Poe, Edgar Allan (1809 - 1849) - Introduction
Introduction
American short story writer, poet, novelist, essayist, editor, and critic.
Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his highly acclaimed short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established an influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in nineteenth-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated what has been assessed as a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late nineteenth century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature. It is this philosophical and artistic transaction that accounts for much of Poe's importance in literary history.
BIOGRAPHICAL INFORMATION
Poe's father and mother were professional actors who at the time of his birth were members of
Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" (1832) won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with a legacy. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his twelve-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next ten years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.
MAJOR WORKS
Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."
Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include "The Black Cat" (1843) "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) and "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843)—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839), "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842), and "Ligeia" (1838) an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and also links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H. P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E. T. A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early nineteenth century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.
A tale of sickness, madness, incest, and the danger of unrestrained creativity, "The Fall of the House of Usher" is among Poe's most popular and critically examined horror stories. The ancient, decaying House of Usher, filled with tattered furniture and tapestries and set in a gloomy, desolate locale is a rich symbolic representation of its sickly twin inhabitants, Roderick and Madeline Usher. Besides its use of classical Gothic imagery and gruesome events—including escape from live burial—the story has a psychological element and ambiguous symbolism that have given rise to many critical readings. Poe used the term "arabesque" to describe the ornate, descriptive prose in this and other stories in his collection. "The Fall of the House of Usher" is also considered representative of Poe's idea of "art for art's sake," whereby the mood of the narrative, created through skillful use of language, overpowers any social, political, or moral teaching.
The story is also one of several of Poe's which utilize as a central character the Decadent Aristocrat. This mad, often artistic noble heir took the place of the traditional Gothic villain in tales portraying the sublime hostility of existence itself rather than the evil embodied by individuals. In addition to "The Fall of the House of Usher," such characters appear in his stories "Metzengerstein" (1840), "Berenice" (1840), "Ligeia" (1838), "The Oval Portrait" (1842), and "The Masque of the Red Death" (1842). Central to the setting in many of these stories is a large, ominous castle, likened by critic Maurice Lévy to the medieval fortresses that appear in the writing of Radcliffe, Charles Robert Maturin, and Horace Walpole. Interior architectural elements, such as the moving tapestry in "Metzengerstein," serve almost as characters in these tales.
A second group of Poe's tales center, in obsessive detail, on the horror and misery wrought by a guilty conscience. These include "The Black Cat," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and the doppelgänger story "William Wilson" (1840). "The Black Cat" is narrated by a once-kind man who has fallen into alcoholism. One day, in a rage, he hangs his cat and is forever haunted by the image. Upon attempting to kill the cat's replacement, he instead kills his wife. It appears his deeds will go unpunished until he is given away by the screaming animal, who is sitting on his dead wife's head. "The Tell-Tale Heart" features a similarly mad narrator forever tormented by the heartbeat of a man he has murdered. While not widely acclaimed during his lifetime, it has become one of Poe's most famous stories. While the stories "Hop-Frog: Or, the Eight Chained Orang-Outangs" (1849), "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1843), and "The Cask of Amontillado" do not take a guilty conscience as their starting point, they share the same paranoid intensity demonstrated in these tales.
Poe first gained widespread acclaim for his poem "The Raven" (1845), which exhibits elements of the tales in both groups identified above. Set at the stroke of midnight in an otherwise empty chamber, the narrator hears a tapping at his door. The narrator, tormented by the ominous raven revealed to be the source of the noise, is not wracked with guilt, however. Rather, he mourns the loss of his love, Lenore, while the raven serves as a despicable and terrifying reminder of her death.
Poe completed only one novel, and it was written in the Gothic tradition. Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), the story of an ill-fated sea voyage, has captured the attention of generations of readers with its action-packed plot, imaginative use of symbol and myth, depiction of cannibalism, and numerous unusual occurrences. Critics studying the imagery of Pym have frequently cited Freudian and Jungian analyses, with the voyage identified as a seminal symbol of a journey inward into consciousness, or denoting a return to the womb.
CRITICAL RECEPTION
While most of his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe has come to be viewed as one of the most important American authors in the Gothic tradition. While even today some critics deride the author's style as amateurish and overwrought, Pamela J. Shelden (see Further Reading) argues that Poe turned hackneyed styles to new and advantageous use. Likewise, Maurice Lévy regards the author as steeped in the tradition of Radcliffe, Walpole and Maturin, yet wholly original. Poe's stories and poems have become some of the most widely read in English-language literature.
"The Fall of the House of Usher" has been lauded by scholars as a prime example of the Gothic short story. Over the years, there have been many interpretations of the story, and much recent scholarship has viewed the tale as a fictional representation of many of Poe's own literary and social theories. For example, Stephen Dougherty sets the tale in the context of racism and fears of miscegenation in nineteenth-century society and also examines the potential influence of French theorist Michel Foucault's political ideas on the work. In general, "Usher" is acknowledged as one of Poe's most cerebral tales, with little or no action to carry the plot. Because of this, the story has lent itself to numerous interpretations, eliciting a large amount of scholarship that continues to explore the text from a variety of perspectives.
Poe's The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym underwent a remarkable transformation in reputation during the twentieth century. When it was first published and for the remainder of the nineteenth century, the novel was ignored completely, dismissed as a literary hoax, or deemed just another of Poe's fantastic tales. In the second half of the twentieth century, however, Pym emerged as the most frequently discussed of all of Poe's works. Critics have studied Poe's handling of language and Gothic imagery and explored Poe's use of narrative structure to produce special effects in the novel. Leslie Fiedler notes that many of the literary conventions used by Poe, and for which he was widely censured, were intended to offer ironic commentary on slavery and other accepted nineteenth-century practices and challenge the notion of innocence in the Western world. A. A. Markley traces Gothic authors who may have influenced Pym, such as William Godwin, and credits Poe with building on this tradition.
Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, and of the Gothic style in particular. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed writer and works as one, criticism of the past twenty-five years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his work. His writing is viewed as highly revelatory of the darkest elements of human nature. Poe's tales "are a concatenation of cause and effect," observes D. H. Lawrence. "His best pieces, however, are not tales. They are more. They are ghastly stories of the human soul in its disruptive throes."
Navigate
Related Topics
