Edgar Allan Poe, America’s Doomed Genius

The writer, artist, musician, or otherwise creative individual who abuses alcohol or drugs is something of a cliché in the art world. And yet, some of these same individuals are anything but cliché, and occasionally one of them is responsible for an artistic revolution.

Is the chemistry behind creation a catalyst or just a common denominator? In the tragic instance of Edgar Allan Poe, his dependencies were often all that he seemed to have—his vices and his immeasurable talent.

Orphaned as a young child by thespian parents, Poe was raised by John Allan, a merchant from Richmond and a man with whom young Edgar had a tenuous relationship. Poe’s brief enrollment at the University of Virginia in 1826 was marked by gambling and alcohol consumption, and although he was an excellent student, Allan refused to serve as benefactor to Poe’s poor behavior.

In his biography Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, Kenneth Silverman writes of this as the first of many periods of poverty in Poe’s life:

What mostly fed Edgar’s quarrel with John Allan were his financial problems at the university. During the year he accumulated very large gambling and other debts, a burden he blamed on Allan entirely. According to his later account, Allan sent him to Charlottesville with a hundred and ten dollars, which went immediately to pay for board and attendance. . . . Still owing $15 for room rent, $12 for a bed, and $12 more for furniture, payable in advance, he took on debts from the start. In fact, with its grand buildings and substantial faculty salaries, Jefferson’s university was the most expensive collegiate school in America, and a costly style of living prevailed. Most students [maintained] a gentlemanly round of partying, drinking, riding, occasionally even cock fighting. Sent there without enough money for the academic costs, Edgar said, he was “Immediately regarded in the light of a beggar.”

Poe’s time at UVA did, however, serve a more positive purpose. It was here that he began his interest in literature and writing, although to his adopted father’s chagrin, Poe’s tastes often ran toward more popular works. Poe’s brief learning experience in Charlottesville was the prelude to another doomed experience—his time at West Point. Although he was an excellent athlete (at Virginia he long-jumped more than twenty-one feet) and a swimmer, and a superlative student, he continued to be susceptible to alcohol, gambling, and bouts of despair. Spurning his five-year commitment to the academy, Poe left in early 1831, having spent less than a year in service.

Poe had previously published poetry (Tamerlane, 1827) and he again pursued writing, first in New York, then later in Richmond, and later still, in Philadelphia. He published stories throughout the 1830s, and in 1839, his work Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published. “The Fall of the House of Usher” from this volume is an excellent example of Poe’s vital and terrifying fiction. The following paragraphs from the conclusion of the story contain the moment of horror when Roderick Usher’s sister—having been placed in her grave prematurely—enters the family home.

"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! We have put her living in the tomb! Said I not that my senses were acute? I now tell you that I heard her first feeble movements in the hollow coffin. I heard them—many, many days ago—yet I dared not—I dared not speak! And now—to-night—Ethelred—ha! ha!—the breaking of the hermit's door, and the death-cry of the dragon, and the clangor of the shield—say, rather, the rending of the coffin, and the grating of the iron hinges, and her struggles within the coppered archway of the vault! Oh whither shall I fly? Will she not be here anon? Is she not hurrying to upbraid me for my haste? Have I not heard her footsteps on the stair? Do I not distinguish that heavy and horrible beating of her heart? Madman!"—here he sprung violently to his feet, and shrieked out his syllables, as if in the effort he were giving up his soul—"Madman! I tell you that she now stands without the door!"

As if in the superhuman energy of his utterance there had been found the potency of a spell—the huge antique panels to which the speaker pointed, threw slowly back, upon the instant, their ponderous and ebony jaws. It was the work of the rushing gust—but then without those doors there did stand the lofty and enshrouded figure of the lady Madeline of Usher. There was blood upon her white robes, and the evidence of some bitter struggle upon every portion of her emaciated frame. For a moment she remained trembling and reeling to and fro upon the threshold—then, with a low moaning cry, fell heavily inward upon the person of her brother, and in her horrible and now final death-agonies, bore him to the floor a corpse, and a victim to the terrors he had dreaded.

Death, living interment, and the dark, haunting places beyond the grave are all themes of Poe’s work. His narrators are haunted by voices of loved ones and voices of those who have been wronged. Typical of his horror is “The Tell-tale Heart,” an economically written (2,210 words) story of murder and vindication from the afterworld. It is one of the most famous short stories in the English language and one of the most widely anthologized. Poe is also generally given credit for introducing the detective into fiction. Sherlock Holmes pays a sarcastic tribute to Poe’s creation in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s first Sherlock Holmes adventure, A Study in Scarlet (1887):

"It is simple enough as you explain it," I said, smiling. "You remind me of Edgar Allen Poe's Dupin. I had no idea that such individuals did exist outside of stories."

Sherlock Holmes rose and lit his pipe. "No doubt you think that you are complimenting me in comparing me to Dupin," he observed. "Now, in my opinion, Dupin was a very inferior fellow. That trick of his of breaking in on his friends' thoughts with an apropos remark after a quarter of an hour's silence is really very showy and superficial. He had some analytical genius, no doubt; but he was by no means such a phenomenon as Poe appeared to imagine."

Poe achieved fame for his poetry in the 1840s. “The Raven” (1845) is another widely read work that contains an estranged voice. The use of internal repetition, anaphora (repetition occurring at the beginning of successive lines or phrases) and a pulse-like cadence give the work a sophisticated and other-worldly quality.

“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no back plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”

Poe’s obsessions with worlds beyond could have easily stemmed from his unhappiness with his life. Troubled by money, disassociated from his family, and stricken by the loss of his young wife, Virginia, in early 1847, Poe frequently abused alcohol, especially toward his end. He disappeared for several days in the early autumn of 1849, and he was found drunk and fevered in Baltimore. After subsisting miserably in a Baltimore hospital through the beginning of October, Poe succumbed to death, embracing his obsession permanently on October 7, 1849.

The year 2009 contains two Edgar Allan Poe anniversaries: the bicentennial of his birth and the 160th commemorative anniversary of his death. There is no shortage of historical sites to accommodate the Poe fan. Poe museums can be found in Richmond, Baltimore, New York, and Philadelphia; he is buried in downtown Baltimore in the Westminster Burial Ground.

Listen to a reading of Poe's The Tell-Tale Heart by the NPG's Warren Perry (14:41)

Suggestions for further reading:
Edgar Allan Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance by Kenneth Silverman (New York: HarperCollins, 1991)
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy by Jeffrey Meyers (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1992)
The Life of Edgar Allan Poe by George E. Woodberry (1909: New York: Biblo and Tannen, 1965)

Edgar Allen Poe's memorial grave, Baltimore, Maryland. Photo by Warren Perry.

Close-up of memorial grave, Baltimore, Maryland. Photo by Warren Perry.

Edgar Allen Poe House and Museum, Baltimore, Maryland. Photo by Warren Perry.

Edgar Allan Poe / George Kendall Warren / Albumen silver print, c. 1874, after 1849 daguerreotype / National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution

Comments

[Rob V]

Just to be clear, Poe was not a drug abuser or even a user, as your first paragraph implies. Second, your description of his works is very one-sided and far too generalized. Judging him by his horror works is unfair considering that the majority of his works are not horror - you ignore the sci-fi, the adventure tales, the detective stories and, most importantly, his comedy works. In fact, Poe wrote more humor than horror.

When he did write horror, it was for the sake of his mainstream reading audience, not for any internal struggles or issues - Poe never wrote an autobiography, after all.

Additionally, Poe was aware of his alcohol problem and, so, did the best he could to avoid drinking - including one period of 18 months at the end of his life (despite the assertion here that Poe "frequently abused alcohol, especially toward his end"). Evidence also suggests he went four years without a drop of alcohol. Of course, he was not found drunk in Baltimore - the doctor who attended him made that clear. He was found sick and dying in Baltimore, likely due to medical reasons (not so unusual, is it?).

200 years after his birth, we simply must stop abusing Poe with lies, rumors, and exaggerated truths. The man was not perfect, nor was he so simple as these stories - and, as you say, these clichés - imply. Especially from a reputable organization, I expect more.

[Rob V]

My previous comment was, apparently, not approved. I was trying to correct some of the misinformation in this article. Rumor-mongering about Poe has existed for over 160 years but, I think, the true Poe is just as interesting as the Poe Myth which this article perpetuates.

[National Portrait Gallery]

Thank you for your comments.

However, we stand firmly by our post.

First, the inclusive disjunction in the first paragraph places Poe within a large set of creative individuals who have abused either drugs or alcohol or both, a subset of which is the number of artists who have abused alcohol. Poe abused alcohol; it is widely documented.

Second, though Poe may not have abused opium to the extent he abused alcohol (historians generally agree that much discussion of Poe’s alleged use of opium is based on hearsay), Kenneth Silverman records in EAP: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance the following story of a Poe encounter with laudanum in November of 1848:

"Instead of returning to his hotel, Poe bought two ounces of laudanum… Poe then swallowed about half the laudanum. It is a solution of powdered opium in alcohol, weaker in opium content than morphine or heroin. In Poe’s time it was administered through cotton earplugs to hallucinating patients in mental hospitals, but was easily obtained and also widely used as a tranquilizer. The drug works quickly, producing maximum respiratory depression in ten minutes, and its peak effect in twenty minutes. The ounce or so that Poe said he took, equivalent to about 300 milligrams of morphine, represents some thirty times the average dose. The quantity is by itself enough to be fatal, although he intended… to swallow the remaining ounce."

Although it might not be considered evidence of long-term abuse, taking a dose of laudanum thirty times the size of a typical dose could easily be construed as opium abuse. That Poe intended to take another dose of the same quantity would certainly mitigate most anyone’s claim that Poe, at least in this one instance, abused opium, though it was never our intention to make that claim in our original article.

Third, we paid great homage to Poe’s detective fiction; it was central to our article.

Fourth, we used the word “horror” twice; once in reference to Roderick Usher’s face, second when we said, “Typical of his horror is The Tell-tale Heart, an economically written…” And although we discussed Poe’s work as the unparalleled master and creator of the genre, the subject was hardly the isolated one in our discussion. It was noted, however, that the subtitle of your calendar included the word macabre, which is an archaic French term connoting nothing less than horror.

Fifth, yes, we chose to omit a discussion of Poe’s lighter works. We also tend to leave out of most of our discussions on Abraham Lincoln that he was a riverboat pilot; like Poe, he is simply known for greater works.

Sixth, we did not in any way abuse Poe with “lies, rumors, and exaggerated truths.” A reading list and references were at the bottom of our article and they serve well to document our discourse, though all items in our article fall under the general knowledge of Poe as discussed in multiple biographies.

For your reference, please consider the following from an article pending publication by NPG historian David Ward:
"Like the raven itself, Poe was a dark presence amidst the optimism of early American culture. Not for Poe the glorification of the individual or the celebration of nature as life-giving. He peeled back the underside of America and sketched a gothic world in which nothing, especially human motivation, was transparent, predictable, or even knowable . . . In America, his voice is still singular for the strength with which it spoke against the spirit of the age. Poe’s great subject was death and he seemed to court it in life as well as in art, dying early after proving himself unable to function in the society he anatomized remorselessly."

Seventh and last, no, it is not unusual to be sick or to die “due to medical reasons.” By definition, everyone will be sick or will die from some medically defined cause.

- Warren Perry, National Portrait Gallery