Text: John E. Reilly, “Introduction,” Poe in Imaginative Literature, dissertation, 1965, pp. 1-15 (This material is protected by copyright)

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In his recent examination of the life and character of Edgar Allan Poe, Edward Wagenknecht doubts the possibility of a “complete or definitive” biography. “There is,” Wagenknecht maintains, “simply too much in his life that we do not know and too much that we do not understand.”(1) While this may be true, what Wagenknecht neglects to mention and what his own book demonstrates conclusively is that Poe biography has come a long way in the last half century. It has not only come a long way, but it has done so in the face of unusually difficult circumstances, circumstances created by the accumulation of misinformation about Poe, by what has become known as the Poe legend or the Poe myth. The student of Poe not only has had the task of discovering, analyzing, and piecing together the facts that make up the whole picture of the man and his accomplishments, he has had to be an iconoclast, destroying the false images which distort and even conceal the truth. Although it is an added burden confronting the student of Poe, contending with legend has proved to be a “pleasant pain,” if we can borrow a phrase from Keats, a pain willingly suffered by a host of men, men who have found the task a fascinating challenge. That these men have succeeded eminently is so beyond question that Wagenknecht [page 2:] could assign his book the incontestably accurate title Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend.

This real man behind the colorful legend; the naked Poe exposed by his modern biographers, has turned out to be a little colorless. He remains, to be sure, a man of considerable talent if not a man of genius, a man with unusual weaknesses to whom fortune was by no means liberal with her gifts. Nevertheless, Poe's life was, in the words of N. Bryllion Fagin, “relatively unadventurous”:

Professor Fagin's list could be extended: Shelley was a more refractory child and a less orthodox adult; Cooper had a less commendable college career; Melville undertook more adventures; Thoreau adhered more faithfully to his convictions; Longfellow knew greater domestic tragedy; and even Wordsworth led a sexual life more deserving of censure. What emerges from the facts of Poe's biography is not the legendary figure of a transatlantic Byron that prevailed for many decades after Poe's death but the figure of a dedicated and disciplined craftsman, critic, and editor whose life was for the most part one of quiet indigence and domestic harmony. [page 3:]

It is to some extent regrettable that the man behind the colorful legend turns out to be a little colorless. This is, perhaps, the penalty of disenchantment. Truth will be served. But in the service of the whole truth, it must not be overlooked that the legendary figure now so zealously uprooted played a crucial role in the evolution of Poe's reputation. It endowed his name with vitality and assured his work of sustained and active interest. Although only an image, only a figment of the imagination, the legendary Poe was virtually the only Poe the world knew for more than fifty years after his death. It kept his name alive at a time when few persons remembered Hawthorne and fewer knew or even cared that Melville was still among the living. Even now, by a species of irony, the legendary figure is responsible for much of the current interest in Poe. For are not most students drawn to him by a curiosity to know what he really was like, to know what really lay behind the veil? Although only a die-hard romantic would seriously lament the unveiling of the man, the legendary image should not be cast aside and forgotten. It is, after all, as real in its own way as Poe himself, or at least as real as the literature he created.

The legendary image is not only as real as the literature Poe created, it has proved to be one of his most enduring fictions. For there can be little doubt that the man behind the legend was largely responsible for its inception. Professor Fagin has told the story of Poe the ‘’creative actor” “in dress and manner, in love and despair, [page 4:] in school, editorial office, and drawing-room,” the “creative actor” who assumed many roles: “the ardent, sad lover; the underprivileged, the misunderstood; the lover of beauty, of gentleness, virtue, womanhood.”(3) Poe also assumed less socially acceptable roles. With what Professor Fagin calls Poe's “unerring sense of romantic effectiveness,” he exploited his own weaknesses and misfortunes, fabricating stories about his dismissal from the University of Virginia and his “many difficulties in St. Petersburg,”(4) creating scandal by publishing love poems addressed to him by married women,(5) and making public confession of his “irregularities” as “the effect of a terrible evil rather than its cause.”(6) It must not be forgotten either that Poe contributed immensely to the establishment of the legend by encouraging the idea that many of his poems and especially his stories are in soma obscure way autobiographical documents. He encouraged this chiefly by creating heroes who look like him and who display the mannerisms he assumed. The inevitable effect was speculation that Poe's mind was a haunted palace, that he had lost a Lenore and an Annabel Lee and could find solace only in drink and drug.(7)

Although there can be little doubt that Poe cultivated a fictitious image of himself, we can only speculate why he did so. Perhaps he did it as a means of compensation or of wish fulfillment, feeling that he had the potentialities to be such a grand figure were fate and mankind to have provided the opportunity. Perhaps he did [page 5:] it out of a kind of histrionic instinct, as Professor Fagin suggests, an inclination to assume a role or mask before the world. Then again, perhaps he did it with a very practical objective in mind, one of achieving the fame he said he loved, doted on, and idolized, of achieving it by cultivating an image of himself so fascinating in nature that the world could not possibly ignore him.(8)

If Poe cultivated an image of himself with the aim of captivating the world, he succeeded. The seeds he planted caught hold even in his own lifetime. Sentimental literary ladies such as Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Locke, Mrs. Lewis, and Mrs. Ellet tell under the spell of his romantic postures. Just how deeply some of them fell is suggested by the violence with which Mrs. Ellet reacted against him once she realized that he was not returning her affections. Interestingly, one of the few women not bewitched by Poe was Mary Louise Shew. Perhaps the many hours she passed at Fordham cottage caring for the dying Virginia enabled her to catch a glimpse of the real man behind the romantic figure. Among the men who knew Poe, his enemies were the ones, who responded to him most vigorously. Lewis Gaylord Clark, for example, never tired of depicting Poe as a reprobate and a charlatan. Thomas Dunn English thought little enough of Poe to charge him with forgery, and Hiram Fuller concurred by publishing the charge in his New York Mirror. Rufus W. Griswold was telling “some abominable lies” about Poe as early as March of 1845, [page 6:] more than four years before the infamous “Ludwig” obituary.(9) And Charles F. Briggs evidently imagined he had discovered a sinister truth when he wrote of Poe to James Russell Lowell that “he knows that I am possessed of the secret of his real character and he no doubt hates me for it .”(10) Poe was not, of course, entirely innocent of all the charges levelled against him; nevertheless, his contemporaries were captivated not so much with Poe as with the romantic speculation he inspired, with the image he projected. What his life lacked in support of such an image was readily supplied by the imaginations of his contemporaries.

The seeds of legend planted by Poe himself germinated in fruitful soil during his lifetime, but they did not begin to mature until after his death. He was no sooner in his grave than his reputation fell into hostile hands. Lambert A. Wilmer, decidedly a Poe partisan, described the situation from the vantage point of 1860:

Leading the onslaught was Rufus W. Griswold, whose “Ludwig” obituary of October 9, 1849, established the pattern of defamation whereby Poe was made to appear as a corrupt and faithless figure whose works [page 7:] are “a reflection and an echo of his own history.”(12) Griswold reaffirmed and amplified the “Ludwig” notice in his “Memoir” published in the summer of 1850. By that time, however, the defamation was well under way. Charles F. Briggs, R. H. Stoddard, and Lewis Gaylord Clark in this country and notably George F. Gilfillan in Britain were among the more prominent voices added to Griswold's. The efforts of Poe's defamers were eminently successful. For approximately a quarter of a century after his death, no one seriously threatened their image of him as a moral derelict.

Although the treatment of Poe at the hands of his defamers is now lamented as a gross violation of justice, of charity, and of the respect customarily afforded the dead, it is possible that Poe himself would not have had things otherwise. He once told a visitor to his Fordham cottage that “I would have incense ascend in my honour frbm every hill and hamlet, from every town and city on this earth.”(13) With a gift, perhaps even a genius, for capturing and sustaining public interest, he seems to have known that if incense is to be kept burning, it must sometimes bear the acrid odor of infamy as well as the sweet smell of fame because a fallen world is less fascinated with a child of light than it is with the possibilities of one man possessed of both good and evil, of both Israfel and Old Scratch. Although we cannot say that Poe consciously contrived his own defamation by naming Griswold to be his literary executor (we have, in fact, only Mrs. Clemm's [page 8:] unreliable word that Poe chose him), the choice was a fortuitous one in terms of the viability of Poe's name during more than five decades following his death. For it is one of the exquisite ironies in the annals of American literary history that Griswold and his followers unwittingly endowed Poe's name with much of the vitality it enjoys in some quarters even today. In their efforts to destroy his reputation, Poe's defamers made him a controversial figure, a figure fascinating in the way that Milton's Satan is more fascinating than his Christ.

More than two decades were to pass before the ironic outcome of the defamation was to make itself fully felt. Attacks upon Poe abated towards the close of the 1850's, whereupon there ensued a period of relative quiet. As one commentator has observed,

Relative quiet persisted until the 1870's. By then all but a few of those persons who had known Poe either were dead or had ceased to take an active interest in him. Meanwhile a new generation had come of age, a generation anxious to re-evaluate the old issues surrounding him in the light of new facts but largely in the light of new attitudes. Spearheading the revival of interest was a group of young men who labored zealously and often jealously to right what they believed were the Wrongs [page 9:] committed by Griswold. The most devoted of these young men was John H; Ingram, an English civil servant whose proprietary attitude toward the facts of Poe's life earned him numerous enemies. William F. Gill and Eugene L. Didier were Ingram's chief competitors in the 1870's, and in 1883 George E. Woodberry began the work which was to culminate twenty-six years later in one of the finest critical biographies of Poe. Meanwhile the growing interest in him was punctuated by the regular appearance of essays and books, chief among which was the publication of his complete works under the editorship of James A. Harrison in 1902.

The attitude toward Poe was not unanimously favorable when the revival got under way; nevertheless, the pendulum of opinion swung rapidly in that direction. Poe's defamers had had their day, had had their opportunity to swathe the man in dark legend; now the partisans, the Poe cult, as Didier labelled it, would have theirs. But the figure they venerated was in many ways scarcely less legendary; in fact, it was in some ways scarcely unchanged. An astute commentator observed in 1909:

It was not the image of Poe so much as the attitude toward it that changed with the revival. Denunciation gave way to atonement. Like Chatterton and Keats before him, Poe became the figure of the artist neglected and scorned. Blame for his faults rested not with him but with the society that had misunderstood and mistreated him. For its scorn and its neglect that society would now atone by belated recognition of his genius in a series of public testimonials beginning in 1875 with the erection of a monument at his grave in Baltimore and culminating in 1909 with the centennial celebration of his birth, a celebration which Charles Alphonso Smith aptly called Poe's “coronation.”(16) Certainly no one deserves more credit for the “coronation” of Poe than his chief defamer, Rufus W. Griswold.

The decades from the revival of interest in the 1870's to the centennial celebration of his birth constitute a distinct phase in the evolution of Poe's reputation, a phase marked by passionate partisanship which mounted to a crescendo of sympathy in 1909. The decades since the centennial constitute still another phase, the latest one. This phase is marked by the gradual but perceptible decline in the vitality of Poe's name, in its ability to elicit the kind of passionate response that made it a cause célèbre between 1870 and 1909.

There are several possible reasons for this decline. Perhaps what we like to think of as the clear-sighted realism of our own era, or what is probably our own brand of romantic sentimentalism, is so out [page 11:] of keeping with the brand of romantic sentimentalism that nurtured the legendary image of Poe that we can no longer respond to it as we once did. Again, perhaps such horrendous events as the Great Depression and two World Wars created such suffering, suffering in which we were. intimately involved, that the alleged miseries of Poe's life and the injustices perpetrated upon his reputation no longer lay so strong a claim upon our sympathy. Once again, perhaps time itself has caused the decline. After all, the life of Poe is a remote event. Lacking the immediacy that prompts passion, his fate now fails to move us as it did in the past.

Even if we could respond as we once did to the legendary image, the recent history of Poe studies would militate against it. The decades since the centennial have witnessed the gradual passage of his reputation into the hands of scholars. Once he had achieved his “coronation” at the centennial, Poe became increasingly a subject of careful research. By meticulous examination and analysis of his works, his life, and even his psyche, such specialists as James H. Whitty, Killis Campbell, James Southall Wilson, Thomas Ollive Mabbott, and Arthur Hobson Quinn slowly pared away decades of accumulated apocrypha until they arrived at the man behind the legend. What they uncovered is a Poe no less a genius, no less an artist, but a human being whose life was far less romantic, far less unconventional and dramatic than either his defamers or his partisans had made it out [page 12:] to be. In effect, the decades since the centennial have been ones of gradual disenchantment essential to arriving at the real Poe and his proper place in American letters.

The process of disenchantment has not reduced Poe's popularity; it is, however, altering the nature of it. His works still appeal to the general public — witness the current rash of motion pictures based upon his tales. And both his works and his life remain popular among scholars, who continue to find them a fruitful subject of research. What is changing is the image of Poe. The old image, born to a large extent of the belief that his tales and poems in some immediate way are the painful record of his miserable life, is fading.(17) This old image was a passionate one capable of inspiring romantic speculation. The new image of Poe as a dedicated and disciplined craftsman whose private life was exceptional for little more than its quiet poverty and whose literature has achieved ct least its just measure of recognition is a dispassionate one, one better able to support a body of criticism and research than to support a body of romantic legend.

Although the old image of Poe is fading, it has not disappeared entirely. It persists to some extent as a part of modern American folklore, that informal body of information and misinformation the public has at its command. Without ever having read a word about Poe, the layman is still likely to wonder whether he really was an alcoholic, a drug addict, or a madman; or he is likely to ask whether it is true that [page 13:] “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” are closely autobiographical in nature. Folklore seems to have staying power even in an age which is, or at least which pretends to be, as sophisticated as ours. The old image also persists to some extent even among literary students. Occasionally it still goads these dispassionate professionals into heated controversy. More often, however, it haunts the student with the fear that he will mistake legend for life and thereby be charged with loss of detachment. There is no charge more devastating.(18)

The old image of Poe proved to be remarkably tenacious. Precisely what made it so, especially what gave it such a firm hold upon nineteenth-century America, is a question best answered perhaps by the psychologist and the cultural historian. One thing seems abundantly clear, however: the image of Poe has had a tremendous impact upon the American imagination, an impact far greater than one man or even the image of one man alone could produce. What appears to have occurred is that the image of Poe stirred some of the deepest feelings in an age of romantic sentimentalism and vestigial puritanism, an age which responded not so much to the image of that one man as to what it represented. The image of Poe became a type of symbol of an aggregate of romantic myths, myths such as the Casanova, the poète maudit, the alienated artist, the aesthetic victim of a materialistic society. In a word, Poe became a kind of transatlantic Byron, a native [page 14:] American scandal and a cause celebre, creating much the same effects in this country that Lord Byron had created throughout the western world a generation earlier; and the response to Poe, like the response to Byron, was essentially an expression of some of the deepest feelings that prevailed. Whether as villain or later as victim, whether as sinner or later as saint, Poe represented to the imagination the embodiment of something fundamental to an age. That the real life and character of Poe could not support this burden is irrelevant. It was the impact upon the imagination that mattered.

No measure of the impact of Poe upon the imagination is more impressive than the drama, fiction, and poetry ha has provoked or inspired. Substantial in quantity and spanning the years from 1827 (when Poe was only eighteen) until the present, this body of literature includes a wide range of imaginative responses to Poe recorded over a period of more than a century. Some of this literature is hostile; a great deal of it is partisan; and much of the remainder is born of fascination for the kind of man who could create feelings of such intensity and such diversity. With the exception of satirical jibes, most of which were aimed at him by his contemporaries, almost all of the poetry is lyrical in nature, celebrating the romantic figure of Poe. And almost all the fiction (both short stories and novels) and the drama exploits the image of Poe in works extending from outright fantasy to near biography. As a body, this imaginative literature represents the [page 15:] response to the prevailing image of Poe. Considered historically, it provides a record of the impact of Poe, rather the impact of the image of Poe, upon the American mind.