Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British-born performer, and her Baltimore-born parents, David and Poe, welcomed Edgar Alan on January 19, 1809. Poe's mother passed away from TB not long after his father abandoned him when he was just a year old. The young Poe was subsequently adopted by wealthy Virginians John and Frances Allan, but this did not stop things from getting worse for him. (Poe 12). Following a turbulent upbringing in both Britain and Virginia, he left home to seek for education, and he attended the University of Virginia where he only stayed for a year.
In 1827, Poe went to Boston where he was enlisted in the US Army; after that, he got admitted to US Military Academy (Poe 9). However, he was again forced stop being at the academy because he lacked the necessary financial support. He later moved to his aunt, Maria’s home in Baltimore, Maryland. Poe’s first collection of poems, Tamerlane among others did not receive any significant or critical public attention. Poe started selling his short stories to magazines at while at his aunt’s place and in 1835, was employed as the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond and he moved there with his new family, aunt and Virginia. In 1836, he married his cousin, Virginia, who was just 14 years old at that time (Poe). After that, Poe took a period of ten years editing many literary journals such as included Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia, the Broadway Journal in the New York City and Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. Later on, Poe developed into a famous writer who earned a lot of respect for his contribution to the American Literature.
Poe's Influence on American Literature
Poe is known to occupy a unique position in American Literature, and he has ceased to be considered as a person but as an Icon. Poe was the archetype of most dysfunctional writers, a genius who is only mining his misfortunes and utilizing his inner self while doing his writings/works. He formed how he was consumed, hence seen as a “Great man Self-Wrecked,” a title that is borrowed from an article that was published in 1850s. Perceiving Poe as an Icon is getting its way to the contemporary American Society as some of the popular imagination has been developed since it was first highlighted by Griswold in his infamous Poe’s “Ludwig” obituary (Leslie et al. 34). Assessing Poe’s “Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym,” for instance J.H. Ingram made a declaration in 1880:
“Poe’s readers know well the clarity of his idiosyncrasies appearing in his verses and prose. they are shown through a transparent mask that is behind which most of his heroes are supposed to be hidden, and it is this “narrative” that it is rarely the imaginary hero of viewed otherwise than just an identical with Poe himself.” (Ingram 121).
Some illustrators of Poe’s works such as Manet and Dulac are motivated to develop images for the book, “The Raven” that features a man who is a protagonist who resembles the writer, Poe. After the subsequent advent of the Freudian theories, Marie Bonaparte and other psychoanalytical devotees relied on Poe’s works to put him on the couch and gave a long and continuous “revelations” about their concepts. Their arguments lack basis for proof but still seemed to verify the ideas of most of the Poe’s works as mainly autobiographical. For instance, John Reilly conceded by saying that:
“What I consider as the most pervasive characteristic of Poe is the belief that his poems/works are somehow autobiographical articles in which his readers can use to identify Poe himself” (Leslie et al. 13).
Such interpretative approach to Poe’s works are still taught in colleges and schools in America and it is, in short, one of the most adored myths.
In autobiographical writing like those of Poe, the names and settings that are almost related may be changed, but the essence of the story always reflect on what occurred, or at least what the author can recall. There can be some essence of fiction; the stories can be recognized by anyone who is familiar with the life of the author. Just like Poe’s works, he mostly wrote stories that were closely related to his life. However, his works again portrayed more of reality than fantasy. Hence, there is a sense of reality that is imposed over fantasy. The settings and names of his tales are mostly taken from many newspaper’s accounts of Poe’s real-life events and also from the works of other authors together with his imagination (Bonaparte 10). However, there are complications that Poe’s works contain. Most of them are full of satires and a little hoaxing.
What the readers can learn from both his life and works is necessarily not that he was an unconscious artist, who inscribed his life on paper, but rather someone who was very careful, who borrowed widely and also recasts many sources full of an imaginative flair. For instance, the orangutan of the “Murders in the Rue Morgue” appeared to be an idea from a newspaper accounts of a man known as Edward Cole, who decided to kill his wife using a razor, nearly severing her head. Most of these papers were popular and were commonly reported in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier which Poe read on a regular basis and occasionally contributed (Ingram).
Most of the readers supporting Poe’s works as autobiographical acknowledge the fact that he commonly wrote his work using a first person narration. Hence they were frequently typified by a phrase such as: “Some years ago, I engaged passage from Charleston, S.C., to the City of New York” (“The Oblong Box”). Additionally, those who are well-read in the literature of the period together with the writing of Poe would have known that a first person narration was a common technique, basically in the tales of sensation that had helped to make the Blackwood’s Magazine successful during the days of Poe’s youth. It was a literary tool that had a long and distinguished history used in Daniel Defoe’s The Life and Strange Surprising Adventures of Robinson Crusoe of York, Mariner (1719), a novel that Poe was fond of reading as evidenced in his review the January 1836 in the Southern Literary Messenger (Bonaparte 12). First person narration was also a hallmark of famous writers such as Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield of 1850 and Herman Melville’s Moby Dick of 1851. However, for Poe, he always makes his narrator one of the characters of the whole tale, and this has been giving his stories a sense of limited perspective and lending of air of believability. Additionally, to confuse him with his narrators has always been him falling victim to his spell as a writer.
Some people can claim that most of the themes of Poe’s works are a reflection of his life. However, some people also believe that most of his tales are in revenge for his foster father, John Allan. Such psychological readings tend to assume the complex nature of Poe’s personality and his relationships with others such as John Allan (Hayes 23). For instance, after John Allan’s death, far from managing the anger of his youth, Poe acknowledged his sad part in only earning his foster father’s displeasure and had to forgive him for leaving nothing to him in his will (Hayes 20). Poe’s “the Tell-Tale Heart” there is a much more likely source than that of Poe’s feud with his foster father. There is an account of a story that was written and published in 1830, and the details of the story include the carefully executed murder of an old man and the murderers had to confess and even as Poe’s phrasing, had such an eerie similarity; the source must still be considered nearly conclusive.
In summary, Poe’s genius nature is basically that he was capable of transcending his limited perspective of his life and also mostly communicated to his audiences/readers by depending on universal truths. Most of the great works of art are commonly about the writer’s ideas, and most of the ideas are not always autobiographies. Of course, Poe always had to sincerely think of something for him to be able to write something about it, but he did not still need a firsthand experience of the incident. Indeed, Poe did not mostly write about himself, but about the darker sides of humanity in general. If a reader recognizes such a broader meaning, then Poe’s work would make them uncomfortable, so most of them retreat to a relative safety of believing that they are only glimpsing at Poe’s soul and not their won. In the end, this leads to the denial of autobiography as a common element of Poe’s works is not an attempt to deny his genius; but just a confirmation of his genius.
Works Cited
Bonaparte, Marie. The life and works of Edgar Allan Poe: A psycho-analytic interpretation. The Hogarth Press Ltd, 1949.
Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
Ingram, John Henry. Edgar Allan Poe: his life, letters, and opinions. WH Allen, 1886.
Leslie, Eliza, et al. The Gift: A Christmas and New Year's Present for... EL Carey and A. Hart, 1844.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. Broadview Press, 2010.
Poe, Edgar Allan. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Vol. 2. Raven Ed, 1978.
