The characteristic themes in Poe’s work are those “of horror, terror, strange fantasies and psychological abnormalities.”¹ A myth has developed, over the years, which attributes these themes to the writer’s drinking and drug-taking. Before any comment can be made about the influences of drugs and alcohol on Poe’s work, the facts should be reduced to their proper proportion.

Poe was not a heavy daily drinker and was abstemious for long periods of time. He drank in times of emotional turmoil, when excitement or crises overtook him. In his own words he drank not for pleasure but to escape from “torturing memories … insupportable loneliness … a dread of some strange impending doom.”² His terrors drove him to seek comfort in drink; it was not drinking or drug-taking that brought on the terrors.

Reports of Poe’s addiction to opium have been grossly exaggerated in the past. There is little proof to support the view of Poe as a drug addict. Indeed, it would seem that he knew very little about the potency or physiological effects of laudanum, which contained opium, for once he unsuccessfully tried to commit suicide using it.

The reality is that Poe had a low resistance to alcohol and a physiological disorder from which he suffered that made him highly susceptible to stimulants. The very evidence of his productivity in terms of literary output contradicts the theory that he was an excessive drinker or drug-taker. It is highly doubtful that someone constantly under the influence of alcohol or drugs could have written so much or have been able to ignore their highly deleterious effects. Rather Poe was characterized by what may be termed the “irritation of a sensitive nature.”³

An examination of Poe’s artistic and poetic principles should serve to dispel the notion that he relied on stimulants for his creative instinct or that stimulants were the cause of his dark vision. He thought that art should put the individual in touch with beauty, and the sensuousness and lushness in his works should be attributed to this. And common elements in his poems are the contrast between material and immaterial love, the struggle to comprehend destruction, innocence accompanying human growth, a sense of loss—all contained in a rigorously controlled structure.⁴ His poems, formed as they are out of such careful attention to poetic structures, cannot be considered a manifestation of emotional, psycho-sexual self-indulgence brought about by stimulants.

Nor can his tales be considered as simply the product of a “disinterested fancy.”⁵ They are too intense and brooding to be thought of in this way. Poe was disturbed, beyond doubt. He suffered fits of deep depression and experienced many tragedies in his life, including the early death of his young wife. His mental state may have drawn him to the themes and tones characteristic in his works; death and disease, madness, fantasy and the dissolution of the personality. But the work itself cannot be so easily explained, nor attributed to the disturbed mind of a chronic alcoholic or drug addict. Poe’s works were often meticulously revised and show evidence of a heightened conscious artistry.

The escape from reality that is common in much of Poe’s work is not a drug-induced escape, but a conscious effort to introduce the theme of discovery through a backing away from the mundane. The determinants of Poe’s art include the terror of the soul and the imaginative quest for beauty; these two themes form the poet’s outlook on the world. Poe makes “studies of stages of consciousness when the real world slipped away.”⁶ In this way the mind confronts horror, loss and loneliness. Usher, for example, goes through such an experience of removal from the mundane, but because of an acute sensitivity, which terminates in madness, he is driven to destruction. However, this sensitivity is also that which allows him to perceive beauty in its ideal form. Thus Poe reveals the danger in departing from the mundane, for the individual becomes engulfed by experience. A disruption is caused between the self and the world and a split occurs in the personality. Such disruption and personality disorder can, then, be traced to an artistic source that has little to do with drugs or alcohol.

It is clear, then, that Poe’s art should not be looked at in terms of his drinking and drug taking so much as that his life should be examined to discover what led to his drinking. Astute critics have not attempted to use Poe’s indulgences in opium and alcohol to explain the morbid themes of his work. Rather they have recognized that he suffered “an isolation that would naturally lead to drunkenness and death.”⁷ They recognize also the amount of work and consideration that went into Poe’s art, contradicting the view that the tales were written by a mindless drunkard or drug addict:

The impulse that made him enjoy writing them—cannot have been the puerile one of amazement, but a deeper, logical enjoyment, in keeping with his own seriousness; it is that of PROVING even the most preposterous of his inventions plausible—that BY HIS METHOD he makes them WORK.⁸

In conclusion, Poe’s work must be considered as a “conscious art.” The image of the man has come to be distorted over the years, so that the fact that his works were composed by a conscious art has become forgotten. Poe believed that the poem, as a work, began in what he termed the “Poetic Sentiment,” was shaped by the imagination, and then constructed methodically, deliberately, and skillfully according to the imagined pattern. In short, each of Poe’s poems was the product of conscious effort by a healthy and alert intelligence. His themes grew out of an already depressed intelligence; their macabre nature cannot be attributed to drunkenness or drug addiction.

Notes

¹Vincent Buranelli, Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd edition (Boston: Twayne, 1977) p. 19.

² Buranelli, p. 33.

³Edgar Allan Poe, Selected Writings (Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967) p. 37.

⁴Poe, p. 24.

⁵ Poe, p. 23.

⁶ Poe, p. 43.

⁷William Carlos Williams, In the American Grain (New York: New Directions, 1956) p. 222.

⁸Floyd Stovall, “The Conscious Art of Edgar Allan Poe,” in Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays; Twentieth Century Views, edited by Robert Regan (Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967) p. 178.

Bibliography
Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe, 2nd edition. Boston: Twayne, 1977.

Regan, Robert, ed. Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays; Twentieth Century Views. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1967.

Poe, Edgar Allan. Selected Writings. Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin, 1967.

Williams, William Carlos. In the American Grain. New York: New Directions, 1956.