Text: Charles Houston Goudiss, “Edgar Allan Poe: A Pathological Study,” Book News Monthly (Philadelphia, PA), vol. 25, no. 12, August 1907, pp. 801-803

[page 801:]

IN this piteous confession Edgar Allan Poe gave to the world a rare definition of dipsomania as distinguished from the vice of drunkenness. Unconsciously he affirmed a scientific truth of deep value, the significance of which he was unaware. In his generation no distinction between the two had been made, and the much maligned, much misunderstood poet was a victim of the severest condemnation. It remained for the present generation to lift from the memory of this Southern poetic genius the stigma of drunkenness so long attached to it.

It has been the fate of few writers to have been so vehemently discussed as Poe. His life has been a battleground [column 2:] 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.

This is undoubtedly due to the great difference of opinion which has existed as to the cause of his erratic life, morbid temperament, and what have been called his drunken excesses.

The general conception of the man, overcolored as it has been, current on both sides of the Atlantic since his death, is summarized in the following obituary notice: “A dissolute, fantastic writer died at Baltimore in consequence of fits of intoxication.” A few valiant friends rose to defend his genius, but it was not until very recently that a scientific explanation of his constitutional weakness has appeared.

During his life the poet deeply resented the accusations of his calumniators. Ina letter to a friend, the late Dr. J. E. Snodgrass, Poe passionately denied the charge of habitual intoxication made against him. “I pledge you before God [page 802:] the solemn word of a gentleman that I am temperate even to rigor. . . . At no period of my life was I ever what men call intemperate; I never was in the habit of intoxication; I never drank drams et cetera; but for a brief period, while I resided in Richmond and edited the ‘Messenger,’ I certainly did give away, at long intervals, to the temptation held out on all sides to the spirit of Southern conviviality. My sensitive temperament could not stand an excitement which was an everyday matter to my companions. For some days after each excess I was invariably confined to bed.”

This was also the consensus of opinion of those who knew Poe intimately up to the time of his death. He had unquestionably an abnormal sensitiveness to alcoholic stimulant — the smallest quantity of the mildest liquor sufficed to affect him to a point of stupefaction. This, however, was not taken account of, and much biography has done deep injustice to the name of the immortal author of “The Raven.” The laurel of genius has been conceded to him only to be preluded by materialistic, abhorrent pictures of his personal character. [column 2:]

Had Poe been born a generation later he would have been spared a life's anguish, and his good name would have been unbesmirched. In the light of modern science Poe belongs to a class of unfortunates now called dipsomaniacs. Modern scientific investigation and research have disclosed the existence of a malady underlying drunken phenomena, which it has christened inebriety or narcomania — a mania for narcotism or intoxication which it recognizes as a specific disease, as is mental unconsciousness, that not so very long ago was believed to be a demoniacal possession. Indeed, in the jurisprudence of some countries, as Belgium, dipsomania is regarded as a variety of insanity.

Inebriety, or narcomania, is now accepted as an abnormal, unhealthful, or defective brain condition that gives rise to the overmastering impulse or craze for intoxication which in many cases results in the visible excesses of drunkenness. The drunkenness is never actually the disease, as is: often loosely stated, but is the outcome or manifestation of a diseased state. Many great writers have been victims of narcomania, due to a highly organized nervous condition. Such were De Quincy, Coleridge, Lamb, Burns, Byron, Baudelaire and De Musset.,

The facts of Poe's life also followed naturally upon the circumstances of his birth and boyhood. Such parentage as Poe had gives to the world many of its geniuses, and also its dipsomaniacs. The poet was descended from two generations of actors, or rather, poor players. Both his parents followed the uncertain profession of the stage at a period when to get a living meant a ruinous drain on all mental and physical attributes. Great nervous excitement, a brain struggle with poverty, no time to give to the maternal thoughts of the coming child, whose germinal status was unfit, could produce nothing but the psychopath. The pair died young, and their orphan boy, at the age of two, was adopted by a childless, wealthy merchant, whose wife indulged the child in every caprice, and stimulated his vanity by making him exhibit his precocious talents to her admiring friends. As a boy of six he used to stand on Mr. Allan's dessert table and drink healths [page 803:] to the company and make speeches. A child thus born and nurtured seemed predestined to an irregular and profligate manhood.

That Poe was born with an unstable nervous organization, and was a silent sufferer of intense psychic disturbances, which forced him finally to seek oblivion in the delirium of alcoholic intoxication, is undoubted. In his poetic prayers and phantasies the neurologist can see the suffering and recognize the feeling of hopelessness ever present in the victim of dipsomania. The dipsomaniacal attacks are symptoms of disorganized brain cells. Each attack naturally weakens the resisting power, and augments the basic cause. The result is an increase of frequency in the attacks until the somatic end.

Poe's infirmity was evidenced as a school-boy. It is said of him that he was capricious, of a violent temper, and frequently showed uncontrollable impulses, all of which would now be regarded by the neurologist as symptoms of deep physiologic concern. At the University of Virginia, as a young man, his predilection for the nervous excitement of gambling, and his craving for alcohol, showed a psychopathic condition. “Poe's passion for strong drink,” says one of his fellow students, “was marked and peculiar. It was not the taste of the beverage that pleased him, for he would seize a full glass and drain it in a gulp. This usually satisfied him.” Unlike the drunkard, he did not indulge in small but frequent quantities, enjoying the flavor with sips and smacks. He was the true psychopath, who poured down just enough to quiet his horrible restlessness. He was possessed by furious, maddening storms that drove before them uncontrollable impulses whose license is impassioned; and the helpless poet, mentally alienated, sought rest and oblivion in alcohol. He knew naught of time, friends, or responsibility of self. After the attacks, memory of acts, words, time, was a dismal blank, and fear, introspection and despair were all that remained. Upon the complete return to sanity the real self was asserted in the refined, gentlemanly, conscientious Poe. In the happy lucid intervals Poe worked under high mental pressure. This he expressed [column 2:] in a letter to Lowell (July 2, 1844): “I am excessively slothful and wonderfully industrious by fits I scribble all day and read all night so long as the disease (the passion for writing) endures.”

The psychologist easily the reason for Poe's intensity, understands his cosmic 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. Dark, sometimes dreadfully dark, is the page on which are written the records of genius, but there are few darker than the melancholy history of America's greatest lyric poet. More than half a century has passed since “the unhappy master, whom unmerciful disaster followed fast and followed faster,” died at the untimely age of forty in the city of Baltimore. But not yet has the world accorded him a recognition worthy of his genius, or condoned the faults that were constitutional rather than vicious.