The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe

“A lie,” says an American proverb, “will run from Maine to Mexico while Truth is putting on its boots,” and the memories of few celebrated men have been more freely aspersed or more tardily vindicated than has that of Edgar Allan Poe. No sooner was the breath out of his body than his enemies addressed themselves to the congenial task of bespattering his reputation, and continued to do so, unchecked and almost unchallenged, for many years. Amongst other charges so contemptible as to be unworthy of a moment’s consideration, he was held up to public execration as a confirmed inebriate and denounced as a shameless plagiarist. At this distance of time it is hardly necessary to remark that the former charge was a particularly cruel perversion of the truth, while the latter was entirely without foundation. But it is a well-known axiom that, if only a sufficiency of mud is thrown, some of it is sure to stick; and in consequence Poe was for a long time denied that place on the roll of fame to which his remarkable talents, both as a poet and a romancer, fairly entitled him. The present generation, however, has witnessed a signal reaction in his favour. Thanks to the untiring efforts of several prominent men of letters both in his own country and in England, the darker shadows which rested upon his name have been effectually dispersed; the world has gradually come to take a more just view both of his character and his genius; and in this, the closing year of the nineteenth century, we find Poe’s reputation more firmly established than at any time since his untimely death in 1849.

To a right understanding of the works of any author some knowledge of his life is essential, for a man’s writings are always to a greater or less extent the reflection of his character and his surroundings. Of course there are exceptions to this as to other rules. There are authors whose forte lies in describing the passions and the impossibility of controlling them, and who in private life are confirmed misogynists; while there are others, whose most entertaining books have been dictated upon a bed of suffering from which there was little chance of their ever rising again. But Poe was not one of these exceptions: in his writings—and more especially in his poetry—his character is mirrored for all men to behold it.

Naturally of a morbid temperament, Poe’s innate propensity to look upon the dark side of things was strengthened by the circumstances in which he was placed. His life was one of continuous disappointment. He laboured incessantly, and hardly earned enough to keep body and soul together; he was, perhaps, the most original genius of his time, and was accused of pilfering from the work of vastly inferior minds; he was intensely ambitious, and remained a literary hack to the end of his days; he was of a most affectionate disposition, and was compelled to witness the one whom he loved best upon earth in the grip of a cruel and lingering disease, without possessing the means of procuring her the comforts which might have alleviated her sufferings. Knowing all this, can we wonder at the tone of settled melancholy which pervades his poetry—the regret for what might have been, the yearning for what can never be? Here and there, it is true, he strikes a different note, as in “Eulalie” and the charming little lyric “To Helen,” which latter poem, however, was written when he was still a boy; but these variations, like glimpses of blue sky on a dark and lowering horizon, only serve to intensify the general gloom. And yet, in spite of their sadness, there is a pathetic sweetness in his verses, which appeals irresistibly to the heart, and makes the reader fain to admit that in his particular strain Poe is indeed a master.

Born at Boston on January 19th, 1809—the son of one David Poe, a man of good family, who had married an actress and subsequently adopted his wife’s profession—Edgar Allan Poe had the misfortune to lose both his parents in infancy, after which he was adopted by his godfather, Mr. John Allan, a wealthy and childless Richmond merchant, with the intention, it is thought, of making him his heir. The boy was handsome, witty, and precocious, and was petted and indulged by his adopted father to his heart’s content; indeed, it is to the injudicious treatment which he then received that Poe himself ascribes many of the difficulties which beset his path in after life.

When eight years old he was brought to England and placed at a school at Stoke Newington kept by a Dr. Bransby, who is amusingly depicted in “William Wilson,” one of Poe’s finest stories. Here he remained five years, when he returned to America, and after studying until he was seventeen at a Richmond academy, matriculated at the University of Virginia, at Charlottesville. At the University he seems to have acquired some reputation as a scholar; but at the end of his first session a difference of opinion with his godfather in respect of some gambling debts, which the old gentlemen very properly refused to pay, led to an open quarrel, and Poe, instead of returning to Charlottesville, set out for Europe, with the intention of assisting the Greeks, then struggling to free themselves from the intolerable yoke of Turkey. It does not appear, however, that he took any part in the war, nor even beheld, except in his mind’s eye, the remains of “the glory that was Greece.” After wandering about the Continent for a couple of years he returned home, became reconciled to Mr. Allan, and, having expressed a wish to enter the army, was accordingly nominated to a cadetship at West Point. But, alas, the “Imp of the Perverse” was ever at his heels, and in less than twelve months he was cashiered “for various neglects of duty and disobedience of orders.”