UNIVERSITY "GOCE DELCEV", STIP

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SEMINAR WORK

Edgar Allan Poe, innovative and groundbreaking poet

Mentor Candidate
Prof. dr index number

Stip, May 2021

Content
Abstract.....................................................................................................................................................3
Introduction..............................................................................................................................................4
1. Introducing Poe...............................................................................................................................5
1.1. Military career............................................................................................................................6
1.2. Publishing career......................................................................................................................7
2. Gothic Poe........................................................................................................................................8
3. Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe.......................................................................................................9
4. Poe remembered...........................................................................................................................12
Conclusion.............................................................................................................................................14
Used literature.......................................................................................................................................15

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EDGAR ALLAN POE, INNOVATIVE AND GROUNDBREAKING
POET

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 Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809, the second son of
David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both stage actors. The family lived in abject
poverty and moved frequently during Poe's first years, during which time his parents
pursued acting engagements in New York, Maryland, and Virginia. Poe's father
abandoned the family when Poe was still a small child, and his mother died in
Richmond, Virginia, in December 1811. Shortly after his mother's death, Poe was
adopted by John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant, and his wife, Frances. In 1815
the young boy went with the Allan’s to Great Britain, living in Scotland and London for
the next five years. After returning to Richmond in 1820, Poe attended private schools,
where he excelled in literature, classics, and oratory; he also began to write poetry.

Keywords: literature, poetry, poems, tales

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 Introduction

Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based
on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which
established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction.

Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short
story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th-
century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned
themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the
specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In
his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well
as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced
the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of
modern literature. Poe's first book of short fiction, Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque, was published in 1840. Over the next few years Poe published two
additional story collections, The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (1843) and Tales by
Edgar A. Poe (1845), as well as his most significant book of poetry, The Raven and
Other Poems (1845). In 1835 he moved to Richmond with his aunt and her 12-year-old
daughter, Virginia. Poe married Virginia a year later, shortly before her 14th birthday
Virginia contracted tuberculosis during this time; she died in January 1847. Poe's own
health began to deteriorate, his condition exacerbated by heavy alcohol abuse.

Poe’s life has interested many biographers and Poe’s works, especially his
Gothic tales, have made Poe very famous. However it is the mystery left behind when
Poe died, along with the tragically small funeral, which has turned Poe’s death into an
enormous cultural phenomenon. Poe’s death therefore hugely contributes to the fact
that the memory of Poe and his works are still alive today.

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 1. Introducing Poe

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe,
Jr., an actor from Baltimore. (fig.1) After his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811,
he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his
godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England
(1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond.
For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling losses
at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe
returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged.

He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic

poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poverty forced him to join the army under the
name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe’s foster mother, John Allan purchased
his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military
Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al
Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from
the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded
to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems, containing several
masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats, Percy Bysshe Shelley, and
Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his “MS.
Found in a Bottle” won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond
as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. There he made a name as a critical
reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to
have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

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 Figure 1 Edgar Allan Poe

1.1. Military career

Poe was unable to support himself, so he enlisted in the United States Army as a
private on May 27, 1827, using the name "Edgar A. Perry". He claimed that he was 22
years old even though he was 18.He first served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor
for five dollars a month. That same year, he released his first book, a 40-page collection
of poetry titled Tamerlane and Other Poems, attributed with the byline "by a Bostonian".
Only 50 copies were printed, and the book received virtually no attention. Poe's
regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina and traveled by ship
on the brig Waltham on November 8, 1827. Poe was promoted to "artificer", an enlisted
tradesman who prepared shells for artillery, and had his monthly pay doubled. He
served for two years and attained the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery (the highest
rank that a non-commissioned officer could achieve); he then sought to end his five-
year enlistment early. Poe revealed his real name and his circumstances to his
commanding officer, Lieutenant Howard, who would only allow Poe to be discharged if
he reconciled with Allan. Poe wrote a letter to Allan, who was unsympathetic and spent
several months ignoring Poe's pleas; Allan may not have written to Poe even to make

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him aware of his foster mother's illness. Frances Allan died on February 28, 1829, and
Poe visited the day after her burial. Perhaps softened by his wife's death, Allan agreed
to support Poe's attempt to be discharged in order to receive an appointment to the
United States Military Academy at West Point, New York.

Poe was finally discharged on April 15, 1829, after securing a replacement to finish
his enlisted term for him. Before entering West Point, he moved back to Baltimore for a
time to stay with his widowed aunt Maria Clemm, her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm
(Poe's first cousin), his brother Henry, and his invalid grandmother Elizabeth Cairnes
Poe.

Poe traveled to West Point and matriculated as a cadet on July 1, 1830.In October
1830, Allan married his second wife Louisa Patterson. The marriage and bitter quarrels
with Poe over the children born to Allan out of extramarital affairs led to the foster father
finally disowning Poe. Poe decided to leave West Point by purposely getting court-
martialed. On February 8, 1831, he was tried for gross neglect of duty and
disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church. He
tactically pleaded not guilty to induce dismissal, knowing that he would be found guilty.

1.2. Publishing career

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a
writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was one of the
first Americans to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international
copyright law. American publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works
rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt
by the Panic of 1837.

After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose, likely based
on John Neal's critiques in The Yankee magazine. He placed a few stories with a
Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama Politian. The Baltimore

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Saturday Visitor awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story "MS. Found in
a Bottle".

Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and
widely reviewed in 1838. In the summer of 1839, Poe became assistant editor of
Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories, and
reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had established at the
Messenger. Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was
published in two volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed
reviews.

In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his
own journal called The Stylus, although he originally intended to call it The Penn, as it
would have been based in Philadelphia. The journal was never produced before Poe's
death.

Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as writer and co-editor at
the then-very-successful monthly Graham's Magazine.

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham,
New York, in what is now the Bronx. That home is now known as the Edgar Allan Poe
Cottage, relocated to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and
Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, Poe befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now
Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and
critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman"
stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

2. Gothic Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is said to have been “the first American to write truly sophisticated
Gothic fiction”. Poe at least brought new elements into American Gothic. For instance,
unlike most of his contemporaries, Poe’s tales usually do not take place within the
United States, but rather in an unspecific location which could be imagined anywhere.

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Gothic literary scholar David Punter claims that this imagined world is “an artificial
version of a European environment” and that evil forces in Poe’s works can always be,
in some way, connected to Europe. Poe took the elements of British Gothic and
developed them further, turning them inwards into a nightmare without escape, often
using tools of imprisonment like coffins and tombs. The world that Poe’s main
characters have to deal with is obsessive and repetitive and the atmosphere of his tales
indicate that “humans are mostly damned and doomed from the start”. However, as Eric
Savoy points out in The Cambridge Companion to Gothic Fiction (2008), in combination
with this darkness; this utter despair and impending doom that appear in his works, Poe
is at the same time obsessed with beauty and looking for “precise aesthetic effects”.
With this unique combination of Gothic elements, Poe captures his readers, both
through fascination and terror.

3. Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s work owes much to the concern of Romanticism 1 with the occult and the
satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare
faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity
and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of
imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser
of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a
storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place
among universally known men of letters.

The outstanding fact in Poe’s character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of
contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two
persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the
butt of his sharp criticism, found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to
accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising

1
attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture,
criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century.

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from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from
appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?

Much of Poe’s best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary
circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of
literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty.
He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope. He had a sense of humour, apologizing
to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is
still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the
ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and
sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (“To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,”
“Eulalie,” “To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in
“Ligeia” and “Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his imagination carried him away from the material
world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later
years of his life.

More generally, in such verses as “The Valley of Unrest,” “Lenore,” “The Raven,”
“For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the
universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From
these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death (“The Fall of the House
of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,”
“The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and
crime (“Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The
Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart”), his tales of survival after dissolution and
his tales of fatality (“The Assignation,” “The Man of the Crowd”). Even when he does not
hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of
the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves
to quiver (“The Pit and the Pendulum”), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses
and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death. (fig.2)

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 Figure 2 Poe, Edgar Allan: “The Pit and the Pendulum”

On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in
the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute
their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself
on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public
with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought
reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he attributed to his characters
William Legrand and C. Auguste Dupin. This suggested to him the analytical tales,
which created the detective story, and his science fiction tales.

The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird
poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty

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and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would
write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a
hard and dry style. In Poe’s masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his
mind, and of his art are fused into oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more
effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and
structure. He formulated rules for the short story, in which he sought the ancient unities:
i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one
place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these
views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals
admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different
from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor
writers.

Poe’s genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world
and, in the long run, the United States, of Poe’s greatness than the French poets
Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé. Indeed his role in French literature was
that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on his
“The Philosophy of Composition” borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples
to generate the theory of pure poetry. 2

4. Poe remembered

The society of Baltimore decided that something had to be done to honour Poe’s
memory. Since his original funeral had been small, to say the least, it was time for Poe
to receive a proper send-off. Therefore, 160 years after Poe’s death, an enormous
memorial was held in Westminster Hall, a former church located near Poe’s burial site in
Baltimore.

2
essage-free verse that is concerned with exploring the essential musical nature of the language rather than with
conveying a narrative or having didactic purpose.

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 As is the tradition with Poe, facts that are stated about him are often based on
unreliable sources or they are the results of misconceptions and therefore often conflict
with other statements. The truth of the matter is that some facts in relation to Poe have
never been fully established, such as regarding the death of his father and the number
of mourners at Poe’s original burial. It is interesting to compare reports that mention
how many people attended Poe’s first funeral.

A great misunderstanding caused one blogger to become outraged over the fact that
Poe’s body was being exhumed for the mere sake of entertainment. The same
misconception prompted people to call Jeff Jerome, the curator of the Poe House and
Museum, and complain over the fact that Poe was to be exhumed for the ceremony.
Poe’s body was not exhumed for this memorial, although the body had once been
removed before: in 1875 it was decided to move Poe’s remains from his unmarked
grave to a better place in the corner of the cemetery. His grave was marked with a
grand monument and the remains of his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and his wife, Virginia, were
also exhumed and reburied next to Poe. This hugely elaborate event, along with the
press coverage, discussions and commotion that resulted from it, is a perfect example
of the cultural phenomenon that Poe’s death has become.(fig.3)

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 Figure 3 Quote from Poe

Conclusion

Poe may be dead and buried but he is far from forgotten. His name continues to
be heard for various reasons; for his works, for his influence on other writers, because
of movies based on Poe’s stories or works based on Poe’s life – or death. On October
7th, 2009, Poe’s name was once again on everyone’s lips. That day was the 200th
anniversary of Poe’s birth.

To modern commentators Poe remains best known for his short stories, almost
all of which were collected in three volumes published during his lifetime: Tales of the
Grotesque and Arabesque, The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe, and Tales by Edgar
A. Poe. Many scholars divide Poe's short fiction into two categories: horror tales and
detective stories. Poe's horror tales typically revolve around characters who have
reached states of extreme alienation, terror, and madness and often contain elements
of the supernatural. In "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843), a murderer is plagued by the
persistent echo of his victim's heartbeat, compelling him to confess his crime; "The
Black Cat" (1843) features a protagonist who becomes obsessed with killing his beloved
pet cat; the narrator of "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846), tormented by the "thousand
injuries" inflicted upon him by an old rival, achieves his long-awaited vengeance by
burying his victim alive in a brick tomb. The sense of menace in other stories is far more
subtle. In "Some Words with a Mummy" (1845), a revivified Egyptian mummy, speaking
to a group of modern scientists, offers an ominous indictment of nineteenth-century
democracy. The narrator of "Ligeia" (1838), distressed by the death of his first wife,
imagines her soul's resurrection in the body of his second wife. "Ligeia" is also
noteworthy in that it contains the poem "The Conqueror Worm," a dark vision of the
power and inevitability of death.

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 Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized
fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular
culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated
museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as
the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

Used literature

1. Maslin, Janet (June 6, 2006). "The Poe Shadow". New York Times. Retrieved
October 13, 2007.
2. Ackroyd, Peter (2008). Poe: A Life Cut Short. London: Chatto & Windus
3. Pope-Hennessy, Una (1934). Edgar Allan Poe, 1809–1849: A Critical Biography.
New York: Haskell House
4. Edgar Allan Poe: Poetry and Tales, edited by Patrick F. Quinn ( New York:
Library of America, 1984)

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