Edgar Allan Poe

1. The Romantic Period, 1820-1860, Fiction The Romance Women Writers and Reformers Authors

2. Edgar Allan Poe “There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.”

3. Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson, and theTranscendentalists represent the first great literary generation produced in the United States. In the case of the novelists, the Romantic vision tended to express itself in the form Hawthorne called the "Romance," a heightened, emotional, and symbolic form of the novel. Romances were not love stories, but serious novels that used special techniques to communicate complex and subtle meanings.

4. Instead of carefully defining realistic characters through a wealth of detail, as most English or continental novelists did, Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe shaped heroic figures larger than life, burning with mythic significance. The typical protagonists of the American Romance are haunted, alienated individuals. Hawthorne's Arthur Dimmesdale or Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter, Melville's Ahab in Moby-Dick, and the many isolated and obsessed characters of Poe's tales are lonely protagonists pitted against unknowable, dark fates that, in some mysterious way, grow out of their deepest unconscious selves. The symbolic plots reveal hidden actions of the anguished spirit.

5. One reason for this fictional exploration into the hidden recesses of the soul is the absence of settled, traditional community life in America. English novelists -- Jane Austen, Charles Dickens (the great favorite), Anthony Trollope, George Eliot, William Thackeray -- lived in a complex, well-articulated, traditional society and shared with their readers attitudes that informed their realistic fiction. American novelists were faced with a history of strife and revolution, a geography of vast wilderness, and a fluid and relatively classless democratic society. American novels frequently reveal a revolutionary absence of tradition.

6. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) • Edgar Allan Poe, a southerner, shares with Melville a darkly metaphysical vision mixed with elements of realism, parody, and burlesque. He refined the short story genre and invented detective fiction. Many of his stories prefigure the genres of science fiction, horror, and fantasy so popular today. • Poe's short and tragic life was plagued with insecurity. Like so many other major 19th-century American writers, Poe was orphaned at an early age. Poe's strange marriage in 1835 to his first cousin Virginia Clemm, who was not yet 14, has been interpreted as an attempt to find the stable family life he lacked.

7. ‘‘There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion.” Poe believed that strangeness was an essential ingredient of beauty, and his writing is often exotic. His stories and poems are populated with doomed, introspective aristocrats (Poe, like many other southerners, cherished an aristocratic ideal). These gloomy characters never seem to work or socialize; instead, they bury themselves in dark, moldering castles symbolically decorated with bizarre rugs and draperies that hide the real world of sun, windows, walls, and floors. The hidden rooms reveal ancient libraries, strange art works, and eclectic oriental objects. The aristocrats play musical instruments or read ancient books while they brood on tragedies, often the deaths of loved ones.

8. Themes Themes of death-in-life, especially being buried alive or returning like a vampire from the grave, appear in many of his works, including "The Premature Burial," "Ligeia," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's twilight realm between life and death and his gaudy, Gothic settings are not merely decorative. They reflect the overcivilized, yet deathly interior of his characters disturbed psyches. They are symbolic expressions of the unconscious, and thus are central to his art.

9. And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door; And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon's that is dreaming, And the lamp-light o'er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor; And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor Shall be lifted -- nevermore!

10. Poe's stories -- such as those cited above -- have been described as tales of horror. Stories like "The Gold Bug" and "The Purloined Letter" are more tales of ratiocination, or reasoning. The horror tales prefigure works by such American authors of horror fantasy as H.P. Lovecraft and Stephen King, while the tales of ratiocination are harbingers of the detective fiction of Dashiell Hammett, Raymond Chandler, Ross Macdonald, and John D. MacDonald. There is a hint, too, of what was to follow as science fiction. All of these stories reveal Poe's fascination with the mind and the unsettling scientific knowledge that was radically secularizing the 19th-century world view.

11. In every genre, Poe explores the psyche. Profound psychological insights glint throughout the stories. "Who has not, a hundred times, found himself committing a vile or silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not," we read in "The Black Cat." To explore the exotic and strange aspect of psychological processes, Poe delved into accounts of madness and extreme emotion. The painfully deliberate style and elaborate explanation in the stories heighten the sense of the horrible by making the events seem vivid and plausible. • Poe's combination of decadence and romantic primitivism appealed enormously to Europeans, particularly to the French poets Stéphane Mallarmé, Charles Baudelaire, Paul Valéry, and Arthur Rimbaud. But Poe is not un-American, despite his aristocratic disgust with democracy, preference for the exotic, and themes of dehumanization.

12. He is almost a textbook example of Tocqueville's prediction that American democracy would produce works that lay bare the deepest, hidden parts of the psyche. Deep anxiety and psychic insecurity seem to have occurred earlier in America than in Europe, for Europeans at least had a firm, complex social structure that gave them psychological security. In America, there was no compensating security; it was every man for himself. Poe accurately described the underside of the American dream of the self-made man and showed the price of materialism and excessive competition -- loneliness, alienation, and images of death-in-life.

13. Dec·a·dence: moral or cultural decline as characterized by excessive indulgence in pleasure or luxury. • Poe's "decadence" also reflects the devaluation of symbols that occurred in the 19th century -- the tendency to mix art objects promiscuously from many eras and places, in the process stripping them of their identity and reducing them to merely decorative items in a collection. The resulting chaos of styles was particularly noticeable in the United States, which often lacked traditional styles of its own. The jumble reflects the loss of coherent systems of thought as immigration, urbanization, and industrialization uprooted families and traditional ways. In art, this confusion of symbols fueled the grotesque, an idea that Poe explicitly made his theme in his classic collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). The grotesque in literature focuses on the human body, and all the ways that it can be distorted or exaggerated: its aim is to simultaneously elicit our empathy and disgust.

14. Biography • On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. • Died of mysterious causes on October 7th, 1849 • Widely regarded as one of America’s finest and most controversial authors • Wrote dozens of short stories and poems, as well as one full-length novel • Considered the originator of the modern crime novel and the horror/shock genre

15. Early Life • Born in Boston, MA. on January 19th, 1809, to traveling actors Eliza and David Poe. • Poe never really knew his parents — Eliza Arnold Poe, a British actress, and David Poe, Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Poe's life (he was still a baby), and his mother passed away from tuberculosis , on December 8th, 1811, at the age of 24, when he was only two, leaving behind her three children. Two-year-old Edgar was taken in by Richmond couple John and Frances Allan, Separating him from his brother William and sister Rosalie.

16. Edgar was never officially adopted, a cause and result of constant tensions between him and his foster father. He did not take their last name, but instead he became Edgar Allan Poe. As a teenager Poe enjoyed the life of the elite upper-class. • In 1824, a young Edgar Allan Poe was a part of a junior honor color guard that escorted the Revolutionary War General Marquis de Lafayette around Richmond, Virginia. Lafayette and the color guard stopped at Richmond’s Old Stone House to visit the Ege family, who had assisted in the American Revolution. Poe stood guard on the front steps of the house. 98 years later, the Old Stone House became the Poe Museum.

17. Young Adulthood • At the age of 17, Edgar traveled to Charlottesville to attend the University of Virginia (UVA). He left behind a fiancé, Elmira Royster, who promised to wait until after graduation to marry. Edgar almost immediately ran into trouble at UVA. Although he was a talented student, he had arrived at college with only $110 for tuition. UVA’s tuition was three times that, so he decided to gamble to raise the rest of the funds. Instead, Edgar generated $2,000 worth of debt. After just a couple months at UVA, he returned to Richmond disappointed and continued to feud with his foster father. To make matters worse, Elmira had become engaged to someone else. While Edgar was off at UVA, Elmira’s father had intercepted Edgar’s letters and steered her in the direction of another man who promised to be a successful businessman and a respectable citizen, something Edgar could not promise.

18. Poe then moved to Boston. He didn’t stay long, but during that time he published his first book of poetry “Tamerlane and Other Poems” under the pseudonym “A Bostonian.” When Poe was 18 he joined the army under the name “Edgar Perry.” Poe did exceptionally well in the army, rising to the rank of sergeant major in just two years. He then went to West Point, where once again he did well academically, but ran into financial issues. Poe was court marshalled for extreme dereliction of duty. He then moved to Baltimore. • In Baltimore Poe lived with several relatives, including his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia. Poe lived in Baltimore for four years, during which time he shifted from writing poetry to short stories. One publication that took special interest in him was the Southern Literary Messenger based in Richmond, Virginia. Poe published “Metzengerstein” which is considered his first horror story, and “Berenice” which was so graphic and terrifying that the magazine received multiple complaints from readers. Editor Thomas White offered Poe a job on the staff of the Messenger. Poe agreed and moved back to Richmond.

19. Poe’s literary career • Soon after Poe joined the Southern Literary Messenger, he and White began to have issues, the root of which perhaps came from Poe’s drinking. Poe invited his aunt and cousin, Maria and Virginia to live with him in Richmond. One year later, Poe and Virginia then got married. She was 13, he was 27. This is an unlikely pairing and there is much debate about the nature of their relationship. Poe often referred to Virginia as “sissy” (sister) and Maria as “Muddy” (mother). Although many people today presume their relationship was familial, we ultimately will never know what happened in their marriage behind closed doors. Virginia and Maria had a stabilizing effect on Poe. He seemed to be more responsible and happier during the years when they were with him.

20. In 1837 Poe left the Southern Literary Messenger and Richmond. Starting in 1838 while living in Philadelphia, he enjoyed his prime years of literature. Poe wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the “Masque of the Red Death,” “The Black Cat,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Gold Bug,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and more. The Tell-Tale Heart  “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” is particularly important because it was the first modern detective story. Poe was the first to write about an eccentric genius who solves mysterious crimes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle cites Poe’s character, C. Auguste Dupin, as the literary inspiration behind his character, Sherlock Holmes. Poe was also an early pioneer of science fiction. Interestingly, the majority of his stories are comedies.

21. Poe wrote in many genres, but his contribution to horror is what makes him famous today. Poe revolutionized the genre. He was one of the first to involve deep, intuitive, psychological horror. He often wrote stories where the true monster was the capacity for evil that is inside each person, and what happens when that evil is acted upon.  The Raven   Poe’s most famous piece is “The Raven.” Once published, in the early months of 1845, this poem made him an overnight success.Before the publication, Poe was well known in literary circles, but because of “The Raven” Edgar Allan Poe became a household name. Although Poe only made around $15 from the publication of “The Raven,” its international success created financial opportunities like taking on literary clients and giving lectures and recitations. Poe was the first American writer to live completely off of his earnings from writing. But for most of Poe’s adulthood, he struggled to financially support himself and his family.

22. Unfortunately, by this time, his wife Virginia began exhibiting symptoms of tuberculosis. She was sick for several years and died in 1847 while the couple lived in New York. Virginia was 24 years old when she died. Poe never emotionally recovered from the death of his wife. It was evident that he relied on her for mental and emotional support. Poe began to drift back south towards the city of his childhood: Richmond

23. The Death of Edgar Allan Poe • While in Richmond, Poe rekindled his childhood romance with Elmira Royster Shelton, who was then a wealthy widow. At the dismay of her children, she and Poe once again became engaged in 1849. Poe planned to move permanently to Richmond to be with Elmira. He planned a trip to New York to bring Maria (his mother-in-law) back to Richmond. He was also planning to see a client in Philadelphia on the way up the coast. • Poe’s last day in Richmond was on September 26th, 1849. Elmira was worried about his health. After his bout of cholera, his health had been quite fragile. She encouraged Poe to visit his doctor who is also a friend. Poe did, but it was primarily a social visit. He had a late meal at Sadler’s Restaurant. And at 4am on September 27th, 1849, Poe boarded a ship headed for Baltimore. From September 27th until October 3rd, there is no record of his whereabouts.

24. On October 3rd, an election day, Poe was found delirious in a tavern called Gunner’s Hall in Baltimore. He appeared drunk, wearing someone else’s clothes and was taken to Washington University Hospital. For the next four days he was in and out of consciousness, sometimes being alert, sometimes screaming at nothing and no one. • Edgar Allan Poe died on October 7th, 1849. The doctor labeled his cause of death as “phrenitis” (inflammation of the brain) which was commonly used when the true cause of death was unknown. Because of these mysterious circumstances, and the persona of Poe, there is much speculation about the true manner of his death. There are over 26 published theories on his demise, so far.

25. Poe’s death, although untimely and unfortunate, was quite the fitting end for a writer who created stories of true horror and mystery. Even in death, Edgar Allan Poe created a mystery that would live on forever.

26. The Poe Toaster • It was an annual tribute as mysterious as its honoree: every year, on Edgar Allan Poe’s birthday, a masked man would leave three red roses and a bottle of cognac on his grave. • From around 1949 (the centennial of Poe’s death) until 2009, this somebody — or somebodies — toasted the famous author.

28. Literary Highlights • After his death, Poe became known as the inventor of the crime/detective mystery, the horror story, and of gothic fiction. • Poe’s short stories are some of the most popular literary works among American teenagers. • A few of his stories have been turned into motion picture horror movies, including “The Raven” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”

29. Poe’s Most Famous Works “The Raven” “The Tell-Tale Heart” “The Cask of Amontillado” “The Fall of the House of Usher” “The Pit and the Pendulum” “The Masque of the Red Death” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”