When Edgar Allan Poe began writing, American literature was still in its infancy. While his peers were imitating English authors and writing educational poems, he was inventing his own language. He was considered a strange and difficult man, prone to alcohol. He was the first American writer who lived solely from writing, but in fact he was more often than not living. Although he became famous towards the end of his life, he died poor. In his works, he created an eerie, dark world in which man is confronted with a sinister force that gives him no peace. He lived in that world.
Edgar Poe lost his parents when he was a young child. His mother, Eliza Arnold, was born in London into an acting family that moved across the Atlantic in search of success. At the beginning of the 19th century, few American cities had a permanent theatre, and actors moved from one place to another like nomads. Eliza first took to the stage at the age of nine and eventually became a relatively popular and renowned actress.
In Norfolk, Virginia, a young lawyer, David Poe, saw one of her plays and fell in love – with her and with theatre. He left the law to join her theatre group, much to the disappointment of his parents. The acting profession was indeed exciting, but it offered no financial security. Eliza and David soon married and began travelling together to cities along the American East Coast. They had three children, Henry, Rose and Edgar, who was born in Boston on 19 January 1809.
The Poe family were an unhappy travelling family. Father David was a stubborn and resentful man, prone to alcoholism. Soon after Edgar’s birth, all traces of him disappeared. Eliza, by then already seriously ill, was left alone with three children and without a broken pair. Just a few months later, at the end of 1811, she died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia.
The first-born, Henry, was taken in by his grandparents, while Edgar and Rose ended up in the loving homes of local theatre enthusiasts. Edgar was taken in by Frances Allen and her husband John, a successful tobacconist and an orphan himself. Although he bore their surname, they never officially adopted him. The Allens were childless and raised Edgar as their own son, spoiling him and giving him a carefree childhood.
Due to John’s business commitments, the family soon moved to England, where Edgar received his first education. He attended an excellent boarding school in the suburbs of London, learning Latin, French and mathematics. His teachers immediately realised that they were dealing with a very talented child, as he outperformed even his older classmates in all subjects. At the age of ten, he was already writing verse, speaking fluent French and quoting the ancient classics in Latin. After five years, the Allens returned to Richmond, and his stepfather John, impressed by his son’s progress, enrolled Edgar in the best private school in the city.
He was the best runner and swimmer among all his classmates and even trained boxing from time to time. One day, he and a friend bet that he could easily swim ten kilometres of the river that runs through Richmond. Upstream and under a scorching sun. His friends begged him not to do it, but he won the bet. He was “red as a roast lobster” and utterly exhausted, but still. Young Edgar was not afraid of a challenge, quite the opposite. He was so stubborn that he tried at every opportunity to prove that he could cope with such a high hurdle. His stubbornness probably stemmed from a sense of inferiority, as he was the child of poor theatregoers and an orphan, dependent in every way on the goodwill of his foster parents.
The awakening of a dark force
He got on well with his stepmother Frances, after all, she was the one who decided to save little Edgar from the orphanage. But he had a more complicated relationship with his stepfather John, who accepted his wife’s decision more for the sake of peace in the house than out of love for the dark-haired toddler. As Edgar entered his teenage years, he transformed from a stubborn but hard-working child into a rebellious young man. In 1826, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, the most advanced educational institution in the country, where students enjoyed a great deal of freedom, both academic and otherwise. He excelled in the classroom, as he always had, and impressed his teachers with his incredible memory and recitation of his increasingly sophisticated poems.
After class, he shared them with his classmates, who noticed that young Edgar behaved very differently behind the four walls of his room. He suddenly stopped the recitation they were all enjoying and, taking charcoal in his hands, began to draw grotesque, bizarre figures on the walls, as if some dark force had taken possession of him. The sketches were so elaborate that his classmates began to wonder who was standing in front of them. A future poet or a future painter?
Perhaps that was the beginning of his battle with the demons that had followed him all his life. During his studies, he started drinking and playing cards, and soon ran up a hefty debt. Not even ten months had passed when his stepfather expelled him from university and sent him to work in the family business without pay. After three months of torture in the form of numbers and regulations, Edgar left home and went in search of “his place in the sun in this wide world”.
As it turned out, for an angry 18-year-old with no work habits, the world was a pretty unfriendly place. For a few days, Edgar wandered the streets of Richmond, hungry and cold. During this time, he wrote several letters to his stepfather, blaming him for his misfortune and asking him for money. This was neither the first nor the last time. In fact, most of their quarrels revolved around money. Edgar had hoped to inherit his father’s fortune one day, but that was a long way off. John refused to help him and the poet, angrier than before, boarded a ship for Boston.
His hometown was no better. After a few months, he was completely penniless and had no choice but to join the army as a common soldier, which was quite a shame for the child of a wealthy merchant. He used the last of his savings to publish Timurlenk and Other Poems, his first collection of poetry. It was published in only fifty copies and met with no response, let alone success.
Tight uniform
Poe committed himself to five years, but after just one year, life in uniform began to get too much for him, and he had to turn to his stepfather for help again. He needed his permission to leave the army. For months, John ignored Edgar’s letters, which, as was his custom, were at the same time harassing him, accusing him and asking for money. It was only after the death of his mother Frances that they made a brief truce. Edgar even persuaded his stepfather to give him another chance to get an honest education and prove to him that he had changed. With his help, he left the army and enrolled at the prestigious West Point Military Academy in June 1830.
He surpassed his classmates in academic achievement and impressed his teachers with his insight, but Cadet Poe did not change. He was still a drunkard and had discipline problems. Just a few months after enrolling, he gave up on a career as an officer. In fact, he gave up on life. That’s when John remarried and had a child. Edgar’s already slim chances of inheriting his father’s fortune had evaporated.
The idea of not being provided for in his old age was terribly unpleasant. He stopped attending lectures and was soon expelled from the academy. After a few letters from Edgar, full of accusations and anger, the stepfather finally took his hands off the ungrateful foster-child. At the age of twenty-two, Edgar Allan Poe was an orphan again.
Living from the pen
He moved to Baltimore, Maryland, then the third largest city in the USA. Maria Clemm, his paternal aunt, lived there with her nine-year-old daughter Virginia and her bedridden grandmother. Although they lived in dire poverty, Edgar was welcomed with open arms and the cramped apartment immediately became his only refuge from the “wide world”.
The new environment had a positive effect on him and after a long time he felt loved. He became closer to Aunt Maria than he had ever been with anyone before. She became his biggest confidante and protector, in fact his third mother. She believed in his talent and helped him in every possible way.
Edgar couldn’t find a decent job because he had no useful skills or influential friends. But he had a vivid imagination and a keen sense of language. From an early age, he wrote poems and read everything he could get his hands on. He decided to write for a living. It was a very ambitious plan, because at that time there was not a single writer in the USA who lived by the pen alone.
Poe quickly realised this. Despite writing a lot and sending his work to all kinds of editors, he earned practically nothing. His arrival was just another hungry mouth to feed for the Clemm family. It was during the Baltimore period that he finally made friends with the poverty, depression and self-destructiveness that would follow him for the rest of his life.
In June 1833, after two years of disappointment and humiliation, he finally had his first tangible professional success. His short story “The Message in the Bottle” won a literary competition organised by the Baltimore newspaper Saturday Visiter. More than the confirmation of his mastery, which he never doubted, Poe was delighted with the cash prize of fifty dollars. That was the average monthly salary, but for an impoverished poet it was an astronomical sum.
With Message in a Bottle, Poe drew attention to himself and got his first serious job. In 1835, he took a job at the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger, where he was in charge of reviewing newly published books.
The unusual couple
The pay was meagre, the work tedious, but Poe made a name for himself by reviewing the varied and bizarre literary output of the era. Most of his work was what today would be called schlock. His reviews were sharp, caustic and so artfully written that an obscure newspaper increased its circulation fivefold at his expense. “The book is for all those who have nothing better to do,” he was unsparing of a fellow writer in one of his writings. Poe, himself extremely sensitive to criticism, reviewed it with a sharp pen.
His new job led to a painful move to Richmond, the city where he grew up and which he had to leave with his head down after a fight with his father. He was soon joined by his aunt Maria and his cousin Virginia. Her relationship with Edgar is still the subject of much debate today. They married shortly after her arrival in Richmond, when she was only 13 years old. The marriage certificate stated that she was twenty-one, and the priest did not mind. My mother-in-law’s aunt Maria, who baked a large cake for the newlyweds, also agreed to the wedding.
In those days, marriage between cousin and cousin was not a common occurrence, but it was certainly not unheard of. Marriage to a minor was certainly rare, but apparently not unheard of enough, because no one, not even Poe’s enemies, ever brought it up.
Some of their friends claimed that they slept in separate beds and lived like brother and sister. Others argued that Poe was indifferent to carnal temptations anyway, that women were just muses to him and that his only love was art. On the basis of various sources, we can only conclude that Edgar and Virginia were, in their own strange way, happy after all.
Without power
Despite the peace on the home front, Poe found it difficult to bear the pressures of adult life. He was tormented by his responsibility to a family he could barely support. He was also tormented by a thankless and poorly paid job. He fought his ills with alcohol, as he always had. He had the habit of drinking his first glass before breakfast, on an empty stomach, for greater effect. He never stopped after the first glass. When he drank, he went from a gentleman to a wild beast.
Poe’s friends said that he had not developed the slightest tolerance for alcohol. After the second drink, he was drunk and drank and drank until he was lying under the table or penniless. This could go on for days, or even longer for a cat accompanied by severe depression.
Poe was the kind of alcoholic who could go completely abstinent for weeks, even months, but once he started drinking, he didn’t stop. And this happened more and more often as the years went by. He was aware of this and thought a lot about where this instinct to self-destruct came from. “I don’t enjoy drinking in the slightest. I have not put my life, reputation or sanity at risk in the pursuit of pleasure. It is an attempt to escape from tormenting memories, from unbearable loneliness and the feeling of fear of some impending doom.”
It is no coincidence that loss, loneliness and death are themes that appear in many of his works. He was able to define his demons rationally and to put them down on paper, but he was completely powerless against them.
His drunkenness got him into serious trouble. For example, he lost his job at Messenger after just two weeks. But after a few days of pleading, his editor offered him a second chance. He grabbed it with both hands and developed into one of the best literary critics in the USA. He later became co-editor, but his drinking put him out of a job again.
Within two years at Messenger, a sad pattern was established, which was repeated again and again afterwards. At first, Poe worked hard and walked determinedly towards his goal, but when it was within his grasp, the instinct to self-destruct kicked in. So in January 1837, he was fired from the Southern Literary Messenger for the third and final time. He packed his bags and moved with his family to a new place, as was his old custom.
Infamous reputation
After a few months of living in New York, they settled in Philadelphia, but even in the “City of Brotherly Love” they could barely manage. Edgar wrote and poeted extensively, but rarely found anyone willing to publish his work. It was in Philadelphia that his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, was published. This tale of a whaling ship, a strange seafaring man and his myriad adventures, including shipwreck and man-eating, was not well received. Later it inspired Herman Melville, author of Moby Dick, and is one of Poe’s most popular works today, but in 1838 it brought him neither fame nor money.
Since his arrival in Philadelphia, he has lived in dire poverty. He had only one pair of shoes and it was not rare to go to bed hungry. It was only after a year and a half that he found a job, becoming editor of the Philadelphia-based Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine.
Even though he was already an established and well-known editor, his salary was even worse than at Messenger. Because he was in a desperate situation, his bargaining position was very weak. In addition, he had a number of additional, non-creative tasks, including proofreading and even printing.
The only advantage of his new job was that he could publish his own texts in the newspaper he edited. For example, one of his best-known short stories, The Fall of the House of Usher, a creepy fairy tale for adults, with a characteristically poetic dark atmosphere and anxious, bewitched characters, was published at the time. It was his first work to resonate with an American readership, but again it did not bring him a penny.
Poe did not stay in one place for long. After only a few months, he fell out with Burton’s owner and was fired. Before slamming the door behind him, he proudly announced that he was going to start his own literary magazine. The dispute was, as always, about money, pride and alcohol. Poe demanded a higher salary, and the owner complained publicly about his “illness”, from which the editorial work suffered.
After the success of The Fall of Usher, he was recognised and envied by many of his peers for his talent as a writer, but since the infamous dispute, he has been known as an irredeemable drunk.
The Philadelphia Years
This time he quickly found a new job. In February 1841, he took a job at Graham’s Literary Magazine, where he had more freedom and a higher salary. Not high enough to satisfy his material or narcissistic needs, but still. He was able to devote himself to writing, reviewing and editing in peace.
During this period, he also wrote Murder in the Rue Morgue, a short story in which Auguste Dupin, a French police inspector, and his unnamed assistant use logic and deduction to investigate unusual murder cases. This short story practically invented the detective story genre and inspired one of the most famous literary characters of all time, who receives clients with a pipe in his mouth in his flat on Baker Street in London.
Money problems aside, Poe’s life in Philadelphia was unusually peaceful. He had a regular job and did not drink for months, but the idyll could not last forever. One day, sitting at the piano, his wife Virginia collapsed and started bleeding from the mouth. These were the first signs of the tuberculosis that was slowly eating away at her lungs.
Edgar fell into a severe depression, which he could not cope with except by starting to drink. Just a few months later, in April 1842, he made an unexpected business move. Thanks to his original stories and reviews, Graham’s became one of the best-selling magazines in the country. The circulation increased from 5,000 to 40,000 copies in one year, while Poe’s salary remained the same. This time, the offended and irritated editor beat the owner to the punch and resigned.
Krokar
The next two years were more often than not marked by drinking and disappointments. At one point, Poe even gave up writing and considered a civil service job. When this too failed miserably, he revisited the idea of starting his own literary magazine, packed his bags and moved.
This time he went to New York. America’s largest city was the last stop in his turbulent life. The Poe family had to change several homes in a few months. Each new apartment was smaller than the last, because there was never enough money left at the end of the month to pay the rent.
Poe was trapped in the vortex of poverty all his adult life. Because of his self-destructive tendencies, any attempt to create a normal life for himself was doomed to failure. Being constantly penniless, he was forced to accept any job offer, no matter how humiliating.
This was also the case in New York, where he joined the Evening Mirror as an assistant editor. Compared to his previous job, this was a significant step backwards, with lower pay and a thankless job. The most famous critic in the USA was editing readers’ letters, proofreading small advertisements and doing other clerical work.
But a short-lived episode at the Mirror suddenly gave Poe his breakthrough. On January twenty-ninth 1845, the Mirror published The Raven, a poem in which the unlucky hero in love is visited by a sinister black bird and watches him sink into madness. It is not far from the truth to say that The Raven is the most famous poem in the history of American literature. Poe went from being a self-aggrandising poet to the biggest literary star in the country overnight.
Fame without money
He was the first American writer to make a living exclusively from writing. He was more often than not living, but not entirely through any fault of his own. At that time, international copyright as we know it today did not exist. American publishers much preferred to publish foreign authors who did not have to be published, rather than domestic authors who had to be paid.
In addition, authors only received a one-off honorarium – when their text was first published. Few received a share of the income generated by their work. As a result, many talented writers had to make a living from journalism.
Poe, who by nature had no business sense, earned a meagre nine dollars from the countless reprints of The Raven. His only book to be reprinted during his lifetime was a scientific monograph on molluscs. He received fifty dollars for editing an illustrated book on shells.
After the publication of The Raven, Poe basked in his well-deserved fame for a while. He received letters from publishers who had ignored him only yesterday, literary critics wrote essays about him, and for the first time the word “genius” appeared in print alongside his name. He also earned some money from public lectures and recitations.
His performances, always in black, were reminiscent of some of his works. He had the lamps in the auditorium blacked out so that the astonished spectators remained in the semi-darkness. He had a melodious and gentle voice, but it sounded eerie when he recited his own poems. One observer wrote that the spectators were often frightened but enthusiastic.
The Curse
Thanks to the success of Krokar, for the first time in a long time he got a job he was not ashamed of. He became co-editor and even one-third owner of the literary magazine Broadway Journal. He had a chance to make a life for himself, but the sad pattern of the Messenger, Burton and Graham repeated itself. All his life he searched for recognition -from his eyes, from his fellow writers or from society- and when he finally found it, he was struck with a crippling terror. He could not shake the curse that had been with him since he came into the world.
It only took him a few months to fall out with the other two co-owners of the Journal. The two far-sighted businessmen, fed up with his whims and drunkenness, sold him their shares for fifty dollars. He had to borrow the money, but he realised his dream. He became the owner and editor-in-chief of a literary newspaper. Poe was a predictably incompetent owner, and after six months the Broadway Journal folded.
Meanwhile, Virginia’s tuberculosis had progressed to the point where she could no longer be helped. The thought of his beloved wife’s death had haunted Poe since Philadelphia, when the first signs of the disease appeared. He was tormented by memories of his mother and stepmother, who had died when he was young. He feared that he would go mad without Virginia, his friend, wife and muse.
The premature deaths of the women he loved were like a wound never healed and a source of fascination never exhausted. “The death of a beautiful woman is without doubt the most poetic subject in the world,” Poe used to say. He could turn fascination into art, but in life the thought of death drove him into the embrace of demons.
Virginia died in January 1847 at the age of twenty-four, the age Poe’s mother Eliza was when she died. From then on, the most famous poet in the United States began his downward slide. His binges lasted for weeks together and rumours began to circulate in New York literary circles that he had gone mad. If it had not been for his Aunt Maria, he would probably have died soon after his wife.
Poe was 39 years old, but in a sense he was as helpless as a child. Maria not only cooked for him and watched over him when he was in bed for days after drinking, she also looked after his career. She made sure he did not miss deadlines for his texts and arranged meetings on his behalf. Although Poe had many admirers, Maria was the only woman who still truly loved him.
Love lost
Poe spent his last years searching for lost love, peace and meaning. Love and peace were elusive, and he tried to get closer to solving the riddle of the meaning of life with Eureka, his most bizarre work, in which he explores the universe, God and man. He dedicated the book to “those who feel more than they think, to dreamers and those who trust in dreams as the only reality”.
He argued that Eureka was more important than Newton’s discovery of gravity, and persuaded publishers that it should be published in a million copies. The bizarre mix of burlesque and pseudo-scientific treatise was difficult to review because it was impossible to understand. Reactions were reticent and many thought it was a Poe hoax. Some contemporary literary critics even believe that Poe had finally lost his mind by then.
Ever since he became famous, many ladies from New York’s good society have flirted with the flamboyant bohemian. Some were attracted by his irrepressible nature, others saw in him a wounded soul in need of help. Edgar liked the attention, but it made him behave even more unreasonably than usual. He courted several ladies at the same time, wanting to marry now one, now another. At the same time, he struggled with guilt, because Virginia was his one true love. What followed was a series of passionate but more often than not platonic encounters, which without exception ended disastrously.
At the end of 1848, he almost died in his search for love. At the time, he was courting Helen Whitman, a Rhode Island poet who adored him as an artist but had some reservations about his personality. Poe could not bear the rejection and, in a fit of despair, took thirty grams of opium. It was not enough to kill him, but it was enough to arouse the poet’s sympathy. After a while, she agreed to marry him, but on condition that he stop drinking. Poe promised to change, but the demons were stronger than ever.
Mysterious death
In the last year of his life, Poe was a nervous wreck. The binges were getting worse, he was out of a job, out of money and writing less and less. Still, he did not give up hope of one day having his own literary journal. To this end, he tried to revive his lecturing career. People were still willing to pay for a ticket to see Krokar live.
In June 1849, he said goodbye to Aunt Marie and headed south. He was due to give a lecture in Richmond, but made an unscheduled stop in Philadelphia and started going from inn to inn. After a few days of drunkenness, he ended up in jail and fell into a severe withdrawal crisis. He began to hallucinate and lose his sanity. He saw horrifying and bizarre images before his eyes, reminiscent of the apparitions in his stories.
He arrived in Richmond after only two weeks, staying in a hotel with a bad reputation. He was ragged and exhausted, but the hot southern air quickly restored his strength. He had bittersweet memories of the city. He had spent his childhood here, got his first job and experienced his first disappointments. Elmira Shleton, his childhood sweetheart, lived there too.
The nostalgic and lonely Edgar soon began to court her. He did so with characteristic eagerness, which Elmira seemed to enjoy, as they quickly grew closer. He even stopped drinking for a few months and soon asked for her hand in marriage. Although he did not get a clear answer, he was convinced that he had finally found love and a new home.
He also wanted to bring his aunt Maria, who was staying in New York, to Richmond, and on Thursday 27 September 1849 he set off on a steamer. The following Wednesday he appeared at the door of a Baltimore tavern – delirious, half-conscious and wearing clothes that were not his own. Where he had been for the previous six days and how he ended up in Baltimore remains a mystery to this day.
What he was doing is clear. Despite the torment, he was still strong enough to call an old friend, who immediately rushed him to hospital. For the next two days he was lost in hallucinations. When he regained consciousness, he could not say when he left Richmond or what he was doing in Baltimore. He mentioned Virginia and a man named Reynolds, but his speech was slurred and incoherent. He died in agony two days later, aged forty.
Poe’s mysterious disappearance still stirs ghosts today. Why did he end up in Baltimore? How come he wasn’t wearing his clothes? Who is Reynolds? And so on… In the last century and a half, dozens of theories have accumulated that try to answer these questions. Some of them are quite far-fetched.
Towards the end of the 19th century, for example, the American public was convinced that Poe was a victim of the electoral fraud that was popular in those days. At that time, politicians hired hoodlums to lure undecided voters to the polls and, with the help of alcohol, force them to circle the right number. The theory was that Poe was in Baltimore on the day of the election and that the pub he was lying in front of was also a polling station.
The cause of death is also still a matter of debate, as no medical report from those days exists. To date, there is a small sea of them: brain tumor, syphilis, epilepsy, mercury/lead poisoning, heart failure and rabies. But given the curse that followed Poe from birth, there is a much simpler explanation for how he ended up in Baltimore that day…
