Study Guide to the Major Works by Edgar Allan Poe

Intelligent Education

• Publisher: Influence Publishers
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781645424154
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Study Aids
• Subtopic: Study Guides

A comprehensive study guide offering in-depth explanation, essay, and test prep for selected works by Edgar Allen Poe, a key figure in Romanticism. Titles in this study guide include The Raven, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Cask of Amontillado.As an author of the nineteenth-century, he is credited with creating detective fiction. Moreover, he was well known for his dark and haunting imagery throughout his works. This Bright Notes Study Guide explores the context and history of Edgar Allen Poe's classic work, helping students to thoroughly explore the reasons they have stood the literary test of time. Each Bright Notes Study Guide contains: - Introductions to the Author and the Work
- Character Summaries
- Plot Guides
- Section and Chapter Overviews
- Test Essay and Study Q&AsThe Bright Notes Study Guide series offers an in-depth tour of more than 275 classic works of literature, exploring characters, critical commentary, historical background, plots, and themes. This set of study guides encourages readers to dig deeper in their understanding by including essay questions and answers as well as topics for further research.

EDGAR ALLEN POE

INTRODUCTION

EARLY LIFE

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. The son of wandering actors, Poe was destined to lead the most tragic life of any major American writer. Misery and bad luck haunted the family. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, had been a widow at eighteen, and two years after his birth she died of tuberculosis in Richmond at the age of twenty-five. Poe’s paternal grandfather had been a wealthy man, but his father, David Poe, had broken with his family to become an actor, and his son was left with nothing. When his mother died, Edgar was adopted by John Allan, a Richmond tobacco merchant, at the urging of his wife. Frances Allan was devoted to him, and in his childhood he enjoyed a measure of security which was never to be his again after he left home. He was raised to be a gentleman and took for granted advantages he was soon to be deprived of. He was well liked as a boy, both by his teachers and his friends, and was a leader in the sports of childhood, particularly swimming at which he excelled. In 1815 John Allan took his family to England in the hope of furthering his business. During the next five years Edgar attended various schools, the most important of which was the Manor House School at Stoke Newington. The gothic atmosphere of this school provided him with many details he was later to make use of in fiction. According to one Master he was an amiable boy and a good scholar.

AT THE UNIVERSITY OF VIRGINIA

In the spring of 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, which was then only in the second year of its existence. The atmosphere was not particularly conducive to study. Many of the students brought their horses, dogs, and personal slaves with them. Gambling, drinking, fights, and duels were common, and revelry was hard to avoid. Like many freshmen in every age, Poe was confused and homesick. He learned to play cards for money, and soon he was in debt. Allan, true to his Scotch forebears, had provided his stepson with little cash, and Poe soon owed money to merchants who had given him credit on the strength of his guardian’s name. It should be emphasized that Poe was not considered a dashing or gallant young man at the University, nor did he move in really fashionable circles. His debts were not unusual for a young man in his circumstances, and today we would be more likely to call them unpaid bills than debts. It was at this juncture of events that Poe discovered he could not depend upon Allan for financial support. The foster-father refused to pay his debts and Poe had to withdraw from the University. Raised to be a gentleman and trained in the social manners of the pre-war south, at the age of eighteen Poe was abandoned with his education incomplete by a man who refused to see through to its conclusion the responsibility he assumed when he adopted the young Edgar. Poe continued to hope that his foster-father would have a change of heart, but he never did, and when he died, his several illegitimate children were amply provided for, but no mention of Edgar Allan Poe was made in his will.

ENLISTS IN THE ARMY

In May of 1827 Poe enlisted in the army, and in the summer of that year he published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. He needed status and economic security, and thought that if he succeeded in his new venture he could make his peace with Allan. In December of 1829 he published his second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. In June of 1830, a few months after the death of Mrs. Allan, Poe was accepted at West Point. He was respected by both his superiors and his fellow-cadets. When it became apparent, however, that nothing he could do would restore him in Allan’s eyes, he wanted to get out of the army. Allan refused to cooperate and Poe deliberately neglected his duties so he would be court-martialed, which he was in January, 1831.

POVERTY AND HIS DRINKING

From 1831 to 1835 Poe lived in poverty in Baltimore. During these years he established the pattern of miserable diet and occasional drinking that eventually brought him to an early grave. In popular tradition Poe is thought of as a great drunkard, but the truth is more complicated than such a statement would suggest. He was brought up in a society that revolved around social drinking, but liquor had a terrible effect on him. He despised debauchery in any form, and yet he did drink. He drank occasionally because it was the habit of the time and because it was a form of charity he could accept without feeling beholden. And, of course, as his position in life became more and more miserable, he drank as an escape from reality. When he did drink his hypersensitive personality was badly affected.

FIRST LITERARY SUCCESS

In October of 1833 he won a contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter, for the story “MS. Found in a Bottle.” Through the influence of one of the judges he was employed as an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger from July of 1835 to January of 1837. For him it was the first of many editorial positions. Poe brought new life to the literary magazines of America. He despised sentimental sham and was the first really great reviewer in American periodical literature. Often his editorials were original essays on literary criticism. While he was editor he raised the circulation of the magazine from 500 to 3500, but during that time received no more than the $10 a week for which he was originally contracted. Throughout his career he performed enormous editorial labors for ridiculously small salaries.

MARRIAGE

In 1835 he married his cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was at that time thirteen years old. He was twenty-seven. The disparity in their ages strikes the modern reader as absurd, but in the pre-war South it was common for girls to marry when they were very young, a practice that was more often than not the rule in Europe at that time. Modern biographers have attempted to prove that because he married a girl so much younger than himself, his marriage was one in name only. Such a conclusion is absurd. Poe was very much in love with his wife, and at least one observer noted that Virginia kissed him so passionately in public that he found it embarrassing. This does not suggest a passionless, brother-sister relationship. Mrs. Clemm, his aunt, continued to live with them, an arrangement that has provided biographers with much material for speculation. However, the reasons for her continuing to live with them are clear. Poe himself encouraged it. He always felt the need to be mothered, and her presence was a consolation to him. The girl was very young and the mother had nothing else in the world to do. Under such circumstances the arrangement was perfectly natural. Virginia had a harp and a pianoforte, and sang. Mrs. Clemm managed the household. Poe wrote editorials and stories and dreamed of opening his own magazine.

MOVES NORTH

After leaving the Messenger, Poe went first to New York, and then to Philadelphia. In July of 1838 Harpers published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, and in December 1839 he published his first collection of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. From 1839 to 1842 he worked as an editor for Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine. These were active years for Poe. His controversial reviews stirred interest in literary matters. He wrote features on cryptography, autography, and other subjects which attracted new readers. He was the first editor to acknowledge Hawthorne’s genius, and he lauded Tennyson and Mrs. Browning. He detested Longfellow’s didacticism and railed against the moralistic tone of literature in New England.

MEETS RUFUS GRISWOLD

In the spring of 1841 Poe met Rufus Griswold (1815-1857), an ambitious editor and anthologist. Griswold was collecting poems for his forthcoming Poets and Poetry of America. Poe gave him several poems and influenced several of his friends to contribute. Poe reviewed the book in the Saturday Museum, and implied that Griswold’s literary judgment was questionable. From that day Griswold harbored a hatred of Poe that he was too cowardly to express until Poe was dead. In the spring of 1842 Virginia was ill. Years of poor diet and health had resulted in tuberculosis, and for the next four years she suffered terribly until her death in 1847. Poe neglected his duties to help care for his wife, and in May of 1842 Graham brought in Griswold as a substitute, although he had no intention of firing Poe. Appearing suddenly one day, Poe found Griswold in his chair, and in a fit of wounded pride he resigned. He remained on good terms with Griswold, however, never suspecting that the latter harbored a deep hatred for him based on jealousy and wounded pride.

PUBLISHES “THE RAVEN”

In 1843 “The Gold Bug” won a prize from the Dollar Newspaper, and in January of 1845 “The Raven” was published in the New York Evening Mirror. Overnight he became famous. “The Gold Bug” had been recently translated into French, and in a year two translations of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” caused a law suit between two French newspapers. Elizabeth Barrett thought there was “an uncommon force and effect” in “The Raven.” Dante Gabriel Rossetti (1828-1882), an English poet of Browning’s generation, imitated “The Raven” in his “The Blessed Damozel.” Fame, however, did not bring wealth to Poe. The $10 he received for the poem did not go far toward alleviating the wretched condition of his family. In February 1845 Poe began to work for the Broadway Journal. Charles F. Briggs, a co-editor of the magazine, came to respect him, in spite of the “abominable lies” he claimed that Griswold had told him about Poe.

DEATH OF HIS WIFE

Virginia Poe was dying and her husband suffered terrible agonies watching her waste away. On January 4, 1848, he wrote to George Eveleth, describing what he experienced:

Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever and underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and again I hoped. At the end of a year the vessel broke again - I went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a year afterward. The again-again-again and once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death-and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive-nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity.

She died on January 30, 1847, in Fordham, New York. The Fordham house has been preserved as a museum and stands today as a reminder of nineteenth-century literary America amid the buzzing activity of the Bronx.

RELIGIOUS PHILOSOPHY

Poe lived a little more than two years after the death of his wife and they were the most miserable years of his life. For weeks after Virginia’s death he would wander off to her tomb and be found there weeping hysterically. In the spring of the year, as he recovered from the shock of her death, he began to work on Eureka, a treatise of some forty thousand words in which he summed up his final attitude toward man and the universe. He discussed the creation and nature of the universe, and its destiny to return to the prime source of being at the end of time. He discarded the method of logic for intuition, but the work was laced with references to Newton, Kepler, Laplace and Humboldt. In a sense the book was an attempt to work out a philosophy of death, a philosophy that would explain the soul’s unification, upon death, with the larger spirit that Poe was convinced existed behind the appearances of the universe. One of the rumors that was circulated by his enemies after his death was that he was an atheist. Nothing could be further from the truth. He despised, however, the conventional pictures of heaven and hell, and was groping for a more precise way to discuss the relationship between man and the infinite. He was no more an atheist than Coleridge (1772-1834), English poet and essayist, from whose Biographia Literaria he got some of his ideas.

ATTEMPTS SUICIDE

In June of 1848 Eureka was published as a book. The next month Poe delivered a lecture in Boston. In a fit of depression he obtained two ounces of laudanum and tried to commit suicide. He did not die, however, but merely made himself sick. He had become acquainted with a poetess, a Mrs. Sarah Whitman, who sent him a valentine with some verses enclosed. As the year progressed he convinced himself that he was in love with her. She shared some of his ideas about religion and was interested in spiritualism. They became engaged late in 1848 but the opposition of Mrs. Whitman’s mother wrecked his plans. The family was well off and the mother felt that he was after her daughter’s money.

LAST DAYS

In July of 1849 Poe returned to Richmond. He wrote to Mrs. Clemm: “If possible, oh Come? My clothes are so horrible, and I am so ill.” Friends arranged for him to give a lecture on “The Poetic Principle” on August 17th at the Exchange Hotel. He lost the manuscript but the lecture was successful anyway. He received invitations to recite “The Raven.” He had few decent clothes, however, and seldom accepted such invitations, which were often prompted more by curiosity than genuine interest. He met a woman he had once been engaged to in his youth, Sarah Elmira Royster, now a wealthy widow, and he began to court her again. In the abortive romances of his last years, Poe was desperately attempting to fill the gap in his life that had been left by Virginia’s death.

HIS DEATH

In September Poe planned a trip to Baltimore and on the 26th he visited Sarah to say goodbye. He complained of not feeling well, and she said that he left in a high fever. She advised him to see a doctor and he went to a Dr. Carter’s office, but the man was not home and he left in a muddled state with the doctor’s cane instead of his walking stick. Early the next morning he boarded the steamer for Baltimore. On the morning of September 28th he showed up at the home of Dr. Nathan C. Brooks in Baltimore, noticeably intoxicated. The doctor was not home and he left. For five days he vanished completely. On the third of October, election day in Baltimore, a Mr. Walker, compositor on the Baltimore Sun, found him lying in the rain outside Ryan’s Public House in which was located the Fourth Ward Polls. He was taken to the Washington College Hospital in a coma. He spoke to imaginary objects on the walls. Hoping to revive his will to live, the doctor told him that in a few days he might be back with his friends. He replied violently that when he thought of his own degradation he was ready to sink into the earth, and that the best thing a friend could do for him would be to blow out his brains with a pistol. He remained delirious. He had been admitted to the hospital on Wednesday. After three and a half days of suffering, at 5 AM on Sunday, the 7th of October, he called out “Lord help my poor soul,” and died.

GRISWOLD MALIGNS HIS CHARACTER

Griswold wrote a funeral notice for the New York Evening Tribune in which he implied that Poe had drunk himself to death. Three years later, still not feeling himself revenged, Griswold implied that Poe had “criminal relations” with Mrs. Clemm. Other enemies followed suit and soon there was a popular tradition to the effect that Poe was an atheist, a madman, a perpetual drunk, and the very incarnation of evil. In one of the great ironies of American literary history, Griswold became Poe’s literary executor and falsified the records to make it appear that his judgment of Poe’s character was correct. Mrs. Whitman defended him in her Edgar Poe and His Critics, which appeared in 1860 and still has much to offer to the serious s...

Table of contents

• Front Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• 1) Introduction to Edgar Allen Poe
• 2) Textual Analysis
• 3) Conclusion
• 4) Bibliography