Text: Anonymous, “The Dual Personality of Edgar Allan Poe,” Current Literature (New York, NY), vol. XLIII, September 1907, pp. 287-288

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THE DUAL PERSONALITY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE

BYRON, we are told, awoke one morning to find himself famous. In the case of Poe, urges William Aspenwall Bradley in the Poe number of The Book News Monthly, it may be said that it was America herself that perceived one day, with a sudden start, how much of her glory, in foreign eyes, lay in the fact of her having given birth to the author of “The Raven.” Since then, he goes on to say, there has been a wild scramble to render tardy recognition to the slender, dignified, threadbare man who had tramped the streets of so many American towns in his solitary struggle with poverty and his own vices. Bernard Shaw is reported as having spoken in a recent interview of Poe and Mark Twain as America's greatest writers. Years before this a Swedish critic put himself on record as having said that Poe, Whitman and Mark Twain were the only original contributors to the world's literature of the American continent. Nevertheless, even in the present re- action in Poe's favor, that will probably reach its climax in January, 1909, on the occasion of the centenary of the poet's birth, estimates of the man's work and personality are strangely contradictory. He has been called at various times immoral, unmoral and fantastically pure. Baudelaire and the French decadents drew from him the inspiration for poems, satanic and perverse. In the opinion of others he has established that art is beyond good and evil. And yet another critic, Charles Leonard Moore, holds that while Poe did not set himself to write copy-book maxims of morality, the total effect of his work is lofty and noble. “His men,” he says in The Dial, “are brave and his women are pure. He is the least vulgar of mortals. Perhaps, if books have any effect at all, his tend to make men too truthful, too sensitive, too high-minded.” His poetry is synonymous with verbal voluptuousness, yet his passions, such as he chose to reflect in his work, are ascetic, almost unhuman. By the sheer force of cogitation he dreamed of solving in his “Eureka” the riddle of the universe. He said to Mr. G. P. Putnam that, compared with this book, Newton's discovery of the law of gravitation was a mere incident. It would at once arouse such universal and intense interest that the publisher might give up all other enterprises and make this one book the business of his lifetime. Yet while his soul was lost in scholastic subtleties or metaphysical [column 2:] speculation, his body craved the gross stimulation of drink.

A promulgator of the theory of art for art's sake, he was at the same time a sensational journalist, and many of his hoaxes would have doubled the circulation of the yellowest of present day journals. He was in one a drunkard and a thinker, surly misanthrope and gentleman, genius and charlatan. It is only recently that modern science has attempted to explain the riddle of the poet's dual nature, which it seems now certain, was the result of pathological processes. Poe suffered from psychic epilepsy which strangely transformed his whole nature while under the influence of an attack of this deep-seated disease. Here must be sought the cause for the contradictory impulses that swayed his actions and his thoughts. Dr. William Howard, in an article published in The Arena, advances the following theory:

“It was to this latter class of unfortunates that Poe belonged, and in his words, poetic prayers, and fantasies the neurologist can see the suffering and recognize the feeling of hopelessness ever present in the unjustly accused. These dipsomaniacal attacks are symptoms of disorganized brain cells. These cells become poisoned at irregular intervals by the by-products of the physiologic system, which are retained in the body through a lack of perfect functioning of the nerve-cells — faulty metabolism.”

Dr. Charles Houston Goudiss takes a similar stand in a pathological study in The Book News Monthly. Poe himself said in 1848: “I am constitutionally sensitive — nervous in an unusual degree. 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.” “In this piteous confession,” Dr. Goudiss remarks, “Edgar Allan Poe gave to the world a rare definition of dipsomania [page 288:] as distinguished from the vice of drunkenness. Unconsciously he affirmed a scientific truth of deep value, the significance of which he was unaware.” To quote further:

“It has been the fate of few writers to have been so vehemently discussed as Poe. His life has been a battleground for his biographers. There is scarcely a fact in any one of the books that have been written about his career that is not emphatically denied in another.

Poe's infirmity was evidenced as a school-boy. He was at times possessed by furious maddening storms and uncontrollable impulses; and the helpless poet, mentally alienated, sought rest and oblivion in alcohol. Friends, or responsibility for self-all were forgotten. After the attacks the memory of acts, words, time, was a dismal blank, and fear, introspection and despair were all that remained. Upon the complete return to sanity, however, the real self was asserted in the refined, gentle- manly, conscientious Poe. The psychologist, Dr. Goudiss affirms, easily understands the reason for Poe's intense terror and his constant dwelling upon the aspect of physical decay. “He lived alternately a life of obsessions and lucidity; and this duality is the cause of his being so shamefully misunderstood, so highly praised, so cruelly blamed.”

In the light of these facts, the closing scene of the poet's life, as portrayed in the same issue of The Book News Monthly by Joseph Lewis French, assumes an altered significance. According to the statements of his friends, Poe was sober and entirely cheerful to the last when he left them on a journey to Baltimore. When he reached that city, however, the nether side of his nature must have asserted itself It so happened that it was the eve of election day and the poet, drunk or insane, was carried off by “heelers” who were after- wards identified, and was “cooped,” as the term was then: literally confined in the back yard of a place made for that purpose. The next day, Mr. French informs us, he was given drugs to restore his faculties, and was taken to different polling places, in each of which, partly at the will of his captors undoubtedly, partly on his own initiative-regarding the whole affair as more or less of a huge joke — [column 2:] he cast a vote. There was no registration law in those days in Baltimore, and any man who could face a “challenge” at the poll and who was willing to take the oath there could cast a ballot. It was a common custom to capture strangers for the purpose of compelling them to vote, very much as sailors were “pressed” in the time of Queen Anne and King George, after first being plied with liquor. Had the poet fallen into kindlier hands in the intervals of obsession, the course of American literature might have been materially changed. Under the circumstances, he was in the power of fiends who, after using the irresponsible sick man for their purposes, robbed and deserted him. The consequence of this treatment and the drink urged upon him was his premature death, the most dreadful in the history of letters. “François Villon,” exclaims Mr. French, “disappeared into the night of time after the career of a desperate criminal. His end can only be conjectured fearfully. But in Poe's case every ray that the twin lamps of circumstance and judgment can bring to bear upon the scene only serves to strengthen the plain testimony of his friend and physician.”

Thus ended the career of America's greatest lyric poet in whose brain dwelled side by side, the angel Israfel, whose “heart strings are a lute,” and the demon of drink. Both have left their impress on his life and on his art. The one brought about his lamentable death, the other has made him immortal.