Biography of Edgar Allan Poe - Research Paper Example

?The great and influential American Edgar Allan Poe, who was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809, was interesting, mysterious, and controversial, both during his life and even after his death. He has had a profound influence on our culture, and not just in the genres of literature, including Gothic literature, detective fiction, and science fiction, he either invented or expanded. He is most likely responsible for our culture’s fascination with death, the macabre, and the mysterious. His life seemed to parallel many of the themes he wrote about, with his many losses of significant women in his life, which inspired his works, even up to his bizarre, mysterious, and explained death. Poe was orphaned early in life. His parents, David Poe, Jr. and Elizabeth, who were both actors, named their second son after a character in the Shakespeare play “King Lear.”1 His mother died of consumption (tuberculosis) shortly after his father abandoned the family when Edgar was a baby, so he lived with his foster family the Allans in Richmond, Virginia. His foster father, John Allan, was a successful Scottish businessman. The Allans never formally adopted Poe, but gave him his name “Edgar Allan Poe.” Poe was the first American to seriously attempt to make a living solely as a writer. He had some success, but struggled financially most of his life. Some of his biographers, who either hated him or wanted to use him as an example to support the temperance movement, said that Poe suffered from alcoholism, or as they called it back then, dipsomania, which is the uncontrollable desire for alcohol. The publishing industries in the early 1800s in America made it difficult for writers to earn a living, so Poe supported his family with a short military career and by editing several literary magazines. He earned just $9 for his poem “The Raven”(1845), even though it gave him instant fame. Poe married his 13-year old first cousin, Virginia Clemm, when he was 26. Virginia was ill throughout most of their marriage, and finally died of tuberculosis in 1847. Virginia’s illness and early death deeply affected Poe. Many biographers state that Poe turned to alcohol during her long illness and months following her death, although the severity of his drinking is a controversial issue debated both during his lifetime and by modern biographers (Silverman 183). One of Poe’s early biographers, Joseph W. Krutch, writing in 1924, stated that Virginia “was the only woman whom he ever loved” (57). One of Poe’s favorite themes in his poetry and tales is the death of a beautiful woman, which Poe called “the most poetical topic in the world” (Silverman 295). Many of his stories and poems were influenced by the many losses in his life, including the deaths of his mother Eliza Poe and foster mother Frances Allan, and especially his wife Virginia’s early death. Much of his work is believed to reflect Virginia’s long struggle with tuberculosis, as well as her eventual death. One of Poe’s most famous poems, “Annabel Lee” (Poe 477-478), which depicts a dead young bride and her mourning lover, is most likely inspired by Virginia. Like other women in Poe’s works, Annabel Lee is struck with illness and marries young, but unlike in Poe’s “The Raven,” in which the narrator states that he will “nevermore” be reunited with his love, the narrator in “Annabel Lee” believes that they will be together again and that they can never truly be apart, since not even demons “can ever dissever” their souls. Virginia is also seen in some of Poe’s prose works, including the short story “Eleonara,” which he wrote in 1842, when she was beginning to show signs of her illness. The narrator of “Eleonara,” for example, is preparing to marry his cousin. “The Oblong Box” (1844), another short story that was probably inspired by Virginia, focuses on a man mourning his young wife while transporting her corpse by boat and was written after Poe took a similar trip by boat to New York City with his dying wife. The story seems to suggest Poe’s feelings about Virginia’s impending death. The protagonist in this story would rather die than be separated from his wife’s body as the ship sinks. Poe seems obsessed with death in his works. His most recurring themes are about death and its physical signs, the effects of decomposition, the reanimation of the dead (perhaps Poe is ultimately responsible for the current popularity with zombies in our culture), premature burial, and mourning. His best known poems and stories can be placed in the Gothic genre, most likely because that was what the public wanted from him, since he was writing to make a living and catering to what was popular at the time. Poe reinterpreted the Gothic genre in innovative ways, focusing more of the psychology of his characters as they descended into madness and less of the traditional elements of the genre. Poe believed that terror, especially the psychological horror he wrote about it, was a legitimate literary subject. According to literary critics Patricia L. Skarda and Norma C. Jaffee, Poe in his “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839) explores these “terrors of the soul” (181) while revisiting classic Gothic themes like death, aristocratic decay, and madness. One of Poe’s most famous stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” (1842), focuses on the “legendary villainy of the Spanish Inquisition” (Skarda and Jaffee 182), themes that other Gothic writers had explored. Ann Radcliffe, a pioneer of the Gothic story, influenced Poe, especially in his 1842 work “The Oval Portrait,” to the point that he mentions her in the story. Poe was also greatly influential in the detective fiction genre. His tales with the character C. Auguste Dupin, who is considered the first detective in fiction, laid the groundwork for future detectives in fiction such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock Holmes. As Doyle once said, “Each [of Poe's detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed... Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” (Meyers 297). Many of the elements that later became common in detective fiction was first used in many of Poe’s stories: the eccentric but brilliant detective, the bumbling and unsympathetic constable who serves as a foil to this detective, and the first-person narrative by a good friend of the main character. Poe’s Dupin is the first fictional detective to announce his solution to the murder mystery he is attempting to solve and then explain it to a listening group of suspects. Poe is also the first to present the mystery in such a way that the reader is able to deduce it along with Dupin, which influenced the works of mystery writers such as Doyle and Agatha Christie. Poe has also been credited as one of the creators of the science fiction genre, and influenced Jules Verne. Poe’s only published full novel, “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Ptaall” (1838), is one of the first tales to feature space travel. The novel’s protagonist travels to the moon in a hot air balloon. Like Poe’s satirical “The Balloon Hoax,” which represents Poe’s venture into humor, “Hans Ptaall” is a humorous tale that ridicules the scientific community of the time. Even though it is not “serious” science fiction, it is a groundbreaking work for the genre because it is one of the first attempt at speculative fiction, which uses the technology and science of the time and places them in a far-fetched and fantastical story. Using the technology of his time, which made speculations regarding the plausibility of using hot air balloons to travel great distances, Poe essentially invented science fiction. As scholar John Tresch stated, “Poe did not so much invent science fiction as discover it in an existing tradition, reshaping it for his own ends and adapting it for the forms of rhetoric, images of truth, and technologies reigning in his day” (114). Poe is one of the most influential American writers, having influenced many genres, even after his death at the age of 40 in 1849. True to form and paralleling his themes of death and mystery, the events leading up to his own death are mysterious. There are aspects of his death that are still unexplained. For several days before Poe died, his whereabouts are unknown. He was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, even though he was travelling from Richmond, Virginia to his home in New York, outside a famous tavern. Some claimed that Poe was heavily intoxicated, but there is little evidence of that. Dr. Joseph E. Snodgrass, an acquaintance and later detractor of Poe’s, found him, and reported that Poe’s appearance was unkempt, which was unusual for Poe, whose appearance was usually meticulous. He was also wearing clothes that did not belong to him. Poe was not coherent enough to explain why he was in that condition. There have been many theories regarding the events leading up to Poe’s death, including that he died from alcoholism by those who wanted to both discredit Poe and use him as a morality tale about the evils of drinking. After his death, Snodgrass, who was a supporter of the temperance movement, claimed that Poe had died of alcoholism and continued the character assassination he had begun while Poe was still alive. There have even been some conspiracy theories that have sprung up over the years, and claims of the same kind of murder plot that Poe wrote about in some of his detective stories. It seemed that Poe’s penchant for the macabre and mysterious followed him, even in his final hours. Poe’s influence reaches far past his time, to the present day, with this culture’s obsession with death and the mysterious, with vampires, zombies, and wizards. His influence can be seen in video games, films, television, and literature of today. It seems that Poe led a similar life as what he wrote about, with the loss of many significant women at an early age. It was probably these losses that led him to write about death and the mysterious, both in his Gothic writings, his detective fiction, and even in science fiction, a genre he invented. Poe’s influence cannot be discounted or underestimated, and it is sure to continue in the future, as long as people want to experience horror and experience the unexplained. Works Cited Krutch, Joseph Wood. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study in Genius. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1926. Print. Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Cooper Square Press, 1992. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan. Complete Poems. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2000. Print. Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991. Print. Skarda, Patricia L. and Norma Crow Jaffe. Evil Image: Two Centuries of Gothic Short Fiction and Poetry. New York: Meridian, 1981. Print. Tresch, John. “Extra! Extra! Poe Invents Science Fiction!” The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allen Poe. Ed. Kevin J. Hayes. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 113-132. Print. Read More

 

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