Text: Coleman Erskine Bishop, “Edgar Allan Poe: The Literary Ishmael,” The Chautauquan (Meadville, PA), vol. IV, no. 7, April 1884, pp. 407-410

[page 407:]

Less is known while more is written and disputed about Edgar Allan Poe, than about any other character in American literature. In the narrative of his life there are gaps of months and years in which nothing can be told of his whereabouts or acts; and as if to atone for this lack he is at other times credited with feats of ubiquity. There are also stories of a quixotic mission to fight for Greek independence, a la Byron; of his escapades in St. Petersburg; of enlistment in and desertion from the United States army; of phenomenally protracted debauches, during which he threw off the most wonderful productions of his pen — most of which stories, so far as can be shown now, were evolved from the inner consciousness of those writers who, upon his death, “woke to ecstacy, the living liars,” to blacken his name.

A general reason for this paucity of particulars may be found, perhaps, in Poe's enforced seclusion from the public by the exigencies of poverty during much of his life, and the low rank of authors in the general estimation of the times; a special reason may be that Poe's literary executor and biographer, Dr. Griswold, to whom in his lifetime he had entrusted all the material he ever furnished any one, suppressed the facts and substituted inventions, in order to assassinate the character of the dead poet. For twenty-six years Poe's body rested in an unmarked grave, and his character was buried under a living heap of obloquy. When at last, in 1875, a few devoted women of Baltimore sought to redeem both tombs, nearly all the contemporary witnesses to his acts were dead. It was not until twenty-six years after the event that Dr. Moran, who had attended Poe's last illness, broke silence and put to rest the story that he died in the midst of a drunken debauch in the streets of Baltimore. “There was no smell of liquor upon his person or breath, and no delirium or tremor,” says this tardy vindicator. It was 1878 (twenty-nine years late) when Mrs. Weiss, of Richmond, told the story of his last visit to that city, and contradicted Griswold's story of his engagement with Mrs. Stalton, and his prolonged inebriety there. It was later still, when the posthumous letter of Mrs. Whitman, of Providence, was published, silencing the long-accepted tale of Poe's engagement to her, and his disreputable conduct and intemperance the evening before they were to have been married. Many chivalrous pens now — alas! too late — essayed his defense; but his true history has not yet been written, and it probably never will be. Dr. Johnson's summary of Butler's life almost literally applies to Poe's: “The date of his birth is doubtful, the mode and place of his education unknown, the events of his life are variously related, and all that can be told with certainty is that he was poor.”

“The persistent and palpably malignant efforts to damn him with some drops of faint praise and some oceans of strong abuse,”* have, indeed, produced a reactionary tendency toward panegyric, since the angels rolled the stone away from his tomb. The best any one can now do is to pity the man and admire his works, and weigh probabilities. A careful view as well of his time as of his character and environment is necessary. Premising that I am not so presumptuous as to expect to add much to the general fund of misinterpretation of his acts and misunderstanding of his character, a brief summary of the less controverted features of this history is submitted.

In “that stray child of Poetry and Passion” concentered hot Celtic and Southern blood, stimulated upon his father's side by drink, upon his mother's by the artificial surroundings of an actress's life, and in both intensified by a runaway marriage, followed by a joint “barn-storming” life. Himself an inter-act, his [column 2:] nursery was the green room, his necessary nourishment narcotics. It is a sad thing to say, but probably one of the few fortunate circumstances of his life was that his parents died in his infancy — one of his many misfortunes was to have been adopted and raised by a wealthy family (Mr. Allan's of Baltimore). He was born in 1809, or 1811, in either Boston, Baltimore or Richmond, through all of which he, living, “begged his bread,” a la Homer. The Allans assiduously spoiled the child with unlimited money, indulgence and praise. It was easy, for he was rarely beautiful, affectionate, and precocious; he recited with marvelous childish effect, spun webs of imaginative stories, and composed rhymes. “He lisped in numbers, for the numbers came,” and when he was nine or ten years old his proud foster-father seriously contemplated issuing a volume of his baby-verse, but was dissuaded by the boy's tutor, who said he had conceit enough already, and such additional celebrity would probably ruin his prospects.

Edgar was schooled in England, at the University of Virginia, and at West Point, but he must have picked up independently of schools and school masters the varied culture which shows in his versatile writings — especially his acquaintance with science, psychology and literature. At these schools he was distinguished alike for fast learning and fast living — his easy absorption of the branches he liked, his utter revulsion against those he did not like (mathematics, notably), for his literary and critical tastes, athletic exercises, and the lavishness with which he scattered his guardian's money. These characteristics won him the jealousy of his plodding classmates, distinction at the university, expulsion from West Point, and quarrels with his foster-father. Over-indulgence by parents produced the usual result of disrespect and ingratitude in the youth; and the marriage of Mr. Allan to a second wife, and the birth of heirs to his estates brought about a final separation and a disinheritance of the adopted son, and so Edgar, at about his majority age, was thrown on his own resources. He chose literature as his profession, and doomed himself to poverty, anguish, professional jealousy (especially strong among authors), triumphs, defeats, ruin and insanity.

Poe's real début in letters was in 1833, when (ætat 24) he won a prize of a hundred dollars offered by the proprietor of The Saturday Visitor [[Visiter]], Baltimore, for the best story. Better than the money, the contest brought him the friendship of the judges, and about a year later the editorship of The Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond, at ten dollars a week. The intervening year is one of the blanks.

The Richmond editorship marks a turning point in Poe's career. He made the fortune of the Messenger; married (‘35) his cousin, Virginia Clem [[Clemm]]; and first began that line of work which is, in my opinion, its distinctive feature, as it certainly proved to be decisive of his destiny — to-wit: criticism. He published in some issues as much as thirty or forty pages of book reviews. They created a tempest; for, rare as is his imagery and wonderful as is his imagination, Poe's distinguishing mental characteristic is analysis. He is more logician than poet, more metaphysician than romancer.

Poe subsequently (‘37-‘38) edited the Gentlemen's Magazine, and then Graham's Magazine, both in Philadelphia, and in ‘44 we find him in New York, employed on the Mirror, the journal of the poets N. P. Willis and George P. Morris. In Philadelphia he did the best work of his life in romance and criticism. Here, too, he made the acquaintance of his evil genius, Dr. Griswold. Poe believed that Griswold supplanted him from the editorship of Graham's; G.'s subsequent enmity, while professing friendship, was of the unforgiving nature that often comes of the consciousness of having inflicted a secret wrong on another. The only other causes of disagreement between them alleged are that Poe criticised Griswold's book in a lecture, and that Griswold attempted to buy a favorable criticism from Poe's pen. But they were outwardly friendly, after a reconciliation, till Poe's voice and pen were beyond the power [page 408:] of response. The work of detraction had preceded Poe to New York, for Mr. Willis writes of this engagement:

In 1845 appeared the work on which Poe's poetic fame most depends, that poem in which he wedded Despair to Harmony, “The Raven.” It marks the acme of his life, also; his star declined rapidly thereafter. His wife, who bore the hereditary taint of consumption, was in a decline; care and anxiety on that account, and his own ill health, took away his ability to write and he was without means of support. He was driven to ask loans from one or two friends, and by a fatality such as he sometimes made to drive his fictitious characters upon their worst expedients, he chose Dr. Griswold as one of them. “Can you not send me five dollars?” he pleaded with G.; “I am ill and Virginia is almost gone.” This and one or two other such letters Griswold published, in connection with his slanders on Poe's character, to give his attack the cover of friendly sincerity. Something was published in New York papers regarding the distress of the Poes, and a lady friend (Mrs. Shew) visited them at Fordham. The worst was confirmed.

Mrs. Poe died January 30, 1847. Captain Mayne Reid, the novelist, who visited often at her house, thus describes her:

“No one who remembers that dark-eyed, dark-haired daughter of the South; her face so exquisitely lovely; her gentle, graceful demeanor; no one who has ever spent an hour in her society but will endorse what I have said of this lady, who was the most delicate realization of the poet's ideal.”

Another said: “She had large, black eyes, and a pearly whiteness of complexion which was a perfect pallor. Her pale face, her brilliant eyes, and her raven hair gave her an unearthly look. One felt that she was almost a disrobed spirit.”

After this Poe's decline was rapid. He was ill for a long time, and never quite recovered his mental balance. In the autumn of this year he visited Mrs. Shew, his benefactress. She says that at this time, under the combined influence of her gentle urgency, a cup of tea and the sound of neighboring church bells, he wrote the first draft of “The Bells.” She adds:

Since I began writing this paper I have heard recited in a company of literary people an account of Poe's staggering into a stranger's house at midnight, calling for a pen and dashing [column 2:] off “The Bells;” then falling into a drunken stupor on the library table. It was evidently believed by the narrator, despite Mrs. Shew's circumstantial and more rational account.

During these dark days, as indeed during all Poe's adult life, Mrs. Clem was his guardian angel. The poet Willis touchingly draws this picture of devotion:

By this test, Poe's was always a pure nature, for he inspired respect, pity and regard in every woman he came in contact with. It was a reflex sentiment, for Poe revered woman, and there is not in all his writings an impure suggestion or an indelicate word.

The rest of the history is one of occasional indulgence in intoxicants and rarely intermitting mental aberration. It is to him during these last months of his unhappy career that the least charity has been extended. He conducted a courtship of three ladies at once, making to each like frantic protestations of love, the same despairing appeals to each to become his savior from some dreadful impending fate. In June, ‘49, he departed for Richmond, for what purpose is unknown. In Philadelphia he appeared the subject of a hallucination that he was pursued by conspirators, and had his mustache taken off for the sake of disguise. In Richmond he remained until the latter part of September, writing some and renewing old acquaintances. During these three or four months he was twice known to be overcome and in danger of his life from drink; he was credited with having been almost continuously “in a state of beastly intoxication” during the whole time. Mrs. Weiss thinks that this was one of the brightest and happiest seasons of his life; if so, it was light at its eventide. The return voyage is shrouded — that is the fit word — shrouded in mystery and controversy.

This seems to be true — that he was taken up unconscious in Baltimore at daybreak, taken to a hospital, and died there at midnight of the same day (October 7, 1849). It is also known that he left Richmond by boat on the evening of the 4th, he then being sober and cheerful. In proper course he must have arrived in Baltimore the night of the 5th or morning of the 6th; he was himself then, for he removed his trunk to a hotel. There was thus left less than twenty-four hours in which for him to travel to Havre de Grace and back, miss the New York connection, vote eleven times in the Baltimore city election, go through the “prolonged debauch,” fall into the delirium, and lapse into the comatose state in which he was found — as described in most of his biographies; and he immediately thereafter is found to have no smell of liquor about him, no tremor, and is conversing rationally when roused to consciousness.

The event was announced by Griswold in the Tribune with this brutal bluntness: [page 409:]

“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. He had few or no friends.” But the Southern Literary Messenger said: “Now that he is gone, the vast multitude of blockheads may breathe again.” Griswold simply elected himself mouthpiece of that host.

On Poe's supersensitive organization stimulants told with fearful effect. Mrs. Clem said “A single cup of coffee would intoxicate him.” N. P. Willis explained the vagaries and sins of Poe by supposing him to be possessed of two antagonistic spirits, a devil and an angel, each having complete mastery of him by turns. But, says Willis, “With a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. He easily seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and was accused accordingly of insulting arrogance and bad heartedness. It was a sad infirmity of physical constitution which puts it upon very nearly the ground of temporary and almost irresponsible insanity.”

That these lapses were infrequent, instead of almost continuous, we have plenty of testimony from those who were much with him as business associates and inmates of the same house. “I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred and particularly refined,” is a certificate of one who was intimate in the family, which was confirmed by many witnesses of different periods and places. The poet Swinburne was probably right in declaring that Poe's inebriety was “the effect of a terrible evil, rather than its cause.” That evil lay not alone, perhaps not chiefly, in his inherited and educated predisposition to indulgence and his morbidness of mentality; but in the character and consequences of his chiefest literary work.

It is a hard enough lot, under the best circumstances and in the best times, to live by the pen. The characteristics as well of Poe's genius as of his times made that lot a doom for him. The rewards of authorship were on an eleemosynary scale (Poe received only $10 for “The Raven,” and $10 a week as editor-in-chief of a magazine: the North American Review [[American Review]] then paid only $2 a page for matter); literary taste was unformed and, worst of all, the market was drugged and cheapened and the best public appreciation perverted by a silly school of writer who had arisen — similar to the “Della Crusca School” which a few years before had infested literature in England. Their lucubrations were both barren of ideas and bad in style. It was the lollipop stage of our literature. Now Poe possessed in high degree two parts which, when addressed to criticism, would most offend these callow writers, to-wit: The musical sense of language, and marvelous analytical powers. The most obvious quality of his poetic style is its rhythm. The musical ear led him to adopt refrains and euphonious syllables, like “Never more,” “Lenore,” “bells,” and to dwell on their cadence; it made a bad composition distract him as a discord does a sensitive musician. For him divine harmonies lay in the relation of words to each other, as if they had been notes.

Coupled with this, to him, uncomfortable sensitiveness to verbal sounds, was his almost superhuman power of dissecting thought — extremely uncomfortable to others, even to the best of writers. Thus gifted with a mental touch equally for the substance of language and the substance of thought which language struggles to give birth to; possessed of the power of an eager and a nipping sarcasm and an infernal courage, fortified with extensive reading and a retentive memory, Poe became a scourge to mediocrity, imitation, sham and pretense. There could not have been a more critical time for such a man to attempt a livelihood at letters; there could not have been a man better fitted to work havoc among the essayists and poetasters of the day, to compel literary reform and to bring misfortunes on himself. “He elected himself chief justice of the court of criticism and head hangman of dunces,” says Stoddard. [column 2:] “He hated a bad book as a misdemeanor.” Burton, proprietor of the Gentleman's Magazine, remonstrated with Poe against the severity of some of his book reviews. “You say,” said he to Poe, “that the people love havoc; I think they love justice.” One adds, “Poe thought literary justice meant havoc with such mediocrity as then flourished.” To the cause of pure literature he thus devoted his life with example, with precept and with destructive force. He was the Wendell Phillips of American literature. He did a work that was necessary to be done in behalf of American literature. He pulled down upon his own head and theirs, the sham temple which the little scribbling Philistines had erected.

So it is not to be wondered at that “he contrived to attach to himself animosities of the most enduring kind,” as the Messenger declared. It became Poe against the whole literary world of America in a very short time — for he had unstinted praise for no one. It is doubtless due to the influence of this army of foes that he lost in succession all his editorial situations and was impoverished. There were other enemies as unscrupulous as Griswold. One of these put in successful circulation the theory that Poe, by cruelty, deliberately caused the death of his wife in order to get the inspiration for “The Raven,” and the story may still be met on its rounds, notwithstanding the fact that the poem was written two years before she died. (Amiable human nature delights in contemplation of human monsters.) She declared on her death-bed that her life had been shortened by anonymous letters slandering and threatening her husband. Perhaps it was to meet this story that he wrote that curious analysis (“The Philosophy of Composition”) of the mechanical and prosaic methods by which he constructed “The Raven.”

The critical instinct, coupled with an impulsive temperament, high ideals of perfect performance and a powerful pen, is a fatal gift to any man. The path of such a one will be strewn with the tombs of friendships which he has stabbed, many and many a time unconsciously; his life will be haunted with vain regrets for words gone past recall, carrying with them consequences he did not reckon upon, hurting those he loves, missing those he aimed at. His way leads steadily through bitter animosities, bitterer remorse and, bitterest of all, isolation from his fellows, who shall clothe him with a character foreign, antagonistic and repulsive to his better nature. If he be not possessed of an o’ermastering will, a thick skin and a healthy, cheerful temper it leads to morbidness, gloom and despair.

Poe was not of that will and temper. He was affectionate, sociable and supersensitive to coolness of manner in others. A rebuff was a stab to him, hatred a calamity. It is said his early life was clouded by the stigma put on him by his parents’ theatrical associations and his own dependence on charity; and that when a lad he wept many wild nights at the grave of a lady who had spoken kindly to him and become the confidante of his boyish sorrows and hopes. So with this nature and with his devastating pen in hand he traced that descent into the living tomb. If from its gloom he sometimes sought “respite and nepenthe” in drink it is not to be wondered at; he was often tempted to suicide. He once solemnly protested: “I have no pleasure in stimulants. It [indulgence in drink] has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories — memories of wrong, and injustice and imputed dishonor — from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending gloom.”

I fancy he tried to typify this unhappy mission that had come to blast his life in that poem in which he “wedded despair to harmony.” “The Raven” was a “grim, ghastly, ominous messenger from the night's Plutonian shore” that settled on the bust of Pallas, goddess of wisdom, even as that critical impulse had settled upon his genius. His soul never was lifted from the shadow. He was himself, of that fell work, the

And why did he not stop the war on the literati and pseudo-authors? Who can tell? He “wasn’t practical.” He lacked some of Falstaff's “instinct.” He was not good and sweet. He wasn’t well-balanced; he was an Eccentric. Pity the Eccentric — the man who knows himself called and chosen to a cause, whether by the necessities of his own nature or by divine impulse — if, indeed, this and that be not the same. Whether that cause be warring upon high injustice, exposing hypocrisy in high places, reforming an art, lifting up the lowly — anything that sets a man apart to a purpose other than self-seeking, brings him ingratitude, misinterpretation, isolation and many sorrows. Hamlet called to set right the out-of-joint times would rather, if he had dared, have taken his quietus with a bare bodkin than face this life of heart-ache, oppressors’ wrongs, law's delays to correct the wrongs, and the spurns that patient merit of the unworthy takes. The greatest of Eccentrics became a stranger unto his brethren, was despised and rejected of man, a man of sorrows and acquainted with grief; even His chosen disciples when He tried to purify the holy places from the profanation of greed misunderstood him; “the zeal of his house hath eaten him up,” sneered they.

Edgar A. Poe's personal appearance matched his genius. Let those who saw him tell it: “He was the best realization of a poet in features, air and manner that I have ever seen, and the unusual paleness of his face added to its aspect of melancholy interest.” “Slight but erect of figure, of middle height, his head finely modeled, with a forehead and temples large and not unlike those of Bonaparte; his hands as fair as a woman's; even in the garb of poverty ‘with gentleman written all over him.’ The handsome, intellectual face, the dark and clustering hair, the clear and sad gray-violet eyes — large, lustrous, glowing with expression.” “A man who never smiles.” “Those awful eyes,” exclaimed one woman. “The face tells of battling, of conquering external enemies, of many a defeat when the man was at war with his meaner self.” He was both much sinned against and much sinning. But he was not a monster, nor an ogre. He was only a poet and an Eccentric.

[[Footnotes]]

[The following footnote appears at the bottom of page 407, column 1:]

*Davidson.