A Classic Crime Collection (2 page)

Poe relocated to New York City in February 1837, seeking new prospects in the publishing capital of the still-young United States. Since New York was also at the center of a financial depression that afflicted the country beginning a few months later, it was a particularly unpromising time and place to attempt to support a household. Poe, his wife, and mother-in-law lived on bread and molasses for weeks at a time. Little is known about what he did in New York over the following year. He published two stories and wrote his longest work, the short novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
. Around the time
Pym
was published, in July 1838, Poe moved his family again, this time to Philadelphia, where they lived for the next five years.

In the spring of 1839, Poe entered into a partnership with actor and playwright William Burton to serve as coeditor of a new periodical,
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine
. Poe wrote most of the reviews that appeared in the magazine over the next year and published some of his best-known stories: “Ligeia,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “William Wilson.” These stories appeared along with twenty-two others in Poe’s first collection of short fiction, the two-volume
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
, which was published in 1840. He also attempted to start his own magazine, even soliciting subscriptions, but was unable to raise enough money. In late 1840
Burton’s
was sold and became
Graham’s Magazine
, and Poe stayed on as editor.

Poe’s editorial positions were inevitably short-lived. He struggled with alcoholism and gained a reputation for unreliability, although he contributed prodigiously to the periodicals for which he wrote. In
Graham’s
he published “A Descent into the Maelström” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” among other stories and many reviews. He had his greatest success when he published “The Raven” in the New York
Evening Mirror
in January 1845, which made him one of the most famous poets of his time. Yet he was preoccupied with his inability to care for Virginia, who was suffering from tuberculosis. The New York newspaper editors, who sometimes waged contentious wars of words with Poe, published appeals for donations on his family’s behalf. After Virginia’s death in January 1847, Poe’s health collapsed. He was unable to appear in court for the libel suit he brought against the owners of the New York
Mirror
, who had published allegations of fraud and embezzlement against him; though he won the suit, he received about two hundred dollars in damages, considerably less than the five thousand dollars he claimed.

Poe had recovered somewhat by the end of 1847, when he published the poem “Ulalume” in the
American Review
. In February 1848, a few days after the first anniversary of Virginia’s death, he gave a public lecture on “The Universe,” which became the basis for his philosophical treatise
Eureka
, published in July. A pseudoscientific speculative essay about the “Heart Divine” that remakes the universe with each throb,
Eureka
was generally derided by critics (whom Poe thought misunderstood it) and failed to make much of an impact. Poe wooed a series of women during this time, sometimes dedicating verse to them, but the courtships tended to end badly. He attempted suicide when his affair with Sarah Helen Whitman failed; she broke off their engagement in January 1849 when he started drinking again.

Poe made another attempt to revive his literary career, publishing new stories and giving lectures. His health was deteriorating, however, and friends reported that he was suffering from occasional bouts of hallucinations. He returned to Richmond for the first time in more than ten years, seeking money for another magazine project, the
Stylus.
While there, he renewed his acquaintance with Elmira Royster Shelton, his childhood sweetheart whose family had kept them apart years before. She was now a widow, and she had never completely gotten over her youthful affection for Poe. When he left Richmond for business on September 27, 1849, Poe believed that he and Elmira had become engaged.

But Poe never returned to Richmond. A week later, on October 3, he turned up in Baltimore, under circumstances that will likely always be a mystery. He was apparently drunk and delirious, and wearing ill-fitting, shabby clothes that did not seem to be his. He lingered in a hospital for four days before succumbing to a fever, possibly encephalitis. He was never coherent enough to explain what had happened during the week he had vanished. He was buried in Baltimore, attended by a small group of mourners.

Historical and Literary Context of Poe’s Writings

The Young Republic

Poe lived from 1809 until 1849, a turbulent early period in American history after the nation gained its independence and before regional and political tensions exploded into civil war. He was a proponent of “art for art’s sake,” and so he rarely engaged, at least directly, with the controversial issues of the day in his poems, stories, or criticism. But no American of the time could be unaffected by the rapid changes in the country, namely the westward expansion and the explosion of population of the cities of the Northeast. Poe was one of the many who came to these metropolitan centers—New York, Philadelphia, Boston, Baltimore—seeking fortune. He made a name for himself in his brief literary career, but as an adult he was plagued by the poverty that was common in the United States of the early nineteenth century. His circumstances are an example of how precarious life in the city could be at the time: Poverty contributed to his ill health and death at forty and to the early deaths of his mother, brother, and wife.

Some critics have argued that Poe’s morbid fantasies, though frequently set in faraway places and a mythical timeless past, are psychological projections of the anxieties of the young United States: the pains of starvation and illness; the violence of urban crime and the threat of war; the grief of orphanhood and the loss of loved ones. If Walt Whitman was the nineteenth century’s optimistic voice of the American dream, Poe was his nightmare counterpart. (Incidentally, Whitman was the only poet to attend the service when a memorial to Poe was dedicated in Baltimore in 1875.) At the same time, in his puzzle stories such as “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Gold-Bug” and in his literary criticism, he asserted the power of the rational mind to impose some sort of order on the chaos of life.

Romanticism

As a poet, Poe’s role models were the English poets of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century known as the Romantics. He was especially influenced by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, whose best-known poem, “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” is a desolate maritime fantasy that Poe no doubt had in mind when he created the ghost ship of “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” Coleridge was also known for his writings about poetry, which Poe drew from for his own theories of the poetic imagination in lectures and essays. In “Letter to Mr.— ——,” written to the publisher Elam Bliss and published as the preface to Poe’s 1831 collection
Poems,
he wrote: “In reading his poetry I tremble, like one who stands upon a volcano. . . .” Poe shared with Coleridge the ideas that poetry comes to the poet in dreams and visions, that poets should strive to attain beauty rather than truth, and that the most poetically beautiful subjects are sad ones.

Poe was born in the same year as Alfred Lord Tennyson, an English Romantic poet he admired. Tennyson lived until nearly the end of the nineteenth century, long enough to become
the
English poet of the Victorian era; Poe, on the other hand, died the year before the first great flowering of American Romanticism, known as the American Renaissance, began. And he was not acknowledged as much of an influence by great contributors to the American Renaissance such as Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson (who once referred to Poe as “the jingle man”), and Whitman. Europeans were much more enthusiastic about Poe. Tennyson returned the compliments of his American admirer, calling him “the most original genius that America has produced.” Charles Baudelaire, who translated Poe into French in Paris, was his great champion; in his magazine, Fyodor Dostoyevsky published Russian translations of the “strange, though enormously talented” Poe. Overseas he was widely appreciated for his fevered, dreamlike tales and poems—a morbid dark side to the Romantic celebration of the individual imagination.

Early American Literary Journalism

Poe was a widely recognized participant in the media wars of his day, the free-for-all competition among hundreds of American newspapers and magazines in the 1830s and 1840s. There were dozens of newspapers in New York City alone in the 1830s, all clamoring for the attention of a growing urban reading public. Especially given the lax copyright laws of the day, publishing books was not a viable way for writers of the time to make a living. Many of them supported themselves, and found a regular outlet for their writing, by editing newspapers or journals. Walt Whitman was an editor of several New York newspapers of the time, as were Margaret Fuller, John Greenleaf Whittier, and William Cullen Bryant. Among his fellow literary journalists, Poe earned a reputation as a biting critic. He was known, and in some circles held in contempt, for his attacks on fellow writers such as Theodore S. Fay (who Poe said wrote like a schoolboy) and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. Poe took it upon himself to offer a comprehensive appraisal of the literary landscape of the time called “The Literati of New York City,” which appeared in six parts in
Godey’s Lady’s Book
in May through October 1846. Not surprisingly, he was also on the receiving end of satire from rivals. James Russell Lowell, for example, in his “The Fable for the Critics,” wrote: “Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge— / Three-fifths of him genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge; / Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters, / In a way to make all men of common sense d—n metres. . . .”

Poe’s pioneering gothic and detective stories were written for magazine audiences. His greatest popular successes in his lifetime, “The Gold-Bug” and “The Raven,” were introduced to the world in this format. And the essays he wrote for magazines—such as “The Poetic Principle” and “The Philosophy of Composition” (published in
Graham’s Magazine
in April 1846), in which he gave a detailed description of the process he followed in writing “The Raven”—are essentially the earliest examples of literary criticism in the United States. Poe also wrote for less reputable periodicals than
Graham’s,
though; his hoax account of a hot-air balloon crossing the Atlantic Ocean earned him more notoriety when it appeared in the
New York Sun
—a newspaper known for its sensationalist and frankly untrue stories—in April 1844.

C
HRONOLOGY OF
E
DGAR
A
LLAN
P
OE
’
S
L
IFE AND
W
ORK

1809: Born January 19, Boston, Massachusetts.

1810: Poe’s father, David, abandons the family and likely dies soon thereafter (death date uncertain).

1811: Poe’s mother, Elizabeth, dies, December 8, leaving Edgar; his brother, Henry; and his sister, Rosalie, without support. Edgar is taken into the home of Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife, Frances.

1815–1820: Lives in England with the Allans, attending boarding schools while John Allan tries unsuccessfully to expand his business.

1825: Courts Sarah Elmira Royster, to whom he may have become engaged.

1826: Registers at the University of Virginia on February 14.

1827: After Allan refuses to allow Poe to continue his studies at the University of Virginia, he leaves home for Boston on April 3. Publishes first collection of poems,
Tamerlane and Other Poems
. Enlists in the U.S. Army under the name Edgar A. Perry.

1828: Rises to rank of sergeant major in the army before seeking a discharge in order to apply to attend West Point.

1829: Second collection of poems,
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems,
is published in Baltimore.

1830: Enters West Point.

1831: Is court-martialed and leaves West Point. Moves to Baltimore and into the home of the Clemms, his grandmother, aunt, and cousins. His brother, Henry, also a Baltimore resident, dies, August 1. Poe’s third collection of verse,
Poems by Edgar A. Poe. Second Edition
, is published in New York.

1833: Story “Ms. Found in a Bottle” wins Baltimore
Saturday Visiter
literary contest.

1834: Foster father, John Allan, dies on March 27, leaving Poe nothing in his will.

1835: Moves to Richmond to become an editor of the
Southern Literary Messenger,
in which he publishes stories and reviews that gain him a reputation as a caustic critic.

1836: On May 16, marries cousin Virginia Clemm, at the time thirteen years old.

1837: Resigns as editor of the
Messenger
and moves with his wife and aunt to New York City but is unable to find employment there.

1838: Moves with his family to Philadelphia; his novel
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
is published in July.

1839: Becomes an editor of
Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine,
writing reviews and publishing stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher.”

1840: Attempts unsuccessfully to found his own magazine, the
Penn,
and becomes editor of
Graham’s Magazine,
as
Burton’s
is renamed after changing owners.
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque
published in Philadelphia.

1841: Publishes “A Descent into the Maelström,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and other stories in
Graham’s.

1843: “The Gold-Bug” wins literary contest sponsored by the Philadelphia
Dollar Newspaper
.
Prose Romances
published in Philadelphia.

1844: Returning to New York, Poe goes to work for the New York
Evening Mirror.