A flutter of raven feathers accompanies each recitation of the name: Edgar Allan Poe. He is the “Master of the Macabre.” If we need visual assistance to remember him, we can look at the “Ultima Thule” daguerreotype, which shows him gaunt, with his left eyebrow collapsed, wearing a cravat resembling a torn bedsheet tied into a noose, his arms crossed. This is what has been made of him by the inclusion of his Gothic fictions in the short story anthologies and all the film adaptations. Meanwhile, his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, the two detective stories, his forays into science fiction including “A Descent into the Maëlstrom,” and his fanciful, satirical pieces such as “How to Write a Blackwoods Article” have receded. As for his poems, the silliest have endured, that is, the nursery rhymes of “Annabel Lee,” and that awful quothing raven, while his Coleridgean best, “The City in the Sea,” or “Dream-Land,” won’t ring many bells. There is also, in the Library of America edition, over fourteen hundred pages of essaying and reviewing, much of it now outdated given the obscurity of the books he was at work on, but including comments on Longfellow, Hawthorne, and Dickens, and ambitious treatises on “The Rationale of Verse” and “The Philosophy of Composition.” It is difficult to fit all of this together except to say that he was a magazine man who wrote whatever he could sell. A friend shown his library found that it contained more periodicals and newspapers than books. His long-held ambition, never achieved, was to start his own magazine.
Those glossy, jet-black feathers adorn the cover of a new biography, Edgar Allan Poe: A Life, by Richard Kopley. Something about the image is off, and a peek at the copyright page explains that it was “AI generated by pham.” Kopley, Distinguished Professor of English Emeritus at Penn State DuBois, has published studies of The Scarlet Letter and its sources, Edgar Allan Poe and the Dupin Mysteries, and The Formal Center in Literature: Explorations from Poe to the Present. He draws, as have no other Poe biographers, from letters between Flora Lapham Mack, stepdaughter to Poe’s friend John H. Mackenzie, and her relative William Lanier Washington. These refer to memories of Poe, many of them early in his life, related by the Mackenzie family of Richmond, Virginia, most of all by John, who is loyally fond of Poe and very compassionate. Kopley’s notion of a formal center in Poe’s writings, around which a chiasmic structure is built, leads him into biographical readings suggesting that Poe dwelt on episodes in his life without ever writing about them directly for the public, while the letters assist in presenting Poe as forgivable, however reckless, as a man who suffered much, not all by his own folly. The book offers a few sips from what Kopley calls Poe’s “bitter cup of misery,” while finding a few consolations, including those encoded in the work.
Poe’s life is not a grand story. It’s only 40 years long, for a start. Born in 1809 in Boston to actors Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe Jr., he is soon moved to Richmond, orphaned, and taken up by his relations John and Frances Allan, though only, writes John, as “an experiment” to please the wife. The family lives in England from 1815 to 1820, where young Edgar attends two boarding schools, then returns to Richmond, where he finishes school and briefly attends the University of Virginia. He will never again leave the country. Gambling debts end his college career, he enlists in the army, he publishes a book of poetry, and with some help from Allan he gets into West Point Military Academy. As at university, he hasn’t enough money from his foster father, and after finding out he will not inherit Allan’s fortune he leaves and moves to Baltimore, staying with family including his aunt Maria Clemm and cousin Virginia. He now writes short stories as well as more poems. Allan dies, Poe returns to Richmond, Maria and Virginia following, and in 1836 he marries Virginia, who is then 13 years old. Maria lives with them, but there will be no children. His drinking habits get him fired from an editing job, the family moves to Philadelphia where he will edit Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine while planning to start his own literary publication, and he publishes his Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, which includes “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In 1842, Virginia contracts tuberculosis, he continues drinking, the family moves to New York, and he gets in the news for a literary flirtation, then sues the Evening Mirror and the Weekly Mirror. In 1847, Virginia dies. After two courtships, Poe seeks marriage with a friend from his Richmond childhood, Sarah Elmira Royster, partly in quest of her wealth. The engagement achieved, he journeys back to New York to fetch Maria, but on his way has a final drinking binge, disappears for a few days, and dies in a Baltimore hospital.
This summary ought to be placed next to the extravagances of Poe’s fictional stories. A traveler reaches a summit to observe a maelstrom (“the Maelström,” actually, off the Norwegian coast), which is “sending forth to the winds an appalling voice, half shriek, half roar, such as not even the mighty cataract of Niagara ever lifts up in its agony to Heaven.” His ship is pulled into the deep and he emerges gray-haired as if aged by decades. A wealthy man loses his wife, Ligeia, in a “dim and decaying city by the Rhine.” He buys an abbey in the English countryside for his new bride, “the fair-haired and blue-eyed Lady Rowena Trevanion, of Tremain.” She dies too, but comes back to life, and now with her predecessor’s appearance, hair “blacker than the wings of the midnight” and “the full, and the black, and the wild eyes — of my lost love — of the lady — of the LADY LIGEIA!” (Stephen King likes his italics and his all-caps, but one flounders thinking of another writer who uses exclamation marks nearly as often as Poe.) In the only Poe novel, the effective but admittedly episodic Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, there is a boat crash, a stowaway on a whaling ship nearly starved to death during a mutiny, a mutiny against the mutiny, storms, an encounter with the Flying Dutchman, cannibalism, shark attacks, the discovery of a new tribe in the South Seas, and finally, beyond a cataract of ash, something more, a “shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men.”
The eastern seaboard was no constraint on Poe’s fictive restlessness, because he had an audience for the exotic, and his reading had some range, from Latin and Greek poetry at school and university to Shakespeare, Robinson Crusoe (read along with John Allan), English Gothic novels, Romantic poetry, and all manner of contemporary American books on Christianity, travel, natural history, philosophy, and so on. In the novel Pym, Poe brings together Defoe, The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, recent sources for the Flying Dutchman, the speculations of the explorer J.N. Reynolds, and, as Kopley demonstrates, Coleridge’s plan for a literary treatment of Jerusalem’s by Titus. The novel’s seams are showing, rather, but there is something charming in the audacity of the plotting. Much of the fantastic invention surely also has to do with Poe’s notorious temperament. The narrator of “Eleonora,” one of Poe’s many rattled, histrionic types, tells us: “I am come of a race noted for vigor of fancy and ardor of passion.” And the teller of the “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “True! — nervous — very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad?” One learns in Kopley’s account that John Allan may be partly to blame for Poe’s wildness, with his alternating affection and coldness toward a boy who, according to a playmate, had “a sensitive nervous organization, like a fine string instrument.” Kopley shows that Poe often saw himself under a tragic aspect, and argues that he lamented his brother Henry’s early death and his adoptive father’s cruelty more than has been thought, finding ways to sound his sorrow in both Pym and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” Poe’s inspiration for ecstatic and morbid literary moods, though, was most often a very young woman, starting with Sarah Elmira Royster, for whom he may have written a poem that appeared unsigned in the Richmond Phenix when they were both adolescents. At that time Poe also met Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a classmate, who became “the confidant of all his boyish sorrows,” but then died the next year. She was recalled in some of Poe’s most famous lines: “Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face, / Thy Naiad airs have brought me home / To the beauty of fair Greece, / And the grandeur of old Rome.”
The older woman, long deceased, is transformed into the tutelary and tutorly classical ideal, while immature love and premature death have formed an early association in Poe’s imagination, one he would use often in his work. He was to marry a girl and lose a young woman, and then seem worn ragged with grief and guilt in the last few years. That marriage to his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia, whose onomastic resonances should be obvious, has previously been a very famous item of literary biography, in part through “Annabel Lee,” but also through its treatment in stories like “Eleonora” and “Ligeia.” Nabokov, who would play an elaborate game of allusions to Poe with his fictional Annabel Leigh (and Roland Pym) in Lolita, told the scholar Alfred Appel Jr. that he had planned to call the nymphet “Virginia,” in a novel called Ginny, which would have made for a rather dastardly tribute. Lee is preserved not only as Leigh but as the second of “three steps down the palate . . . . Lo. Lee. Ta.” Both authors, or at least Poe and Humbert Humbert, were Romantics given to melancholy, manipulative sentimentalists, and fascinated with beautiful, ephemeral creatures, be they brides or butterflies. The fanciful commentary on memories of Lolita describes an experience of haunting much like some of Poe’s nocturnal visions: “when you instantly evoke, with shut eyes, on the dark innerside of your eyelids, the objective, absolutely optical replica of a beloved face . . . .” That said, Poe pictures the eyelid not as a projection screen, but as a barely translucent medium, in the poem “Dream-Land.” That region is inaccessible to the waking, of course: “Never its mysteries are exposed / To the weak human eye unclosed; / So wills its King who hath forbid / The uplifting of the fring’d lid; / And thus the sad Soul that here passes / Beholds it but through darkened glasses.”
This, like most of Poe’s best verse, is quiet and sibilant, mimicking a slow exhalation, the sound of the spirit. The poet is calm and controlled. But when not working, Poe was abandoning control and pouring literal spirits into what everyone knew was a sensitive system. At the University of Virginia, where Poe was otherwise distinguishing himself with his translations of Tasso and his juvenile fictions, his drinking does not seem to have been more than the collegiate, convivial norm, and his vice was card playing. But his friend George Miles does recall that when he drank, it was to “calm and quiet the excessive nervous excitability under which he labored.” This, it is well known, does not tend to work. Several years later, in Richmond, where Poe edited the Southern Literary Messenger, the problem emerged properly. The cycles of abstention and relapse make for unhappy reading, as do the pledges to stop and the formulaic expressions of concern from friends and family. When on his bouts, Poe would go missing from work, even from home, and lose editing jobs when he had frustrated his bosses beyond patience. When he returned, he would be not just hungover but sick, needing much care from Virginia and her mother. A colleague avers that Poe was “kind and courtly” when sober, when drunk “the most disagreeable man I have ever met.” The long-gone biological father and the older brother Henry, who died in 1831, were both tipplers, and Kopley, with backing from the surgeon general on the nature of addictions, seconds John H. Mackenzie’s claim that given his predisposition Edgar eventually could not help himself. Poe’s problem may have been even more acute: a few are quoted in the book as observing that just one drink seemed to intoxicate him, and it has been posited that he had hypoglycemia, which condition may also have affected F. Scott Fitzgerald, another drunk whose reveling could swing into raving. Kopley claims and then patiently convinces his reader that the essential thing with Poe was his sturdy belief in his talent, which got him through even these difficulties. Had he avoided drink, Poe likely could have raised money for his magazine and pulled the literary levers, and his legacy would have been left differently. As it was, an apparently envious editor named Rufus Griswold, made Poe’s literary executor under dubious circumstances, disparaged him in an obituary and in a posthumous edition’s biographical sketch. As to whether Poe’s drinking compromised or affected his writing, Kopley’s book may help suggest an answer, however unintentionally.
A child can read a spooky story like “Berenice” and “get it” as thoroughly as any scholar, so there is no need for Kopley to forward claims about his subject’s relevance or importance. Poe looked at popular magazines and found that they exploited readerly appetites, which he could list: “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful coloured into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” The critical side of Kopley’s book involves an analysis of structures which will certainly not have been noticed by the child reader. On the record, Poe was interested in symmetry and “unity of effect”; he wrote about cryptography, and his poem “A Valentine” is an acrostic; his criticism has a pseudo-scientific bent. With all this prompting, Kopley is at work finding patterns. The conceit is that Poe would build a chiasmic structure around the midpoint of a work, such as the beginning of the third section of four in “Berenice,” or the fourth paragraph out of seven in “Life in Death.” Words and short phrases proceed before the midpoint in the order A, B, C . . . and after the midpoint in the order . . . C, B, A. “Chiasmus” is derived from chi, the Greek “X”, and in the most elaborate instance of the form, Pym, “X” marks the spot of the character Augustus’ death, which corresponds to that of Poe’s brother Henry. At greater length, as in Kopley’s book on the “formal center” in Poe and other American writings, the analysis of mirroring effects may well be intriguing, but within this Life it is not always quite convincing.
Some things must be said about the land Kopley is surveying. Poe was very repetitious. In the poetry, he sometimes takes it too far, as we are reminded if we read Aldous Huxley’s parody of him, rewriting Milton, in the essay “Vulgarity in Literature,” which also ridicules his stiff meter. In the stories, the repetition is appropriate to and evocative of the torment and obsession of his narrators, who are stilted and lack certain arts, all the better for the sake of their urgent, haunted appeals. It’s an obvious matter in a short passage, such as in “The Tell-Tale Heart”: “Meantime the hellish tattoo of the heart increased. It grew quicker and quicker, and louder and louder every instant. The old man’s terror must have been extreme! It grew louder, I say, louder every moment! — do you mark me well? I have told you that I am nervous: so I am.” (Later in the story, “louder! louder! louder!” is, onomatopoeically, the dreadful heartbeat.) But across the length of the story, it happens below the notice of the reader. Among dozens of short stories, mere repetition has a decent chance of creating patterns that the author did not intend, certainly when one imposes a basic structure of division into two halves by locating a middle which the story does not formally mark. Kopley finds that “The Man in the Crowd” contains these repetitions across the center: “momently increased” and “momently increasing”; “absorbed in contemplation” and “absorbed in contemplation”; “eyes rolled quickly” and “eyes rolled wildly.” This could easily be taken as phraseology that Poe and his narrator simply relied on, and, as Kopley does not point out, the order of the sequence is not reversed in the second half, as it is, for example, in “Berenice.” There is an undeniable plot symmetry in Pym, which Kopley handles well, finding suggestions of hope in the echo from beginning to end, but the smaller verbal symmetries of the stories are perhaps not as promising as he would have us think. There is, to risk a pun, something of a crux here, in that he is representing what has been considered Poe’s problem, his lapsing into repetition, as a clever formal gambit.
Reminded thus of Poe’s tendencies in diction, and helpfully alerted to subtler autobiographical touches, one can look into the work, however conventional it may be, and find something new. In adolescence, one reads a story like “The Fall of the House of Usher” with some measure of awe. The tale will be teased out of the memory when one reads the fate of the Clennam house in Little Dorrit, or Robert Louis Stevenson’s Olalla, or the ending of Carrie, not necessarily bringing the conviction that a debt is owed, but rather, as Poe’s critics have to concede, that he can intuit and access universal fears more easily than most writers. Revisited, the story is a bit clumsy. Even just catching the title in a table of contents, one doesn’t like to see that double “of.” It’s a little too long, and yet not long enough to contain things like the six verses of Roderick Usher’s ballad, or the catalogue of books he and the narrator are reading, or the odd, favorable comparison of his paintings to Fuseli’s. Again, there is repetition, a terrific quantity of “gloom” all over the place. But the plodding and protraction are doing something. The black and crimson Gothic is complemented by a melancholy midnight blue: the narrator’s feeling for Roderick is sympathy with a little disgust, but Poe’s is something else. Roderick, who sometimes speaks in the heavy voice of the “lost drunkard,” has a “morbid acuteness of the senses,” so that his own guitar and voice “impromptus” are the only music he can tolerate, the sound of himself and his situation. Like the man in the de Béranger epigraph whose heart is compared to a lute, and as readers before the biographies wouldn’t have known, like Edgar, he has “a sensitive nervous organization, like a fine string instrument.” Lonely Roderick, the last of the Ushers once his sister Madeline wastes away, seems to know that the “pestilent and mystic vapour” around the house is making him mad, but has no will to escape.
Obsessed with speculations about his ill health, he cannot enjoy the medieval romance, the “Mad Trist” of Sir Launcelot Canning, which the narrator hopes will soothe him. Roderick has no quest, no grail to find, so the dying shriek of the dragon in the story has to find a local analogue, the sound of his sister’s agony as she breaks out of her tomb. The critic V.S. Pritchett adduces Roderick’s confession — he knew that they had buried Madeline alive — as an example of Poe’s doing up “the conventional nightmare of the drug addict or the facile alcoholic” as an “incantation.” Inebriates are rather given to selfish, forceful repetition: “Not hear it — yes, I hear it, and have heard it. Long — long — long — many minutes, many hours, many days, have I heard it — yet I dared not — oh, pity me, miserable wretch that I am! — I dared not — I dared not speak!” There is a “deep and dank tarn” outside the house which adds to the noxious vapors, and into which the whole edifice will sink, with a “long, tumultuous shouting sound like the voice of a thousand waters.” I venture to suggest that a thousand waters may be the euphemistic reckoning of a thousand whiskeys, a very heavy tab. Roderick does not seem to drink, not in the account of this narrator who is with him all through his final days, but the sickness heard in his voice is at least analogous to dipsomania. It is the voice of Poe’s other narrators too, those intoxicated by fear and guilt, but also a panicking self-regard that can pass as self-castigation, or self-knowledge. “I have told you that I am nervous: so I am.” The horror in Poe is often that these desperate cases have only themselves. They are alone, each of them, in a haunted house.
Poe’s borrowing of this voice, perhaps mostly from himself, gives his stories an intensity that is rarely achieved in prose. They are overheated, fraught, and rather obviously ginned up, subjecting their narrators to tangible and spectral intrigues while suggesting, when not saying, that the victims are complicit. Readers will notice these kinds of anxious muddles in Conrad, and later Graham Greene: those two, like Poe, have a taste for the adventure into the exotic, but cannot be called writers of escapist fiction. There is not an obvious American lineage from Poe until, in the 20th century, H.P. Lovecraft and later horror writers take up the bloody pen. He did not travel in Europe, as Emerson or Hawthorne did, but his legacy is rather cosmopolitan. Kopley ends with the unveiling of a Poe statue in Boston, attended by the former U.S. poet laureate Robert Pinsky. He looks for traces of Poe in the more immediate sphere, in the work of Frederick Douglass and Herman Melville, but Poe seems to send his strongest signals in a more fantastic diffusion, not just across the pond but further, to Baudelaire, who liked his synesthetic effects, and to Thomas Mann and Dostoevsky, who were much impressed by the doppelgänger tale “William Wilson.” Nabokov read Poe in his Russian boyhood, and in the original, too. What he brought back to Poe’s native country around 50 years later in Lolita is Poe’s haunted melancholy, to be sure, but also something of his poetics. The attention given Poe by Nabokov, though not uncritical, is the best compliment we can cite to counteract the charge of vulgarity and artlessness, or the catty criticism of Harold Bloom, who had it that the Poe short story is but a myth from the unconscious universal, better in translation or in our own words. We can sense that for Nabokov, Poe, more than just a storyteller, was a teacher of literary art. How is it that Poe at his worst, near self-parody, is so affecting, and why is he outgrown but not discarded, stored like a favorite childhood curio somewhere up in the attic of the memory? Because one learns something from him and knows it is valuable.
We know that to Poe’s ears, a thousand waters can form a voice; in his “Tamerlane” we find “dwindled hills” which are “shouting with a thousand rills”; Nabokov’s Ada studies “the purity of the running water’s enunciation.” But there is nothing like the sea. Humbert Humbert has his famous “princedom by the sea,” adapted from “Anabel Lee” and shared with Anabel Leigh, but Professor Pnin, a figure without pomp, has his own remembered coastal demesne. Here he is on his way back from the dentist, who has taken all his teeth:
It surprised him to realize how fond he had been of his teeth. His tongue, a fat sleek seal, used to flop and slide so happily among the familiar rocks, checking the contours of a battered but still secure kingdom, plunging from cave to cove, climbing this jag, nuzzling that notch, finding a shred of sweet seaweed in the same old cleft . . . .
The tongue, lingua, has that special association with language, and is its muscular, agile operator, but as the seal, it is also a frolicking, hedonistic creature, a joyful homebody. Nabokov turns our attention to the mouth, literal but now imaginatively littoral, too, so as to relish the feeling of the language with which literature is formed. This trick could be learned in different places, but Poe is a likely first teacher. When the speaker in “Anabel Lee” remembers how “we loved with a love which was more than love” — he makes a childish repetition, but he also has us feeling the three taps of the tongue near the teeth that three times form “love.” (Most of Poe’s other loves share this most delicate phoneme: Helen, Eleanora, Lenore, Eulalie, Ligeia, Ulalume! The lost lover’s name is always on the tip of his tongue.) If this is only a world of words, both on the page and between the parts of the speech apparatus, “love” is trapped there, in the cramped kingdom of the poem, the mouth: He can say that love can be more than love, and mean it, but “love” cannot be more than “love.” It sounds like nonsense, but it doesn’t feel like it. In the triple telling, both humble and proud — “loved with a love which was more than love” — one can feel in the second consonant the gentle spirit as it tries to get out through the narrow channel between top teeth and bottom lip. Though Annabel is locked up in the sepulcher, the spirit is released at the end of the poem into the “sounding sea” beyond, where it carries far with its sibilance. However embarrassing we might find Poe, this is how his persistent, perseverating love of language, and his language of love, have reached other shores.
Kazuo Robinson is a writer based in New York. His work has been published by The New Criterion, Cleveland Review of Books, The Spectator World, and The Oxonian Review. He is on Substack at kazuorobinson.substack.com.
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There's a lot more to Poe than what we learned in high school, and this tells us that his influence went a lot further and longer. It's a pity he drank himself to death so young, and I'm glad to know that we have a biography that dives a lot deeper than the usual material in textbooks.