Similarities Between Poe’s Life and His Works

In Edgar Allan Poe’s lifetime and today, critics think that there are striking similarities between what Poe lived and what he wrote.

 

His penetrating and sometimes depressing stories are thought to reflect his feelings. There is a truth to this, although his entire life was not miserable. In fact, in some of his poems the good characters are modeled after himself. Edgar Allan Poe’s writing was affected by many things in his life, including a turbulent childhood, his poverty, and his many tragic losses.

 

In Poe’s childhood he had five parents. His original mother and father, Elizabeth Arnold and David Poe, Jr.; John Allan and Fanny Allan, who took him in after his mother died and his father left him; and Jane Mackenzie whom he thought of as his mother.

 

Elizabeth Arnold was a famous actress whom everyone loved. Kenneth Silverman thinks it was she who initially instilled a love for the arts into his life. Unfortunately, she died when he was only two years old.

 

David Poe, Jr. was also an actor, but he did not gain nearly as much critical acclaim because of his stage fright and a tendency to mumble. He left soon after Edgar was born and went to Baltimore where he lived for a few years and gained a reputation as a drunkard. It is thought that he died at age twenty-seven in either New York or Baltimore.

 

After his mother’s death, Poe was sent to live with John and Frances Allan, who gave him a life radically different from the one he had known. Kenneth Silverman says that, in his new life, Poe found material wealth and love, instead of poverty and abandonment. At age thirteen, Poe went with John Allan to London where he received a strict boarding school education. He enjoyed the challenges this school brought to him.

 

William Wagenknecht says that in Poe’s later story, William Wilson, about a man who struggles with the concept of good and evil, the good character was based on Edgar’s happy times in England. With Poe’s new found wealth, he immersed himself into the arts. He would often quote Cervantes or Shakespeare and add that he was envious of their literary genius.

 

At the tender age of fifteen someone offered to publish a book of his works. Allan would not allow it, though, as he was concerned for Poe’s swelling ego. Edgar strove to excel in everything he did, swimming, long jump, running, and writing. His push to succeed later showed in his work, as he wrote continuously to keep pace with a growing demand for his stories.

 

He eventually broke away from Allan as a result of an argument between Allan and his second wife, with Poe taking the wife’s side. He briefly reconnected with Allan to get a recommendation for West Point. Poe eventually purposely failed from of West Point by missing classes, and he lost touch with his father altogether. These tumultuous moments brought great highs and lows, and seriously affected his writings.

 

Another aspect of Poe’s life that greatly affected his writing was poverty. Silverman agrees, saying that poverty was a consistent thread throughout his life, except his time with the Allans. In his early years, his mother’s career as an actress often left them with little more than donations from people who pitied the family. Poe later found himself bound on all sides by relentless debt and poverty. This influenced many of his decisions, including his decision to work for little or nothing in order to get his first book published. This book, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, was published with no royalties for its author. His only consolation was that he got to keep his copyrights. Times bittersweet forged him into a doleful self-awareness.

 

He often associated love with pain, hurt with hope, and majesty with a death and dying.

 

Ronald Gottesman cites that he called death “...that fitful stain of melancholy, which will ever be found inseparable from the perfection of the beautiful.”

 

Edward Wagenknecht’s view is that, “Beauty brings melancholy because it is impossible to hold, and it can not be dissociated from death because even while we grasp at it, death snatches it away.”

 

Poe’s oxymoronic views frightened many of the day’s top writers. Gottesman also states that Ralph Waldo Emerson nicknamed Poe the “jingle man”, Henry James called his writing primitive, and T.S. Eliot labeled him immature. For a long-term view, today Poe is highly regarded by critics and readers alike.

 

In his twenties, Poe’s struggles left him angry with the world. He transferred his anger from many a failed initiative, with lack of finance, into his writings and other life aspects. He often gave scathing reviews to better-than-average books and stories, and he publicly accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism.

 

These acts reflected a cause for which he was deeply involved–that of establishing an international copyright law. He was passionate in his pursuit for a personal equality among his contemporary authors. He saw where American writers were able to simply copy British writers with little or no consequence. All of these factors contributed to a frequent appearance of madmen during this era of his life, including: Roderick Usher in The Fall of the House of Usher; Montressor in The Cask of Amontillado; and the narrator in The Raven.

 

His poverty brought him shame and pain, but most critics are unsure of the total magnitude of the effect it had on his poetry and short stories.

 

Personal loss also had a considerable effect on Poe’s writing. Silverman articulates that when he was only two years old he had to be given to the Allans because of the tragic and sudden death of his mother. A respected actress, she was taken ill on tour, never recovering, despite many benefit performances given to raise care for her by the acting troupe. By all accounts, she would have been a great mother to Poe, despite her current poverty.

 

During Poe’s time with the Allans, he met Jane Standard. William Jay Jacobs stated that he “asked to call her ‘Helen’ rather than Jane–for the Greek Helen of Troy.” Through Jane he was able to have a relationship that he never had with his mother. A result of their relationship is Poe’s poem To Helen. In 1824 Jane died suddenly of a brain tumor. He and Jane’s son, his friend Rob, sometimes went to her grave together at night.

 

This unfortunately was not Poe’s last or greatest loss. In 1829, his foster mother also fell ill. Her dying wish was that Poe could see her face one last time before she was buried, but he was too late. She was buried in the same graveyard as Jane Standard, and once again he was there only to wonder and weep. Jacobs says she “was the third woman to whom he had looked for affection, only to have her taken from him by death: first his mother, then Mrs. Standard, and now the woman who had reared and protected him–Frances Allan.”

 

It was at this time that he also reworded some of his older works, including Tamerlane, and published them in a book called Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. He had rewritten the poems to reflect more of his personal life, including his losses. The loss that affected Poe’s life the most was, however, yet to come. He was removed from the University of Virginia for attempting to finance his scholarship, unaided by family, by gambling; and continued from there, a successful US Army soldier, and, afterward, West Point cadet, all with a limited or absent contact with Richmond's Allan. Leaving West Point in the pursuit of his ambitions, Poe never again spoke to John Allan.

 

He was editor of several magazines, and attempted starting a new one on his own, but he either failed, or quit, or was fired at all of them. Then he met the love of his life, his fourteen-year-old cousin, Virginia. They lived happily for only a short time before Virginia’s health began failing. As Virginia became more and more ill, so did Edgar. It was as if his heart were breaking as he watched her suffer, in pain and cold, only to see her die. After her early death, he often left his house at night, unable to sleep. He would go to her grave and sleep there beside. This period induced him to write one of his most-famous poems, “Annabel Lee”.

Annabel Lee

by Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of ANNABEL LEE;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea;
But we loved with a love that was more than love-
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsman came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me-
Yes!- that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we-
Of many far wiser than we-
And neither the angels in heaven above,
Nor the demons down under the sea,
Can ever dissever my soul from the soul
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee.

For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling- my darling- my life and my bride,
In the sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
 

Her death had started his rapid downfall, which included long periods of drinking, and eventually ended his life. Jacobs states that on October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe died in a hospital after being found lying in a gutter outside a voting poll where he had reportedly been trying to vote more than once. Poe, although widely respected in his youth, was rumored to have become crazy as he got older. The many losses he suffered greatly contributed to a permanent sadness and gloom.

 

Poe’s short life brought in a great fortune, though he never survived to see it. Like a great many outstanding artists, he was misunderstood by his time, and only death brought about his lasting fame. Having barely reached middle age, the world was robbed of one-half his productive years, and all of his maturing genius. We can only surmise the loss to literature and advanced thought, each dealt a crushing blow on this account.

 

From his unstable early years, to the death of his wife, Poe let everything around him enter his writing. The fact that people could relate to his characters made him a truly great writer. No matter how strange and perplexed his characters presented, there were always unashamed and unmasked human truths hidden within them. Those who were able to find their value praised him for his depth. As for those who were not, they passed him off as another magazine writer, undaunted by magnificent self-appraisal.

 

Attending his side during the time of his horrid death, his physician, acutely aware of the patient's enormous mind and inestimable knowledge, heard his delirious spews and his most heartfelt utterings; and was, therefore, himself exhausted in a general refusal for days on end to leave him. Having therein found respite, it is easy to see that the sickened man could have had insufficient desire to pick up or return to the dreary streets whence he came.

I became insane,
with long intervals of horrible sanity.
During these fits of absolute unconsciousness, I drank–
God only knows how often or how much.
As a matter of course,
my enemies referred the insanity to the drink,
rather than the drink to the insanity.
–Edgar Allan Poe,
from a letter to an admirer.

 

Bibliography

 

Works Cited

 

Gottesman, Donald (ed.). 1979.

The Norton Anthology of American Literature (vol.1).

New York: W.W. Norton and Company. p1204-1206.

 

Jacobs, William Jay.

Edgar Allan Poe.

McGraw-Hill Books. New York: 1975.

 

Poe, Edgar Allan.

The Unabridged Edgar Allan Poe.

Courage Books. New York: 1997.

 

Porges, Irwin.

Edgar Allan Poe.

Chilton Books. Boston: 1963.

 

Silverman, Kenneth.

Edgar A. Poe: A Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance.

Harper Collins Publishing. San Francisco: 1991.

 

Wagenknecht, Edward.

Edgar Allan Poe the Man Behind the Legend.

University Press. New York: 1963.