Most kids in this country have a passing acquaintance with Edgar Allan Poe— required to read The Telltale Heart or The Raven.
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered weak and weary over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore, while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping – as of someone gently rapping -- rapping at my chamber door. ‘Tis some visitor,’ I muttered, ‘tapping at my chamber door – only this and nothing more.’”
Some historians saw Poe’s dark subjects as a sign of mental illness, but Emily Ogden, a professor of English at UVA, has studied his works and what others have written about him and drawn a different conclusion.
“With a writer like Poe who is so easily misunderstood as kind of a crank or a madman, one reason that we might be inclined to say that is to defend ourselves against the darkness in ourselves. What might it be like to instead say, ‘Here’s someone who’s willing to explore that.”
Poe was likely an alcoholic, and his childhood was tragic.
“He was born in 1809 in Boston. He was the child of traveling actors, and by the time he was 3 his father had abandoned the family, and his mother had died.”
A couple in Richmond, John and Fanny Allen, took him in, but as a teen Poe fought with his adoptive father who provided too little money for his studies at the University of Virginia. He tried to raise money at the card table, but instead, ended up with gambling debts and left school after only ten months.
“So he left earlier than he wanted to, but he did fine academically.”
Fortunately, Professor Ogden says, he was a hard worker, earning money for a time as a brick layer and a soldier.
“He had a tremendous work ethic we’re told. As a young man he was very athletic. He swam six miles in the James River. He pointed out, whenever he told the story, that a tidal surge was coming against him as he swam.”
He wrote poetry on the side and eventually found his way into the world of publishing.
“He was working for the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was his first job as editor, and he was also writing stories. He wrote a story about a man who – apparently in a fugue state – extracts all of his cousin’s teeth.”
This, of course, sparked letters of protest from readers who felt the magazine should publish something more wholesome, but Poe refused to back down when his boss raised the issue.
“Poe wrote back to him and said, ‘I know that people say they want wholesome and simple things, but it’s whatever sells, that’s what people really want, and watch what happens when I write you another story of this kind. See how that one sells," Ogden says, "And he was right!”
In her new book about him, Darkness Becomes Bright, she explains that Poe believed there was something in the human brain that caused him and others to screw up.
“Procrastination, for example. Standing at the edge of a cliff and feeling in yourself the wish to jump, being in a circle of people and realizing you’re talking too long but not being able somehow to find the end of a sentence.”
After his young wife died of tuberculosis, Poe, at the age of 40, went in search of a new mate – visiting his childhood sweetheart, then heading back to his home in New York by way of Baltimore.
“He arrived in Baltimore and, for five days, we don’t what happened to him, but then when he turned up, he was drunk and not in his own clothes, and he was taken to a hospital where he eventually died.”
Of course, his legacy lives on in classrooms around the world. A character he created was said to be the model for Sherlock Holmes, and his gift for telling scary or mysterious stories inspires current writers of books and scripts today.
