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EDGAR A. POE.
[Born, 1811. Died 1849.]
EDGAR A. POE,
born in Baltimore in January, 1811, was the second son of David and
Elizabeth Arnold Poe, of the theatre, both of whom died in Richmond, in
1815, leaving three children in homeless poverty. He was adopted by Mr.
Allan, a merchant, who in the following year placed him at a school
near London, from which in 1822 he was removed to the University of
Virginia, where he graduated with distinction in 1826. His
irregularities at college caused a a disagreement with his patron, and
he joined an expedition to assist the Greeks; but after proceeding as
far as St. Petersburg, on the way to Athens, he returned, and a
reconciliation with Mr. Allan having been effected, he was enabled to
enter the Military Academy at West Point. Here he made his first essays
in literature, in a small volume of Poems, printed in 1830, about which
time he left the Academy, and Mr. Allan having died without making any
provision for him in his will, he was compelled afterward to rely
entirely upon his pen for support. Securing attention with two literary
prizes at Baltimore, he was in 1835 engaged by the proprietor of The
Southern Literary Messenger, at Richmond, to assist in editing that
magazine; in 1838, he removed to Philadelphia, where he was connected
as editor with Burton’s Magazine one year, and with Graham’s a year and
a half; and he continued in the latter city until 1844, during which
time he published Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, in two
volumes; and Arthur Gordon Pym, a nautical romance, in one volume;
besides many of his finest criticisms, and other tales and poems, in
periodicals. He went next to New York, where he was employed several
months as a reviewer of books for the Home Journal, and was first an
associate and afterward the sole editor of the Broadway Journal. In the
winter of 1848, while at Fordham, a few miles from the city, he
suffered much from poverty, and his wife, to whom he had been married
about twelve years, died in the following spring. He had already
published new collections of his Poems and Tales, and the magazine [column
2:] sketches of the Literati, and in 1849 he gave to the world
Eureka, a Prose Poem, intended to illustrate his views of the
constitution of the Universe. In the summer of 1849 he revisited
Virginia, and it was believed that he had entirely mastered his habits
of dissipation; but on the fourth of October he set out for New York,
to fulfil a literary engagement, and to prepare for his second
marriage. Arriving in Baltimore, he gave his trunk to a porter, with
directions to convey it to the cars which were to leave in an hour or
two for Philadelphia, and went into a tavern to obtain some
refreshment. Here he met acquaintances who invited him to drink: his
resolutions and duties were forgotten; in a few hours he was in such a
state as in commonly induced only by long-continued intoxication; after
a night of insanity and exposure, he was carried to a hospital; and
there, on the evening of the seventh of October, 1849, he died, at the
age of thirty-eight years.
Soon afterward, having been appointed his literary
executor, I collected and published his various works, in three
volumes, for the benefit of his family. In the third volume I have
given an account of his life, with opinions of his genius. His realm
was on the shadowy confines of human experience, among the abodes of
crime, gloom, and horror, and there he delighted to surround himself
with images of beauty and of terror, to raise his solemn palaces and
towers and spires in a night upon which should rise no sun. His
minuteness of detail, refinement of reasoning, and propriety and power
of language — the perfect keeping and apparent good faith, with which
he managed the evocation and exhibition of his strange and spectral and
revolting creations — gave him an astonishing mastery over his readers,
so that his books were closed as one would lay aside nightmare or the
spells of opium. The analytical subtlety evinced in his works has
frequently been overestimated, because it has not been sufficiently
considered that his mysteries were composed with the express design of
being dissolved. When Poe attempted the illustration of the profounder [page
524:] operations of the mind, as displayed in written reason or in
real action, he frequently failed entirely. In poetry, as in prose, he
was eminently successful in the metaphysical treatment of the passions.
His poems are constructed with wonderful ingenuity, and finished with
consummate art. They display a sombre and weird imagination, and a
taste almost faultless in the apprehension of that sort of beauty which
was most agreeable to his temper. But they evince little genuine
feeling, and less of that spontaneous ecstacy which gives its freedom,
smoothness, and naturalness to immortal verse. He was not remarkable
original in invention. Indeed some of his plagiarisms are scarcely
paralleled for audacity: for instance, [column 2:] in The Pit
and the Pendulum, the complicate [[complicated]] machinery upon which
the interest depends is borrowed from a story entitled Vivenzio, in
Blackwood’s Magazine. In his Marginalia he also borrowed largely,
especially from Coleridge. As a critic, he rarely ascended from the
particular to the general, from subjects to principles.; he was
familiar with the microscope but never looked through the telescope.
His criticisms are of value to the degree in which they are
demonstrative, but his unsupported assertions and opinions were so apt
to be influenced by friendship or enmity, by the desire to please or
the fear to offend, or by his constant ambition to surprise, or produce
a sensation, that they should be received in all cases with distrust of
their fairness.
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