The exact opposite is the case. Poe was almost always near the top of his class no matter what institution he was currently enrolled in. His problem was that he either became bored or allowed debts from both drinking and gambling to pile up until he was forced to pay or leave. He repeatedly made attempts to coerce his foster father into honoring his debts with no success. The end result was that Poe never got settled into one specific institution, with but one exception, the military. There was only one thing (other than writing) at which Poe seemed to excel while he was of school age. In 1827 he enlisted in the army at Boston under the pseudonym of Edgar A. Perry. He was stationed at Sullivan's Island in Charleston Harbor, which he would describe as the setting of his story "The Gold Bug." He rose in rank rather quickly for a man of his age and experience, attaining the rank of regimental sergeant major, the highest noncommissioned rank for an officer in the army. He soon grew tired of the daily routine of army life and sought admittance to West Point, which he gained through the assistance of his foster father. "During this period of nearly perfect social adaptation he must have cherished thoughts of an entirely different kind." (Asselineau, 410). He began writing tales in the morbid and grotesque style which we know him for today. He produced his first compendium, Tamerlane and Other Poems which, sadly, went virtually unnoticed by the literary world. Though a failure, he did not allow his first experience in publishing to discourage him, for he produced a second volume of literature, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, in 1829. As its title indicates, it was a revised and expanded version of his first book, receiving about as much acclaim. After expulsion from West Point, which he admittedly brought upon himself of his own free will, Poe was destitute. He was in extreme financial difficulties, being unable to attain any grant from his foster father. Though he was at this time more desperate then ever before, he showed extreme perseverance in his literary ventures. He published a book entitled, merely, Poems. Though it too was largely ignored by critics, it contained several of his most famous poems: "To Helen," "Israfel," "The City in the Sea," "Lenore," & "The Valley of Unrest." Upon finding salvation in the home of his Aunt Clemm in Baltimore, an active publishing center, he set to work as an author. In 1831 he competed in a contest, held by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, to see who could submit the best short story. He submitted five stories, yet won nothing (though it should be duly noted that only one, "Metzengerstein," was first-rate). In June of 1833, he again entered a literary competition, held this time by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. His submissions this time included "A Descent into the Maelström," and "MS Found in a Bottle," for which he won first place."Poe now went through a period of emotional instability during which he apparently resorted to the bottle to steady his nerves. He was no habitual drunkard and never wrote under the influence of drink, for he was very frugal and of a sober inclination, but he was extremely sensitive and given to excruciating fits of depression, so that he could not at all time resist the temptation of using alcohol as a sort of moral anesthetic. Unfortunately, he was inordinately affected by even one glass and then lost all sense of dignity and decency. As he put it himself: ‘My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an every-day matter to my companions.'" (Asselineau, 411-12) At this point in his life Poe committed one of the most controversial acts of his lifetime. He brought Aunt Clemm, who had befriended him when he was most vulnerable, and her young daughter (his cousin) Virginia to live with him in Richmond. In May of 1836, he married young Virginia, whom he boldly declared to be "of the full age of twenty-one years" even though she was not yet fourteen, and very immature-looking (Asselineau, 412). Poe was no pedophile, though he could easily be construed as such. In all likelihood, the marriage was never consummated, and he treated his bride more like a sister than a spouse. He kept his Aunt Clemm, whom he affectionately referred to as "dear Muddy," on as both mother-in-law and devoted housekeeper. During this period of his life, Poe wrote with a fervor. "He wrote stories, many forceful and slashing reviews in the manner of the Edinburgh reviewers, waging war on mediocrity, trying to enforce high literary standards, attacking the ‘heresy of the didactic,' and denouncing plagiarism even where there was none." (Asselineau, 412). On the employment front, he went through several editorship positions at literary periodicals throughout the eastern U.S., producing fiction all the while. He wrote several stories for circulation in these various periodicals, notable among them being The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Prymm, and "The Fall of the House of Usher." He also found a publisher for a collection of his stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which was well-received by critics but did not fare well in the open market. After dismissal from Graham's Magazine, Poe found it difficult to place his stories. He sold some of his best work ("The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Black Cat") for paltry sums to second-rate literary magazines. At this point he realized he could not hope to make a living as a freelance writer, despite a $100 prize he won for "The Gold Bug," prompting him to move to New York. New York was the literary center for America at the time and Poe knew he would fare better writing along-side the other literary giants of the time, such as William Cullen Bryant and Washington Irving. Here, he published a hilarious (in hindsight, at least) newspaper article that has come to be known as "The Balloon Hoax." "On April 13, 1844, he published in the New York Sun . . . a tale in the form of a news item. It appeared under the caption "Astounding News by Electric Express via Norfolk! The Atlantic Crossed in Three days– Signal Triumph of Mr. Monck's Flying Machine . . ." (Asselineau, 413). He then published "The Raven" in the Evening Mirror. For the first time in his career, the public eye was captured by one of Poe's works. "The Raven" was published all over the country and even internationally. However, Poe pocketed only a few dollars for is pains. Now Poe was at his worst financially. He had no money, and no income. He was living in a shabby wooden cottage with Aunt Clemm and Virginia, who was dying of tuberculosis. He had no money for firewood or coal, resulting in Virginia's having to sleep in an unheated room. After six years of marriage, Virginia was going to die, and Poe was driven to distraction. Virginia died on January 30, 1847, and Poe broke down, though he felt somewhat relieved from the "horrible never-ending oscillation between hope and despair." : "Thus, like the hero of one of his own tales, he was constantly threatened and tortured by the pendulum of fate swinging between the extremes of the human condition. All his life he craved love and tenderness, but was doomed to lose in turn all the women he loved; his mother, Mrs. Stanard, Mrs. Allan, and Virginia. He longed for wealth and luxury, and yet, for all his talent and frenzied efforts, was condemned to destitution. He dreamed of fame and never succeeded in publishing a complete edition of his works or founding a review of his own. When he reached manhood after a sheltered childhood and adolescence he encountered nothing but failures and denials. So, instead of really living, he took refuge from the physical world in the private world of his dreams – in other words, in the world of his tales – and gradually identified himself with those phantoms of himself who haunt his stories. As is frequent with artists, nature in his case imitated art. He became the spiritual brother of his doomed heroes. His life was quite literally ‘a Descent into the Maelstrom,' a slow inexorable descent into the abyss which attracted him irresistibly and was to claim him at forty years of age. He remained perfectly lucid to the end, but, unlike the hero of ‘A Descent into the Maelstrom,:' he lost the will to extricate himself from the whirlpool which was sucking him down. His art failed to save him. His works reflect this double aspect of his personality: the abandonment of the self-destructive romantic artist and the self-control of the conscious and conscientious craftsman, the passivity of the dreamer indifferent to all that exists outside his dream world and the restless activity of a keen mind always on the alert." From here Poe's life was a downward spiral. He sank deeper and deeper into a deep depression. In a frantic effort to regain the sliver of happiness which his child-bride Virginia had given him, he courted several widows at once, trying to make any one of them promise to marry him. When these attempts failed him, he prophetically knew his end must be near. He wrote his Aunt Clemm in New York "I must die. I have no desire to live. . ." (Asselineau, 429) In a last gasp, he visited the home of his childhood sweetheart, Mrs. Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton in Virginia. On his way back to New York he stopped in Baltimore, setting in place a series of events of which no one, to this very day, knows the full detail. Some experts say Poe drunk himself into a stupor and passed out; while others claim he was kidnaped by a group of political thugs, force-fed alcohol, and drug around to election booths. Perhaps the most likely of events, as facts have come to light in recent years, is that Poe contracted the disease rabies and did not receive proper medical attention. The only thing know for sure is this: Poe was found unconscious in a gutter outside a bar. He was taken to a Baltimore hospital, but was never to regain consciousness again. He died on October 7, 1849, and in an instant, one of the literary world's brightest stars was extinguished. The most contradictory analyses have been placed on the literary merit of Edgar Alan Poe: The Reverend Rufus Griswold . . . branded him a perverse neurotic, a drunkard and drug addict ‘who walked the streets, and madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses.' For Baudelaire, on the contrary, he was a ‘fallen angel, who remembered heaven,' a ‘Byron gone astray in a bad world.' Whereas Emerson looked down upon that ‘jingle man' who shook his bells and called their sound poetry, Tennyson admired him as an equal and Yeats (on an official occasion, it is true) proclaimed that he was, ‘so certainly the greatest of American poets, and always, and for all lands, a great lyric poet.' For James Russell Lowell, he was ‘three-fifths . . . genius and two-fifths fudge,' while Mallarmé piously raised the monument of a sonnet over his grave and Paul Valéry acclaimed the author . . . as one of the greatest thinkers who ever lived, Writers as dissimilar as Mark twain and Henry James rejected him, the former because he found him ‘unreadable,' and the latter because it seems to him that ‘an enthusiasm for Poe [was] the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection.' But William Carlos Williams, for his part, praised him for giving ‘the sense for the first time in America that literature is serious, not a matter of courtesy but of truth.' Who was right? Whom are we to believe? T.S. Elliot, who denounced his ‘slipshod writing,' or George Bernard Shaw, who found him ‘exquisitely refined?'" (Asselineau, 409). If you look at a portrait of Poe, it will always be full-faced, from the front. However, the only accurate portrait would be to show a head with a double profile, like that of the Roman god Janus (Asselineau, 414), with one side turned towards reality and the other towards dreams. Poe himself was crystalline in his awareness of this duplicity. He went so far as to point out, when describing his detective which appears in several of his stories (most notably, "The Murders in the Rue Morgue), C. Auguste Dupin, "I often dwelt meditatively upon the old philosophy of the Bi-Part Soul, and amused myself with the fancy of a double Dupin– the creative and the resolvent." (Asselineau, 414). The subject of his tales were evenly divided between those of imagination and those of "ratiocination." His personality at the time of their composition controlled which mode he wrote in; the former being written by a "Dinysiac" and inspired creator, the latter written by a articulate and apathetic analyst. When a tale is written to invoke fear, it must first involve the imagination. Poe was a master at stimulating the reader's imagination, and thereby bringing out the sense of irrational fear that all human beings possess. The narrator in "The Fall of the House of Usher" is a prime example of how Poe invoked this fear, saying "a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit . . .There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart. . . .There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase in my superstition . . . to accelerate the increase itself. . . .An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and . . .there sat upon my heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm." (Poe, "The Fall of the House of Usher"). It is this irrational fear which often leads Poe's characters to insanity, and even death. Poe's world is a nightmarish universe. You cross wasted landscapes, silent, forgotten lands where life and water have both stagnated. Here and there you might catch sight of medieval buildings suggestive by their very architecture of horrendous and unknown happenings, such as those in "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia." The interiors of these sinister habitats are just as disquieting as the exteriors. Everything is dark; the furniture is ebony and the ceilings oaken; there are heavy draperies hung on the walls to which drafts of unknown origin give "a hideous and uneasy animation;"even the windows are of a leaden hue, so that light, whether it be from the sun or moon, casts a ghastly aura on the objects within. To compound matters, theses stories usually take place at night, so that the rays giving light to the scene are often from a blood-red moon. Another common setting for his tales is in the midst of a terrible storm, with the only light coming from the intermittent flashes of lightning (a curious juxtaposition; the only thing which may illuminate, and thereby give life to the scene, also possesses the ability to destroy, and bring death to the scene). His heros are tortured souls who are often of a tainted ancestry and are addicted to drink or drugs, perhaps Poe's method of inserting himself into his works. They know that they are destined to lose their sanity and, eventually, their lives and do so under horrific and ghastly circumstances. "Metzengerstein is a victim of ‘morbid and melancholy' and ‘heredity ill-health.' The nervous illness of Roderick Usher passes from hypochondriacal hypersthesia to delirious telepathy. The odious protagonists of ‘The Tell-Tale Heart,' ‘The Imp of the Perverse,' and ‘The Black Cat' suffer from irresistible homicidal manias." (Asselineau, 414-15). The presence of so many horrible details might lead the reader to wonder if Poe was sincere in his tales; whether he was truly terrified in his heart, or if he was merely a mystifier who wrote what he felt the public wanted to read. Poe's attitude towards his writings is much more complex than is commonly realized. He never allows himself to be fully taken in by his vivid imagination. The frantic insanity is always accompanied by a certain amount of reason. The fear invoked is oftentimes tinged with skepticism – but his skepticism is also tinged with fear. However, for all the skepticism and exaggeration, fear always prevails. Bibliography: Allen, Henry. Poe, Edgar Allan. Dictionary of American Biography VIII. Ed. Dumas Malone. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1963: 19-28. Asselineau, Roger. "Edgar Allan Poe." American Writers Vol. III. Ed. Leonard Unger. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1974: 409-432. Bartlett, John. Famous Quotations Fourteenth Edition. Ed. Emily Morison Beck. Boston: Little, Brown and Company, 1968: 641-644. Bleiler, E.F. "Edgar Allan Poe." Supernatural Fiction Writers: Fantasy and Horror Vol. II. Ed. E.F. Bleiler. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1985: 697-705. Poe Reference, The Definitive. http://www.gothic.net/poe/ Woodbury, George E. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Chelsea House. 1980. Word Count: 3165
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