Edgar Allan Poe

And it was already true when, as a young man, Poe studied at the University of Virginia.  He was there both a successful student and a gambler anxious to scrape together or borrow enough money to furnish his student life.  (Poe’s alcoholic father, an actor, abandoned his actress mother when Poe was a toddler; his mother died of tuberculosis shortly afterwards.  His foster parents provided him with his education, but by the time he was at University, he was not on good terms with his foster father, John Allan, and Poe did not receive enough money from him to support himself.)  His acquaintances among the students – he had few long-lived friendships – would gather to hear him read aloud the stories he was always writing.  He read, as he would all his life, with passion and “almost supramortal…eloquence” (Griswold qtd. in Haining 15).

…he read with his whole soul thrown into every action and intonation of his voice – now loud and rapid, like the mad rush of many waters, and now sinking into a scarcely audible whisper, of some terrible sentence of incantation or curse sending a shiver over all that heard.  (Tucker qtd. in Haining 40)

His listeners were fascinated.  This strange young man – a young man who over-indulged in alcohol, although he had no tolerance for it; who threw a completed story into the fire in a fit of pride when his fellow students teased him about it; and who one student would ambivalently describe, years later, as having been “as true and perfect a friend as the waywardness of his nature would allow” (Tucker qtd. in Haining 39) – made a striking frame for his own weird stories.

The legendary details of Poe’s life include the following:  his birth to destitute actor parents in Boston, on Jan 19, 1809.  His lonely childhood, spent partly at bording-schools in England when the Allans lived there between 1815 and 1821.  His frequent indebtedness, growing alcoholism, and often terrible poverty.  His brief stints in the army – first as a hardworking (for a time) private soldier and later, with the grudging support of John Allan, at West Point officer training college; although these overlap with the period of time when, according to some sources, “from Christmas 1826 (when he was seventeen) to 1833…his whereabouts and occupations [were] in the main shrouded in mystery” (Haining 40).  His dismissal in disgrace from West Point for neglect of duty.  His bursts of relative success in Baltimore and New York City as a short-story writer, literary journalist and critic (occasionally even enough to get him temporarily out of debt).  His determined efforts to start his own literary journal, which constantly failed.  His marriage, at 28, to his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia.  Her devotion to him, and her “strangely haunting” beauty (“…ethereal and tender, she was for Poe the incarnation of his poetic vision” [Knapp 26]).  His attempts to provide for her, and his desperation when she began dying of tuberculosis (Knapp 35).  Their poverty-stricken last years together in a cottage.  His own failing health, alcoholism, speculated drug use, and bouts of reported “insanity” after Virginia’s death in 1847 (Knapp 36).  His final fitful attempts to find work and even to re-marry before, legendarily, “he was found unconscious on a street in Baltimore.”  Even his death at age 40 is surrounded with story:  the cause of his death was speculated to be, among other things, any of “alcoholism, delerium tremens, drug addiction, tumour of the brain, and diabetes” (Knapp 40).  And while he died as he lived – “in the shadows, known by few, cared for by even less” (Haining 9) – to this day, Poe’s legend has remained too fascinating to be forgotten. (SB)

Works Cited

Dillon, John M.  Edgar Allan Poe:  His Genius and Character.  New York:  the Knickerbocker Press, 1911.

Haining, Peter, ed.  The Edgar Allan Poe Scrapbook.  London:  New English Library, 1977.

Knapp, Bettina L.  “The Life.”  Edgar Allan Poe.  New York:  Frederick Ungar Publishing Co., 1984. 9-41.