ution. 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, settin...
