EDGAR ALLAN POE, 1809-1849
Born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, United States, his parents, both traveling actors, died when he was just three
years old and he was adopted by John Allan in Richmond, whose name he added to his own surname. By the age of
13 he had already written a large quantity of poetry, and at Virginia university he was an excellent student (but he
started having serious financial problems due to his addiction to gambling). His first collec-
tion Tamerlane and Other Poems, when he was only 18, had little success. He then went
to the military academy of West Point where he was expelled for neglecting his duties in
favour of writing.
Penniless and abandoned by his foster family, Poe was taken in by his aunt Maria Clemm
in Baltimore, where she lived with her eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, Poe’s future wife.
Poe became here a regular contributor to the Southern Literary Messenger, publishing not
just stories but scathing book reviews that earned him the nickname “tomahawk man.” Poe,
Virginia, and Maria Clemm moved to Richmond, where Poe then took the reins as editor of
the Messenger. The next year, Poe, 27, and Virginia, 13, married. Soon after he wrote his
only novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. In 1840 he published his first collec-
tion of stories Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Over the next few years, he pro-
duced some of his best-known stories including The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat,The Pit
and the Pendulum and The Gold Bug. It was only in 1845, with the publication of the poem
The Raven, that he finally reached fame and financial security. He was now able to devote himself to his work as a
writer.
However, tragedy struck in 1847 when his wife died as the age of 24. Unable to write and struggled with ill health, a
combination of epilepsy, heart disease and alcool addiction, he died in 1849 in Baltimore, at the age of 40. Poe’s
claustrophobic life consisted of one escape attempt after another, most of them unsuccessful. And drink promised an
oblivion that kept luring him back, with increasingly destructive consequences.
Hostile obituaries described him as a mad, immoral drunkard but paradoxically this cruel, unfair description of the
man brought him great public interest and boosted the sales of his books. Poe's immense contribution to American
literature has won him considerable posthumous fame, and the French poet Baudelaire played a significant role in
introducing Poe to French and European readers by publishing widely read criticisms and translations of Poe's writ-
ings.
POE'S MYSTERIOUS DEATH
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found at Ryan’s 4th Ward Polls, a tavern also known as Gunner’s Hall, in Baltimore,
disoriented and wearing tattered clothing. He was admitted to Washington College Hospital, where he never re-
gained full consciousness and died four days later.
His death was attributed to “congestion of the brain,” though no autopsy was performed. Due to conflicting testi-
monies from his doctor and a libelous obituary written by his literary nemesis Rufus Griswold, the nature of Poe ’s
death has remained in question. Doctors and scholars have theorized that Poe died of epilepsy, hypoglycemia, beat-
ing, rabies, alcohol, heart failure, murder, or carbon monoxide poisoning. One of the most compelling scenarios is
that Poe, found on election day, was a victim of “cooping,” a form of voter fraud in which a person is dressed up,
beaten, drugged, and forced to vote multiple times—the term is related to a “chicken coop,” as victims were often
held captive in a small space while abused. Not one of these theories has been proven, and Poe’s death remains a
mystery.
POE'S CONTRIBUTION TO LITERARY THEORY
Edgar Allan Poe invented the detective story, perfected the horror tale, and first articulated the theory of the modern
short story as well as the idea of pure poetry.
As a literary theorist (The Philosophy of Composition, 1846, and The Poetic Principle, 1850) he established the
structure of the short story as a genre: a work of fiction that can be read at one sitting so that the reader is not dis-
tracted by the external world and the story has to be limited to one single effect, to which all other details are subor-
dinate. As for poetry, he thought it should appeal only to the sense of beauty, not truth (a poem written solely for a
poem's sake); in short, he disapproved of poetry with didactic aims or ideas. French svmbolist poets, in particular
Baudelaire (1821-67), admired Poe's theory of poetry, and his concern for formal beauty was considered the origin
of the Aesthetic Movement.
With the phrase 'unity of impression' Poe means the capacity of a work of fiction to keep the reader's attention
without pauses or interruptions. If a prose work or a poem is too long, readers need to interrupt their reading several
times and this destroys the 'unity of impression', which is essential to maintain the 'exaltation of the soul' provoked
by any good literary work. According to Poe the literary form that best guarantees the 'unity of impression' is the
short story, which can be read in not more than two hours. Short stories keep the reader' attention at its highest and
allow the reader to connect with the author without mediations or interruptions.
PSYCHOLOGICAL HORROR
Edgar Allan Poe pioneered the genre with his tales. Throughout Poe’s fiction there runs an undercurrent of inward-
ness, an obsession with dark corners of the subconscious mind, at the time familiar perhaps only from Mary Shel-
ley’s Frankenstein (1818). He also uses a number of devices—exclamation points, double- dashes, italics, repetition,
the capitalization of first letters and sometimes of entire words—to support the urgency of his gothic stories.
Focusing on the darker sides of the human psyche, psychological horror tends to follow protagonists who are tor -
tured by their own mind or haunted by the darkness of others.
Psychological horror arguably terrifies the reader, still the contemporary one, more than other genres because it is
plausible. The Black Cat focuses on an alcoholic who is driven insane by his cat, leading him to commit acts of vio-
lence; “The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer.” Poe demonstrates that monsters are
not outside elements living under our bed, but rather they live in our heads. The beast lies not without, but within.
SETTING
Setting in Poe as the externalization of mental states, and the human mind is indeed the source of horror. Poe was
convinced that isolation was necessary in a Gothic tale: his protagonists cannot exist outside the physical spheres in
which they live and, as a consequence, Poe’s plots usually take place within limited spaces such as houses, rooms,
coffins or cellars. However, the protagonists are not merely physically restricted to a confined space, but are also so -
cially and psychologically detached from reality.
PERVERSENESS
Poe made use of the traditional gothic themes but added mental illnesses such as sadomasochism, obsession, delu-
sion and self-loathing. Actually, Poe called it “the perverse”, that is “the human propensity for self-destruction, [and]
for doing those things which are neither healthy nor socially acceptable”, as well as "an innate and primitive
principle of human action". Poe's characters are driven by crazy obsessions, and all committed crimes are just a way
to get rid of them.
FIRST PERSON NARRATOR
Poe shifted the narrative’s perspective to the first person, a strange intimacy was developed between character and
the reader: he was the first writer to press the relationship between monster/criminal and the reader to the point
where it came simultaneously unbearable and pleasurable.
