Text: Burton R. Pollin, “The Varied and Variable Writer, Mr. Poe,” Tales of Mystery and Imagination, Birmingham, AL: Oxmoor House, 1982, pp. 6-21

[page 6:]

The life of Edgar Allan Poe may be, philosophically, regarded as the unhappy preparation for the creation of the series of amazingly original and varied poems and tales that have made him among the most popular and renowned of American writers throughout the world. Even a brief survey of his life will reveal that he was peculiarly prone to self-frustration and self-destruction, and his unhappy end, after he was found in a coma on a Baltimore sidewalk, was apparently self-invited. His career was characterized by a series of minor triumphs in editing and acclamations for individual poems and tales, but these were always followed by psychological and economic depression and the alienation of friends. Surely Poe is himself “the imp of the perverse” as he entitled this spirit in an analytic story. And while the Victorians tended to concentrate on his perversities, we of the twentieth century recognize the splendid achievements of this major writer.

Today we talk voluminously about Poe, the creator of the detective story, the master of the horror story, the exponent of the perfectly tailored, unitary work of poetry or narrative, the originator of science fiction, the critic who raised literary discussion to a science, the inspirer of the symbolists in Europe, and the psychologist who exploited the sense of doom which is now a hallmark of literature in a post-atomic-bomb age. In addition, the marked tone of satire, wit, and even broad humor deserves our appreciation, as the illustrator Harry Clarke well knew. We tend to overlook this element, [page 7:] perhaps because some of the objects of his fun and frolic were derived from the customs and personalities of his age. Probably it was this outlook that helped Poe to tolerate the striking vicissitudes and hardships of his own life.

Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, to an actress of English birth, his father, David Poe, having left his reputable, unsympathetic Baltimore family for the stage in 1803. Edgar, as well as his elder brother and his sister, was orphaned by the death of the tubercular mother in November 1811 in Richmond, Virginia, the shiftless father dying soon afterwards. Edgar was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond. A prosperous merchant, Mr. Allan, of Scotch birth, childless in wedlock but not extramaritally, reared the boy as a son, although not by legal adoption. He took him to England along with the family (1815-1820), a sojourn influential in forming Poe's language, ideas, and habits. Having returned to Richmond, Allan became more comfortable and prominent through a large inheritance from Scottish relatives and sent Edgar to good schools and to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville for the year 1826.

Here is where Poe supposedly wrote his first prose stories, but his gambling debts and possibly his drinking habits led Allan to withdraw the scholastically successful lad, who then quarreled with him and left for Boston. There he enlisted in the army under a pseudonym, published a slight volume of poems, and found himself transferred to Sullivan's Island in Charleston Harbor, later the scene of “The Gold-Bug.” Promoted to the highest non-commissioned rank, Edgar was aided by the now friendlier John Allan to leave the army after nearly two years for an appointment to West Point, which he entered in 1830. Late in 1829, a second slim volume of poems had appeared in Baltimore, and early in 1831 there was to be a third. This publication coincided with his expulsion from West Point, deliberately managed by Poe himself for “absence from roll call.” [page 8:]

Estranged from John Allan, now a remarried widower, Poe lived in Baltimore with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. A contest in a Philadelphia weekly of December 1831 spurred him to complete five humorous or satirical tales, all published as runner-up entries in 1832. During 1833 Poe wrote six more satires on contemporary best-sellers and won a prize for a fantastic sea tale published best-sellers and won a prize for a fantastic sea tale published in a Baltimore paper. In 1834 John Allan died without mentioning Edgar in his will — a final blow to all his expectations. He continued to live with the Clemms in and Baltimore, courted several girls romantically, and through the Virginia novelist John P. Kennedy began publishing tales and book reviews in the newly established Richmond Southern Literary Messenger. Then in May 1836 Mrs. Clemm successfully engineered Poe's marriage to his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia, and the three of them moved to Richmond.

After a brilliantly successful year editing and writing, Poe left the Messenger, chiefly because of his drinking habit, and took his “family” to New York City just in time for the financial depression of 1837, which killed his job opportunities in journalism. He managed to complete the hoax “autobiography” of Arthur Gordon Pym published in 1838, and then moved his family to Philadelphia. He contributed to magazines, ghostwrote a scientific book or two, and finally became coeditor of a journal owned by the actor William Burton. Fine tales, many long reviews, his first essays on cryptography, and finally his first volume of stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, were published in 1839 and 1840. Poe then quarreled with Mr. Burton but in 1841 was taken back into Burton's, called Graham's after the new owner. This year marked Poe's high point for brilliant fiction, including the first methodical detective tale, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” By 1842 his old intemperance, ill health, and a longing to start a new “ideal” magazine led him to leave Graham's. His first real monetary success was the [page 9:] prize-winning “Gold-Bug.” He felt that he could now make definite plans for the Stylus, with illustrations by the young genius F. O. C. Darley, but an office-seeking visit to Washington turned into a spree and killed the project.

In April 1844 Poe left Philadelphia with the obviously tubercular Virginia and her mother for New York and at once arranged for the newspaper publication of a very convincing account of a transatlantic flight, now called “The Balloon Hoax,” and secured work on various journals as a subeditor and contributor. His wonderfully designed poem “The Raven” (January 1845) brought him renown, even in England, but no real increase in income, and he managed to win control of the newly established and precarious Broadway Journal midway in the year. By January 1846 this varied and lively weekly expired, and a much publicized libel suit against a former friend completed Poe's disrepute and isolation. A year later Virginia's death in the bleak Fordham cottage climaxed anguish and distress, but he acquired some friends, chiefly female, and added a few brilliant tales and poems to his roster, such as “Ulalume” and “Eldorado.”

Yet in the final three years he was markedly unstable and wretched. His plans to marry his early “sweetheart” of Richmond, now the wealthy widow Mrs. Shelton, were aborted by his death in Baltimore from excess of alcohol and possible assault, October 7, 1849. His name was soon to be maliciously blackened by a rival editor Rufus W. Griswold, ironically his literary executor. It was probably Poe's aunt who had persuaded Griswold to edit and publish his papers vain hope of profiting from their sale. It required the rest of the century to expose the slanders and even forgeries in published letters of editor Griswold. Yet Poe was certainly indiscreet, tactless, and devoid of many of the solid, reliable qualities sought in ordinary social and commercial relations. His oscillations in mood often paralleled those in his physical locations, and his tendency toward Southern associations and [page 10:] scenes, characterized by his final months and marital plans, seemed apparent in his allegiances if not in his tales. However, many critics have found a Southern quality in his courtly language, aristocratic settings, and Romantic ideals, especially in his poems and essays, and this element is also implied in many of the illustrations of Harry Clarke.

Poe and Art

Since Poe's death, his poems and tales have become favorite subjects for pictures by eminent artists in the United States and the major Europen countries: Edouard Manet, Sir John Tenniel, James Whistler, Odilon Redon, Gustave Doré, James Ensor, Paul Gauguin, René Magritte, Aubrey Beardsley, Alfred Kubin, Edward Hopper, and more than a thousand other artists and illustrators. Sketches have been created for scenes and characters taken from every one of the more than seventy tales, covering the supernatural, science fiction, the terrifying, the imaginative, the pastoral, and the humorous, as well as for his four dozen poems, although a few scenes have been astonishingly and almost obsessively repeated by artists. Perhaps the reason for Poe's popularity with artists lies in a quality for which he himself once coined a word — “graphically.” He was alluding, in a review, to “touches which other artists would be sure to omit as irrelevant to the subject” and to a “faculty” leading the author “to paint a scene less by its features than by its effects.” In Poe's tales it is certainly these “touches,” seemingly irrelevant, which turn out to be wonderfully striking, true or “lifelike,” and memorable upon analysis or reflection, like the little details or clues that he taught detective fiction writers to exploit: the hiss of the pendulum in the cell, the fainting of Pym over the precipice, the sinister waving of the draperies in “Ligeia,” betokening the first wife's spirit as present. Artists revel in this sort of detail. [page 11:]

And how did Poe himself feel about a graphic representation or illustration of a character or incident? In a review of 1842 he offers characteristically a kind of competitive motive in justification of illustrative pictures: the pleasure, “a very acute one, of comparing our comprehension of the author's ideas with that of the artist. If our imagination is feeble, the design will probably be in advance of our conception, and thus each picture will stimulate, support, and guide the fancy. . . . [contrariwise] There is the stimulus of contrast with the excitement of triumph . . . [yielding] an interest in even the worst illustrations of a good book.” Elsewhere he condemns a slavish adherence to the details of a scene as “Flemish,” for himself was the first to imagine an abstract painting in the most modem style in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” “An outline,” he said, “frequently stirs the spirit more pleasantly than the most elaborate picture.”

It is clear that Poe did approve of certain types of illustrations to accompany the letterpress of poems and tales. Indeed, in soliciting a contribution for his projected fine-quality magazine, the Stylus, he wished “to illustrate whatever is fairly susceptible of illustration, with finely executed wood-engravings” which would be free of any “namby-pamby” or sentimental, false elements. For this task he approached Felix O. C. Darley (1822-1888), who soon executed two scenes from “The Gold-Bug.” The story was published in 1843 in two Philadelphia weeklies and circulated, Poe later estimated, in 300,000 copies. Poe may have supervised these plates, for he and Darley had signed a contract for the illustration of the abortive Stylus magazine, and Darley also did the magazine cover: a handwriting [[hand writing]] “truth” in Greek. See the following pages for Darley's two woodcuts of “The Gold-Bug” (Figures 3 and 4) that appeared in the Dollar Newspaper of June 28, 1843. These repay close comparison with the much finer originals (Figures 1 and 2), these ink-wash drawings have a delicacy and refinement of [page 15:] detail totally lacking in the stark, melodramatic scenes which have been imitated “evermore” by later illustrators of this famous tale. Later Darley contributed an amusing sketch of hatchet-critic Poe to a New York magazine (January 1849) to illustrate these verses by J. H. Duganne: “With tomahawk upraised for deadly blow, / Behold our literary Mohawk, Poe!”

After Poe's death many famous artists became willing, even eager, to capitalize on his graphic qualities. Literally hundreds of other artists of major fame and also, it must be admitted, of minor talents have joined the army of Poe illustrators all over the world, often by commission from canny publishers.

A striking example of this was the commissioning of Harry Clarke by the London publisher G. G. Harrap to illustrate Poe's tales. The edition proved so popular and profitable that in 1923 Brentano's issued the American edition with reset text and Clarke's illustrations. We may note that American artists have not been preeminent in the field of Poe illustrations. (Whistler's two paintings of “Annabel Lee” were done in England solely as easel paintings.) But we have produced as many popular editions with passable if not distinguished illustrations as other countries. Harry Clarke, the only Irish artist-illustrator of Poe, proves that the inspiration of Poe travels far and transcends the boundaries of custom and cultural ambience.

Harry Clarke and Poe

The extraordinary talents and interests of Harry Clarke (1890-1931) made him wonderfully fit for the commission of illustrating Poe's tales in 1919. He was born in Dublin, served as an apprentice in his father's firm which made stained glass, attended a Dublin art school, and won a scholarship to study the windows of French cathedrals. Upon his return he worked [page 16:] indefatigably on private and public commissions for churches, schools, and libraries in Ireland, England, and other countries, creating both colored and black and white designs which were said to have transformed the approach to this art. Concurrently he worked on striking illustrations in color and in black ink for Faust, the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Charles Perrault, Pope's Rape of the Lock, various collections of poetry, and the volume of Poe's tales. He also produced designs for textiles, a major element in the patterning of these illustrations, as you will note on pages 36 and 122. Perhaps the major influence on Clarke was the very large body of ink sketch drawings produced by the highly original, somewhat notorious, and short-lived Aubrey Beardsley (1872-1898). Similarly the strain of incessant work in several fields broke the delicate health of Clarke in 1926 and led to a nervous breakdown in London, where he had set up a small studio, and to his death from tuberculosis.

Clarke's decorative and psychological handling of colors is exemplified in the eight plates included in this volume: the unwholesome skin tones merging into the richly varied fabrics of “The Tell-Tale Heart” (frontispiece); the pallidly lifeless hues of the imaginary deep-sea demons rearing up from the ocean's blue in “MS. Found in a Bottle” (page 16); the sinister orange and black of the bad baron Metzengerstein (page 86); the oriental swirls of Ligeia's siren form with the gigantic blue serpent coiling through the scene — a totally non-Poe detail (page 122); the shades of the tormented body of Madeline Usher in her coffin below the weird beast of the story being read aloud (page 138); the sickly yellows and blues of the evil “man of the crowd” standing over the lurid debris which includes a bisected corpse (page 174); the archly demure grisette Marie Rogêt, near the menacing dissolute “types” of the Paris demi-monde, amid lovely floral patterns (page 212); and finally the jeweled colors of the heaven of the spirits of Monos and Una (page 258). This last scene recalls Clarke's [page 17:] expertise in church decoration, as do the Christ-like figures of torment in “Berenice” (page 26) and “The Pit and Pendulum (page 282). There is a devotional quality perhaps only in “Morella” (page 32) which shows a touch of the Burne-Jones Pre-Raphaelite school in the ornate flower bower around the figures.

Clarke also enjoyed displaying his sense of wit and light satire, as in “Lionizing” in which the narrator exhibits his enormous nose amid many admirers (including Poe), a scene set off by the charm of intricate geometric tiles, filigreed clothes, and a lovely Japanese screen backdrop — a Whistler touch (page 36); the marvelous mass of monsters at the charnel dinner table with ominous foreground swirls in “King Pest” (page 76); the bestial-like vegetation merging into the weird trees of “Silence” (page 92); the odd disappearance of the good spirit, like an oriental djinn, all in fine tones of gray and black in “William Wilson” (page 160); the splendid contrast of textures in the massacre scene of “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and the facelike shadow at the left which amusingly echoes the tiny figure of the appalled sailor high in the window (page 208); the unexpected horror of Death's exchanging a jeweled lusty animal face for one of sorrow (page 272); the startling and inappropriate beauty of the composition of “The Cask of Amontillado” in which poor mournful Fortunato is niched into a curious pattern of fetters, stalactites of nitre, and building stones (page 400). Clarke's wit is even apparent in the variety of the jewel- or beadlike outlines and division lines: the filigreed docks and walls of the canal and Bridge of Sighs in “The Assignation” (pages 42-43) and of the trees and shrubs of the tranquil setting for poor Marie who is being dragged to the river (page 248); the folds of the garment and the frieze of smothering rats in “The Pit and the Pendulum” (page 282); and the skillful theatrical panorama of Japanese inspiration for “Landor's Cottage” (page 404). Always a wonderful control of black and white masses reminds us that [page 18:] Clarke executed many windows in these two tones alone.

The diversity and brilliance of the twenty-four black and white plates and the eight with color make us wonder whether these tales were all chosen by Clarke himself instead of by the original publisher G. G. Harrap. Here arises a surprising fact that has hitherto received no attention: Poe called his two collections Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque and Tales, but from 1852, date of the first collected edition in England, the British more aptly called them Tales of Mystery, Imagination and Humour, a title that persisted through reprints or different editions by other publishers through 1855, 1856, 1866, and 1878. In 1882, at the height of sober Victorianism, the word “humor” was deleted from the title, a loss which would not have pleased Poe. Poe took pride in his imagination and in his methodical detective fiction, but he especially thought of himself as a humorist, that is, a satirist, parodist, and wit. The sense of humor has certainly not departed from Clarke's collection — witness “Lionizing,” “Bon-Bon,” and “The Spectacles.”

The uniformity of the British title never indicated a uniform content, although most of the tales included did remain surprisingly identical throughout the nineteenth century. Unquestionably almost every other phase of the varied genius of Poe is here displayed: the genre of the arabesque (the strange and rare), the grotesque (perverse and unexpected), the poetic or incantatory as in “Silence,” the realistic and detailed, the mood-piece, the horrible, the spoof tale such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” the philosophical “Colloquy of Monos and Una,” and the detection tale exemplified by “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” Did Clarke choose them?

Probably, for we know that as early as 1914 he had shown two publishers sample pictures for Poe's tales. However, in view of the splendid illustrations, so apt and relevant, why did he omit “Eiros and Charmion” and “The Oblong Box”? Was it objection [page 19:] to the choice, or simply lack of time or volume-space? Whoever made the selection, the group of tales well represents Poe's varied approaches and also the many phases of temperament and intelligence in one of our most complex and fascinating literary personalities.

Poe and His Critics

The faithful reprinting of this splendid illustrated volume amply demonstrates our own appreciation of Clarke as well as Poe's richly varied talents; we might well wonder al recognition of Poe from the critics in the 1830s and 1840s when he was struggling against many odds. Did they admire the tales for the merits which we now find in them? We must remember that almost every one was first issued in before being selected and collected in volumes, after much solicitation of publishers by Poe. And fully half of the seventy-odd tales were never so collected. Concerning the Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, twenty-five stories published in two volumes in November 1839 (with a title-page date of 1840), we can record several warm appreciations, almost all of them very brief (cited here almost verbatim). In New York the Albion thought the tales light and sentimental but delightful; the Corsair found in them fancy, sentiment, novelty, and wit; the Mirror thought them exciting and original in its first review and, in the second, ascribed high invention, fine diction, a keen display of passions and motives, and a good stress on the somber and wild. In Baltimore the American praised the fine imagination and the profound meaning of “William Wilson.” In Philadelphia Alexander's Messenger found them vigorous, varied, and promising; the Courier thought them wildly imaginative, novel in incident, rich and colorful in description, and the Pennsylvanian though them vigorous, imaginative, and droll. But in Boston the Notion thought them wild and pointless, nonsensical, and [page 20:] distempered, and the Post thought them trashy and affected (Poe and his city of birth were seldom friendly).

After “The Raven” of January 1845 had greatly extended his fame, Poe's second collection of twelve Tales (1845), although they were not selected by him, received more numerous and more farflung encomia than the first without bringing him ease or prosperity. In New York, where Poe was living, Hunt's Magazine briefly praised his exuberant fancy, and Margaret Fuller in the Tribune sagely commended his vigorous imagination, keen observation, and handling of the terrifying. In Philadelphia the popular Godey's Lady's Book spoke of his brilliant fancy, skill, and descriptive details; Graham's spoke of his tales as original, forcible, acute, stimulating, and ingenious. In Boston, the Harbinger found genius and dramatic intensity in tales that are also, it said, too horrifying, clumsy, perverse and tasteless; the North American Review thought them a dishonor to American literature, but the Post praised his clarity, ingenuity, and odd learning.

A new international touch, demonstrating Poe's wider popularity, was seen in a number of London reviews, most of them including long excerpts: The Atlas found the tales typically American in the startling adventures; Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine thought them strange, powerful, analytic, and highly detailed; Churton's Literary Register, strongly legalistic, ingenious, and varied; the British Critic, ingenious, superficial, and cruel and horrifying; the Literary Gazette, in two long reviews, found them apt in descriptions, induction, and analysis, terrifying, instructive in the “heavenly dialogues,” and poetic in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Most important of all, in a very long article, the great Revue des Deux Mondes of Paris lauded Poe's powers of analysis, his scientific observation, his sense of poetry and fantasy, and ranked him above Washington Irving. This perhaps comes closest to our own view of Poe's merits. All these tributes must have raised the spirits of Poe in the last four very trying [page 21:] years of his life, for he often alluded to reviews in letters and in his own editorials.

Since his death was undoubtedly connected with alcoholic excesses and possibly with some sort of mysterious physical abuse through his own carelessness, the obituary notices used his death as an object lesson. Unfortunately for Poe, this period marked the triumphant ascendancy of the Temperance Movement in American culture and journalism. But the tide public taste turned soon afterward, and Griswold's two volumes of the tales (1850) and the Vizetelley volume of 1852 in England became consistent favorites with the public, with a more popular or even juvenile appeal in their publishing format in the latter country (often with accompanying illustrations). By the end of the century the distaste for Poe's life (never for his language which is superlatively chaste) had faded. This may be traced in part to the wonderful enthusiasm of French critics and readers following the lead of his devoted master-translator Charles Baudelaire and to several painstaking biographers, such as John H. Ingram of England. It was not until the 1920s that we in America, even in Virginia where Poe chiefly lived and was schooled, accepted him as one of our “classic” American authors; there is still no uniformity of judgment about the worth of his fiction, his poems, his aesthetic and philosophical essays, and his trenchant, trailblazing reviews. Nevertheless, in widespread appeal, in the media of the popular arts, such as the motion picture and the adapted or simplified tale, and the illustrated book, no American writer can compare with Poe.

Burton R. Pollin

[Illustrations: page 12-14:]

Figure 1, “Finding the Treasure”

(Reproduced from the Delaware Art Museum Catalogue of Darley drawings, courtesy of Mrs. Elizabeth R. Schiek)

Figure 2, “The Treasure Revealed”

(Courtesy of New York Public Library, Print Collection, gift of Mrs. Jane Darley)

* Darley evidently reversed the signature in order that it might appear correct when transferred for reproduction.

Figure 3

Figure 4

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 6:]

* Professor Emeritus of the City University of New York, Dr. Pollin has written Discoveries in Poe as well as four other authoritative books and four-score learned articles on Poe; he is working on a definitive multivolume edition of Poe's writings and on a comprehensive study of the illustrations Poe inspired.

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 13:]

* Darley evidently reversed the signature in order that it might appear correct when transferred for reproduction.