Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (Boston, United States, January 19, 1809-Baltimore, United States, October 7, 1849) was an American romantic writer, poet, critic, and journalist. generally recognized as one of the universal teachers of the short story, of which he was one of the first practitioners in his country. He was a renovator of the Gothic novel, especially remembered for his horror stories. Considered the inventor of the detective story, he also contributed several works to the emerging genre of science fiction. Furthermore, he was the first major American writer to attempt to make writing his modus vivendi, which which had unfortunate consequences for him.
He was baptized Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts, and his parents died when he was a child. He was taken in by a wealthy Richmond, Virginia couple, Frances and John Allan, though he was never officially adopted. He spent an academic year at the University of Virginia and later enlisted, also briefly, in the army. His relations with the Allans broke down around this time, due to his ongoing disagreements with his stepfather, who often ignored his pleas for help and ended up disinheriting him. His literary career began with a book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827).
For financial reasons, he soon turned his efforts to prose, writing short stories and literary criticism for some newspapers of the time; he came to acquire some notoriety for his caustic and elegant style. Due to his work, he lived in several cities: Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York. In Baltimore, in 1835, he married his cousin Virginia Clemm, who was then thirteen years old. In January 1845, he published a poem that would make him famous: "The Raven." His wife died of tuberculosis two years later. The great dream of the writer, to edit his own newspaper (which was to be called The Stylus ), was never fulfilled.
He died on October 7, 1849, in the city of Baltimore, when he was barely forty years old. The exact cause of his death was never clarified. He was attributed to alcohol, brain congestion, anger, drugs, heart failure, rage, suicide, tuberculosis and other causes.
The figure of the writer, as much as his work, profoundly marked the literature of his country and it can be said that of the whole world. He exerted great influence on French symbolist literature and, through it, on surrealism, but his imprint goes much further: all Victorian ghost literature is indebted to him and, to a greater or lesser extent, such disparate authors and important figures such as Charles Baudelaire, Fedor Dostoyevsky, William Faulkner, Franz Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft, Arthur Conan Doyle, M. R. James, Ambrose Bierce, Guy de Maupassant, Thomas Mann, Jorge Luis Borges, Clemente Palma, Julio Cortázar, who translated almost all of his texts into prose and wrote extensively about his life and work, etc. The Nicaraguan poet Rubén Darío dedicated an essay to her in his book Los raros.
Poe also made inroads into fields as heterogeneous as cosmology, cryptography, and mesmerism. His work has been assimilated into popular culture through literature, music, both modern and classical, film (for example, the many adaptations of his stories by American director Roger Corman), comics, painting (several works by Gustave Doré, for example) and television (hundreds of adaptations, such as the Spanish ones for the series Historias para no dormir ). (Vid. Repercussion of Edgar Allan Poe).
According to Kevin J. Hayes, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,
the artistic diversity of those who fell under Poe's spell indicates the extent of their influence. The best artists used Poe's imaginative works as a basis for his aesthetic theories. [...] In short, Poe's writings have promoted the artistic and aesthetic generation of a wide variety of creative disciplines.
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural states of this author:
He revolutionized the horror story, giving it original psychological perspective, coherence of tone and atmosphere; he wrote some of the best and most well-known lyric poems in the world, and also some of the most sensational short novels of the century XIX, and vividly impressed authors like De la Mare, Stevenson, Doyle, Lovecraft and Borges. However, over the years Edgar Allan Poe's work has received decisively challenged criticism.
The Encyclopædia Britannica includes:
His sharp and sharp judgment as a commentator of contemporary literature, the musical virtue and the idealism of his poetry, the dramatic force of his stories, which were already recognized in life, assure him a prominent position among the most universally recognized men of letters.
Poe's genius, in the words of critic Van Wyck Brooks, was unparalleled in his time, and his only major rival as a prose writer and short story writer was perhaps Nathaniel Hawthorne.
In his essay "Edgar Poe's Tradition," Canadian intellectual Marshall McLuhan argued:
At the same time that the teachers of New England tasted the pages of Plato and Buda with a hot tea next door, and Browning and Tennyson generated parish fog to relax the English spirit, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of your time. Long before Conrad and Eliot, he devoted himself, together with Baudelaire, to explore the heart of darkness.
For the French poet Stéphane Mallarmé, the Bostonian was "the intellectual god" of his century.
In one of his letters, Poe wrote:
My life has been capricious, impulse, passion, longing for loneliness, mocking the things of this world; an honest desire for the future.A James R. Lowell, 2/7/1844
Biography
Background
Poe's paternal great-grandfather, John Poe, immigrated to the United States from Ireland in the 18th century and became a farmer, marrying an Englishwoman; both claimed to be of noble descent. One of his ten children was David Poe, who in turn married an Irish emigrant, Elizabeth Cairnes. They lived in Baltimore, Maryland; David Poe was a carpenter and, when the revolution against the English broke out, he even lent money to the army.For merits, he received the honorary title of “general.”David and Elizabeth had seven children. The eldest, David, was Edgar's father; the second daughter, Maria (later Maria Clemm), was the poet's aunt and mother-in-law (mother of his wife, Virginia). Edgar's maternal grandmother, Elizabeth Arnold, was an opera singer and romantic actress who, with her namesake daughter, emigrated from London, England, to the United States in 1796. David Poe Jr., a law student, left law school to become an actor. In 1804 he met the pretty Miss Arnold —actress of great charm and with an extensive repertoire: she came to represent some two hundred roles—, who was married at the time to a certain Mr. Hopkins, who would die shortly after. David and Elizabeth married six months later and settled in Boston, Massachusetts, where their first two children were born.
Early Years
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in the city of Boston, where his older brother, William Henry Leonard (1807), had already been born. The younger sister, Rosalie, was born in Richmond in 1810. Edgar may have been named after a character in William Shakespeare's King Lear, which the parents performed in 1809, the year of his birth. David Poe left his family in 1810, and his wife, Elizabeth, died a year later of tuberculosis; she was twenty-four years old. The only things Edgar kept of his biological parents were a portrait of his mother and a drawing of Boston Harbor. His sister Rosalie was given an empty jewelry box. The reason Edgar and Rosalie were adopted was that, when their mother died, the children were left totally helpless in Richmond, while the grandparents, who lived in Baltimore, moved away. they took care of William Henry, who already lived with them. In any case, Edgar was taken in by one of the charitable families that had cared for the children when his mother died: the couple formed by Frances and John Allan, from Richmond, Virginia), while Rosalie was taken in by the Mackenzie family. The Allans and the Mackenzies were neighbors and maintained a close friendship.
His stepfather, from whom Edgar would take his last name, was a wealthy merchant of Scottish descent. His businesses included tobacco, textiles, teas and coffees, wines and spirits, grain, tombstones, horses, and even the slave trade; a hot-tempered and intransigent man, he played a leading role—negatively speaking—in the writer's life. For example, he never showed any sympathy for his literary ambitions. His biographers note that John Allan had several natural children out of wedlock. The Allans took the child in, but never formally adopted him although they gave him the name &# 34;Edgar Allan Poe". His stepmother, who had not been able to have children, felt true devotion to the boy and always loved and pampered him, it is believed that to the point of spoiling him with the other women in the house, which they tried to avoid the stepfather's interventions.
In 1812, Edgar was baptized into the Episcopal Church. At the age of five he began his primary studies, but soon, the following year (1815), the Allan family traveled to England. The boy attended a school in Irvine, Scotland (the town where John Allan was born), for a short period, but it was enough to introduce him to the old Scottish culture and folklore. Later the family moved to London (1816). Edgar studied at a Chelsea boarding school until the summer of 1817. He later entered the Reverend John Bransby's College in Stoke Newington, then a northern suburb of the city. There he learned to speak French and write Latin. From these experiences and from the contemplation of the Gothic landscapes and architectures of Great Britain, stories such as "William Wilson" would be born years later. However, the memory that Poe would keep of his stay in this country was sadness and loneliness, feelings shared by his stepmother. In this regard, John Allan stated: "Frances complains as usual".
The Scotsman, considerably troubled by his ill-fated London dealings, returned with his family to Richmond in 1820. From 1821 to 1825, Edgar attended the best schools in the city, receiving the careful southern education befitting a Virginian gentleman: the English Classical School, by John H. Clarke, and the schools of William Burke and Dr. Ray Thomas and his wife, where he met the classics: Ovid, Virgil, Caesar, Homer, Horace, Cicero... Outside of school hours, since he was little he liked to spend time leafing through the English magazines that he found in his stepfather's stores; there the seafaring legends told by the captains of sailing ships that approached Richmond also captivated his imagination. Some of these legends would eventually inspire one of his fundamental works: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. According to Van Wyck Brooks, Poe was also able to hear stories about apparitions, corpses and cemeteries in the barracks of the black slaves, when his mammy would take him to visit the family plantations.
His character is forged in those years. In 1823, at fourteen, he had already made his first literary steps, and fell passionately in love with the mother of a fellow student, to whom he dedicated the well-known poem "To Helen". This woman, called Mrs. Stanard, was of great beauty and was thirty years old at the time; she died months later. She was his first great love.At fifteen he was peaceful, though not quite sociable. He had few conflicts with his companions, but he was known to tolerate no manipulation of any kind. He was also fond of masquerades. One day he ended up beating up a companion much stronger than him, after having received what was his, and waiting, as he himself confessed, for the other to be exhausted. They are also well known. his skills as an athlete. In imitation of his great hero, Lord Byron, on a celebrated occasion, one hot June day the young man undertook a five-mile swim up the James River from Richmond; he did it against the current. When he doubted her feat, he sought eyewitnesses to corroborate it in writing.
Still, Brooks recalls, at this stage he was a nervous and irritable boy, with a glint of anxiety and sadness in his eyes; he began to have frequent nightmares, all possibly due to family constitutional problems that had already manifested in his sister Rosalie's. "This complex insecurity," continues Brooks, "of a physical, social, and later financial nature, would largely explain Poe's life and character, also conditioning to a large extent all of his literary work." As a way to counteract these weaknesses in successive years, he would boldly seek supremacy in the journalistic field, and literaryly he always wanted to be considered "a magician, because of the feeling of power that this gave him."
In 1824 the disagreement between him and his adoptive father began to take shape. In a letter addressed by Edgar to Edgar's older brother, William Henry, he stated: "What are we guilty of? It is something that I do not understand. And that I have put up with his conduct for so long still surprises me more. This boy has not an ounce of affection for us nor one bit of thanks for all my care and kindness to him". In this letter Allan complains baselessly about Edgar's "friendships", going so far as to suggest maliciously that Rosalie, the younger sister, was really only a maternal sister, a possibility that always tormented Edgar. According to Hervey Allen, the stepfather's advances were due to his knowledge of certain intimate information about Poe's mother, since, once After her death, Allan somehow came into possession of her private correspondence. With the letter to William Henry he intended to ensure Edgar's silence about his own dealings.
In 1825, John Allan's uncle, William Galt, also a Scotsman and former smuggler, died. He had been considered the richest man in Richmond, and left many acres of land to his niece. Edgar's fortune grew considerably and, in that same year, Allan celebrated by buying an imposing two-story brick house, called Moldavia. It was on the balcony of that house that Edgar became interested in astronomy.
University of Virginia
At around this time, at the age of sixteen, Edgar was romantically involved with a girl from the neighborhood, Sarah Elmira Royster, who would reappear at the end of her life. In a letter to a friend of hers, she described the future writer many years later in this way:
Edgar was a very handsome boy, not very talkative. Nice conversation, but rather sad behavior. He never talked about his parents. I was very attached to Mrs. Allan, just like she was to him. He was enthusiastic, impulsive, he did not bear the slightest verbal rudeness.
This relationship preceded his enrollment at the University of Virginia, Charlottesville, in February 1826, to study languages. The university, in its early years, adhered to the ideals of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. They were very strict when it came to gambling, horses, weapons, tobacco and alcohol, but these rules were hardly respected in reality. Jefferson had established a system of self-government for students, allowing them to choose their study subjects, organize their own support, and report irregularities or misconduct to the authorities. This unique regime had turned the school community into chaos, registering a very high rate of absenteeism.
Poe, usually disinterested in politics, was quick to express his rejection of the young democracy, a system that he considered deceitful and socially disastrous. "He often expressed his lack of faith in human perfectibility or in the common notions of equality, progress, and social betterment that characterized Jefferson's day, to the point that he could be called an anti-Southernist." jeffersonian».
Despite being considered a brilliant and diligent student at first, he soon became noted for a peculiar defect, which was that of pretending to be far superior to his knowledge and erudition. And, although these were not so vast, even as a child, he devoured all printed paper that was put in front of him, because he felt, according to Brooks, "with the energy of a man": he was always "a hard worker". his conceit and fondness for mystification were also manifested in the classrooms and rooms of the university. He boasted of having traveled, like Byron, to Greece; he knew the entire Mediterranean well, and had also been to Arabia and St. Petersburg.
In the time that Edgar spent in Charlottesville, he lost contact with Elmira Royster, and also fell out with his stepfather permanently due to his gambling debts; According to Hervey Allen, Poe began to gamble because of his need to get extra money to support himself. Cortázar affirms (who admits following the biography of this Poean scholar in general lines) that it is at this time that he is related to Poe for the first time. Poe with alcohol. "The climate of the University was as favorable as that of a tavern: Poe gambled, almost invariably lost, and drank", and this despite the fact that the effects of a small amount of alcohol were devastating to his constitution. the future writer reads and translates the classical languages with no apparent effort, earning the admiration of teachers and fellow students. He also tirelessly reads history, natural history, mathematics, astronomy, poetry, and novels.” Edgar complained that Allan did not send him enough money for classes, to buy books, and to furnish his bedroom. Despite Allan agreeing to send money, his adopted son's debts only grew.
Poe finally dropped out of the university after a year and, not feeling at home in Richmond (especially on learning that Elmira had just married one Alexander Shelton), he moved, first to Norfolk, and in April 1827 to Boston, where "there is obscure evidence that he tried to make a living as a journalist" and also had some trade-related work. At this stage he used the pseudonym 'Henri Le Rennet'.
Military career, early writings
On May 27, 1827, unable to survive on his own, Poe enlisted in the army as a private, under the name 'Edgar A. Perry'. Although he was 18 years old, he signed that he was 22. His first assignment was at Fort Independence, in Boston Harbor. His salary was five dollars a month.
In that same year (1827) he published his first book, a forty-page poetry booklet entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems, signed: "By a Bostonian" ("For a Bostonian"). In the foreword he stated that almost all of the poems had been written before the age of fourteen. Only fifty copies were printed, and the book went virtually unnoticed. Meanwhile, his regiment was posted to Fort Moultrie in Charleston, where the November 8, 1827 aboard the brig Waltham. Poe was promoted to artificer, the soldier in charge of preparing artillery shells, and who was paid double pay.
After serving two years and earning the rank of gunnery sergeant major (the highest non-commissioned officer rank), he tried to shorten his five-year enlistment by revealing his real name and circumstances to his unit's commanding officer, Lt. Howard. Howard promised to help him only if Poe reconciled with his stepfather, and was the one who wrote to this end to John Allan seeking a reconciliation between the two, but Allan was adamant.Months passed and Allan's pleas were unheeded; It seems that Allan did not even share with his adoptive son the serious illness that afflicted his wife. Frances Allan died on February 28, 1829, and Poe was only able to come to her house the day after her funeral. Facing her grave, he could not resist the pain and fell inanimate. Edgar, until the last day of his life, whenever he expressed himself about her, he did so with tenderness. Perhaps softened by the death of his wife, Allan finally agreed to help Poe obtain his discharge, albeit on the condition that he enroll in West Point Academy.
Poe was finally discharged on April 15, 1829, after finding a replacement to take his place. Before leaving for West Point, he moved to Baltimore to spend time with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm (sister his father), his daughter, Virginia Eliza Clemm (cousin of the poet), his brother William Henry, and his invalid grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe. During this time, he published his second book: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (Baltimore, 1829). The book was not fully understood, and the author was generally lambasted; however, the famous critic of the time John Neal had glowing comments for him: "He will be the very first in the ranks of true poets", and the also well-known Sarah Hale went so far as to affirm that "he remembered a poet no less than Shelley".. These were the first flattery that flattered the ears of the Bostonian.
He traveled to West Point and enrolled as a cadet on July 1, 1830. In October of that same year, John Allan married Louisa Patterson for a second time. This marriage, as well as Allan's arguments with his protected, in which his natural children used to come to light, caused the definitive estrangement between the two. The poet did not endure military discipline for long and caused with his conduct that he was tried by a court martial. On February 8, 1831, he was accused of serious abandonment of service and disobedience to orders, by refusing to train and not going to classes or church. He pleaded not guilty in order to directly provoke his expulsion, knowing that he would have been found guilty.
In that same month of February, he left for New York, where he managed to publish a third book of poems, which he simply titled Poems. The publication was supported by his West Point classmates, many of whom donated 75 cents each. Poe thus managed to raise a total of $170. The companions would be in for a surprise, expecting the poems to be of the satirical type Poe wrote at West Point to mock commanding officers, and the work is purely romantic. The book was printed by Elam Bliss of New York, and appeared as "Second Edition" with the following dedication: "This book is respectfully dedicated to the United States Corps of Cadets." The book republished the long poems "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf", as well as six previously unpublished poems, including early versions of "To Helen", "Israfel" and "The City in the Sea".
She returned to Baltimore with her aunt, brother, and cousin in March 1831. Her older brother, Henry, who had been in failing health, partly due to alcoholism, died on August 1, 1831. Poe moved into the garret he had shared with his brother, and was able to work in relative comfort. His literary attention, until now focused exclusively on poetry, will be transferred to the short story, a more "marketable" genre, which at that time was of capital importance for the writer and his family, who lived for the next four years "in conditions of extreme poverty". According to certain testimonies, the Poes sometimes suffered "material lack of food".
Poe, Journalist
After his brother's death, Edgar strove hard to carve out a career as a writer, however, encountering great difficulties, largely due to the state of journalism in his country., was the first well-known American who strove to live exclusively from writing. What hurt him most in this regard was the non-existence at the time of international copyright law. American publishers preferred to pirate English works instead of paying their fellow citizens for theirs. The publishing industry was, in addition, badly affected by the serious economic crisis, which would materialize in the so-called Panic of 1837. Despite the great boom experienced by American periodicals in that period, which was driven in part by new technologies, most did not cover more than a small number of topics and on the other hand journalists found it very difficult to collect what was agreed upon on time. Poe, in his attempts to make his way in this world, was continually constrained to ask his employers for money and to all kinds of humiliating situations related to the economic issue. This sad state of affairs would not improve in all his life.
After his first poetic attempts, the writer turned his sights to prose, for the aforementioned reasons. In 1832 he managed to publish five stories in the Philadelphia newspaper Saturday Courier . Among them is included the first story he wrote, Gothic in style: "Metzengerstein." Around this time he began working on his only drama, which he would never finish: Politian . In April 1833 he sent a last letter to John Allan in which he desperately pleaded for his help: "In the name of God, have mercy on me and save me from destruction." Allan didn't answer him. Fortunately, around this time, the Saturday Visiter, a Baltimore newspaper, awarded the writer a $50 prize for his short story "Manuscript Found in a Bottle". The editorial board of the Visiter stated that the account "was far and away superior to anything presented before".
In 1834 his stepfather died without leaving him an inheritance, which, financially, left him forever at his own expense. According to Wilson, Poe would always seek literary success as compensation for the loss of social prestige that his break with his had meant.
"Manuscript Found in a Bottle" had caught the attention of John P. Kennedy, a wealthy gentleman from Baltimore, who helped Poe publish his stories by introducing him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. , from Richmond (Virginia), a newspaper to which Poe was closely linked. He became its editor in August 1835; however, he lost his position after a few weeks when he was caught in a drunken state on several occasions.
Back in Baltimore, he secretly married his cousin Virginia Eliza Clemm on September 22, 1835. She was thirteen at the time, although the marriage certificate issued months later listed her as twenty-one. Poe was twenty-six. According to his biographer Joseph W. Krutch, Poe was impotent and for this reason, although perhaps unconsciously, he chose a thirteen-year-old girl as his wife, with whom it was impossible for him to maintain normal marital relations. Edmund Wilson affirms in this regard that there is no evidence of this, although he does say that, because of Poe's scruples, the marriage of the two cousins was somehow unsatisfactory, playing a "strange role" in the writer's work. Rafael Llopis recalls at this point Baudelaire's fair appreciation that in all of Poe's work there is not a single passage that refers to lust or sensual enjoyment, which, according to Llopis, points to the oedipalism underlined in his day by the psychoanalyst Marie Bonaparte: Poe was for his wife, Virginia, at the same time husband, son and brother. And in Harry Levin's opinion, the writer always sought maternal comfort in the people around him, and his wife did more good for him of younger sister.
Reinstated by White with a promise to improve his behavior, Poe returned to Richmond with Virginia and his aunt and now mother-in-law, Maria Clemm. He remained in the Messenger until January 1837. During this period the circulation of the newspaper went from 700 copies to several thousand, due to the fame acquired by the writer, already national in scope. He published in it poems, book reviews, literary criticism, and works of fiction. According to Hervey Allen, Poe certainly did not go unnoticed in that city. He was an "attractive, disturbing and exciting" young man. The severity of his judgments provoked quick responses and comments, and although he earned enmity in some quarters, his presence on the literary scene and the incisiveness of his style increased his fame more and more.
At that time he assembled a group of stories in a book he called Tales of the Folio Club; he would never see the light as such, although his stories would be used. Under the title of Pinakidia he published a collection of notable essays, of the most heterogeneous nature, which would later be grouped as Marginalia .In May 1836 a second marriage took place. with Virginia in Richmond; this time the ceremony was public, and soon after he tried to set up a guest house for his wife and his mother-in-law to take care of. His abandonment of a comfortable position in the Southern Literary Messenger in January 1837 was due, according to Hervey Allen, to the fact that "being so brilliant, he was not a person to fill a subordinate post".
In the same month, he moved with his family to New York. There he tried to publish his Tales of the Folio Club at Harpers, but it was not possible. The publishers advised him to write a long adventure work, the more popular format, and from there came his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Appearing in that same year of 1838, it was the fourth book published by the Bostonian, and the first in prose, but it was not well received by critics and provided little benefit.
In New York, despite the fact that he managed to publish some stories and reviews, the economic situation ended up becoming untenable and, in mid-1838, the family moved again, this time to the American literary center of the time, the city of Philadelphia (Pennsylvania), settling in a poor pension. Due to the hardships they were going through, Poe was given to work inappropriate to his talent, such as the publication with his name of a conchology text, a fact that would later cause him great difficulties, since he was accused of plagiarism. Poe wrote the preface and the introduction. This book is today the object of veneration by collectors. It was his fifth publication.
In the summer of 1839, he managed to become editor-in-chief of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In it he published numerous articles, stories and literary criticism, which contributed to increase the reputation that he already enjoyed in the Southern Literary Messenger . Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ( Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ), his sixth book, was published in two volumes; the writer made little money with this work, which received mixed reviews. "Manuscript found in a bottle", etc. Poe left Burton's after contributing to the magazine for about a year. Later he enrolled in another newspaper, which emerged from the transfer to another editor of that one: Graham's Magazine. Sales of this magazine grew spectacularly, due to Poe's literary contribution and good politics editorial by its owner, George Rex Graham.
These works allowed the writer to improve the situation of his wife and her mother. They moved into a nicer house, the first decent home since Richmond days. The house was on the outskirts of the city, and the writer had to walk several kilometers daily to get to work. In this period of bonanza Poe developed the germ of the detective novel through his stories "The Murders of the Rue Morgue », «The gold beetle», etc. Much of his most important work appeared in the period of Graham's. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he also published major works (such as the stories "The Appointment", " A Tale of the Rugged Mountains", "The Oblong Box" and "The Barrel of Amontillado") in the most important magazine of the time, Godey's Lady's Book, based in Philadelphia.
In 1840 he published an article announcing his intention to create his own newspaper, the Stylus. His first idea was to call it The Penn, since it would be based in in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the June 6, 1840, issue of the newspaper The Saturday Evening Post, of that city, Poe contracted an advertisement to that effect: «Information about the Penn Magazine, publication monthly literary publication soon to be published in Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe». But these initiatives never came to fruition.
One holiday afternoon in January 1842, a defining event occurred in the lives of Poe and his family. His wife, Virginia, showed the first signs of wasting typical of the disease now known as tuberculosis. As if taken from an old romantic novel, Julio Cortázar relates it this way in his biography:
Poe and his people had tea at home, in the company of some friends. Virginia, who had learned to join the harp, sang with childish grace the melodies that liked Eddie the most. Suddenly his voice was cut into an acute note, while the blood was running from his mouth.
The husband himself described the event as a ruptured blood vessel in his throat. She only recovered momentarily and the writer began to drink more than necessary due to anxiety caused by his wife's illness. Hervey Allen points out that there is some evidence that around this time Poe turned to laudanum (which contains opium) to cope with his depression and that he, too, began to suffer from serious health problems.
In March 1842, he personally met his admired Charles Dickens in Philadelphia, who was traveling to the United States at the time. They had two interviews, but what was discussed in them is unknown. Georges Walter suggests that, apart from literature (Poe had just commented on the work Barnaby Rudge in English), surely they talked about copyright; Dickens, always outraged by the pirates of his works in America, and Poe simply by not being published and also by the absence of international copyright legislation. Dickens would return to the United States years later after Poe's death. According to Walter, "the visit he then paid to Maria Clemm and the help with which she gratified her prove that he never forgot the black-robed American poet."
At this time (1842) Poe tried to obtain a position in the administration of President John Tyler, claiming membership in the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the Philadelphia customs house with the help of the president's son, Robert, who was acquainted with a friend of Poe's named Thomas Frederick. Poe, however, in mid-September of that year, failed to appear for a meeting with Thomas to discuss his appointment. He excused himself from being indisposed, but Thomas thought he was drunk.The writer was later promised a new appointment, but eventually all available positions were filled by other people.
He left Graham's because of disagreements with its publisher, George Rex Graham, who had hired Rufus Wilmot Griswold, an old acquaintance of Poe's, and tried to find a new job, surviving hardships as a free-lance writer, but eventually the family returned to New York. From this moment Hervey Allen always refers to Virginia Clemm as an "invalid". In that city, Poe worked briefly at the Evening Mirror, and later became editor-in-chief of the Broadway Journal, which he eventually owned. There he earned the enmity of many writers, among other things for publicly accusing poet laureate Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, although he never responded to the accusation.
On January 29, 1845, his poem "The Raven," inspired by a chattering bird in Charles Dickens's novel Barnaby Rudge, appeared in the Evening Mirror, becoming a great popular success overnight, the first of his career. Allen says that it is without a doubt the most famous poem in American literature. From his appearance, Poe for the first time led a normal social life, frequenting the most important literary salons in the city. Although he made his author a celebrity, Poe obtained only nine dollars for " The Raven".
At that time he began a relationship, it is said to be strictly platonic, with the poet Frances Sargent Osgood, a relationship apparently consented to by Virginia, who saw in this woman a beneficial influence on her husband. scandals in the writer's life, provoking countless comments and gossip among the literati of the city. The origin of everything was a woman that Poe had scorned, also a writer: Elizabeth F. Ellet, and involved the Poe couple, the Osgood couple and other people. In 1847, Poe and Frances Osgood stopped seeing each other for good. (Vid. Virginia Clemm#The Osgood/Ellet scandal.)
The Broadway Journal closed its doors due to lack of liquidity in 1846. Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, in the Bronx, New York. This house, now known as Poe's Cottage, stands on the corner of Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. In that time of extreme hardship, during the night hours, the writer's mother-in-law was forced to clandestinely pick vegetables in the neighboring orchards, in order to feed her children.As has been seen, this situation had been going on for a long time.. According to one study, Poe's income at the time he worked at the Southern Literary Messenger , in proportion, would not have allowed him to exceed the equivalent of the 1981 poverty level.
Virginia, who had not been able to overcome tuberculosis, died there on January 30, 1847. Family friends would later recall how Poe, whose health would not fully recover, followed his wife's funeral procession wrapped in his old cadet cape, which for months had been the only blanket on Virginia's bed. The writer's biographers have repeatedly suggested that the frequent theme in his work of the death of a beautiful woman (Cfr. "The Raven"), part of the various losses of women throughout his life, including his mother and his wife. Levin, in this regard, mentions the many "posthumous heroines" that punctuate Poe's work.
Since Virginia's death, the writer's behavior "is that of one who has lost his shield and attacks, desperate, to compensate in some way for his nakedness, his mysterious vulnerability." Increasingly unstable, he tried to court to another woman: Sarah Helen Whitman, a mediocre poet but a woman full of immaterial charm, like Poe's heroines. Sarah lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their relationship did not come to fruition, presumably due to Poe's alcohol problems and his erratic behavior. There is some evidence that the true cause of the break may have been Whitman's mother. Poe still sought the company of other women (Marie Louise Shew, who had cared for them in 1846, or Annie Richmond). There were even marriage proposals, but they did not come to fruition.
Despite the desperation and delusion, at that time such relevant works as the poem «Ulalume» and the hallucinating cosmogonic essay Eureka, the tenth and last book published by the author, emerged from his pen. In November 1848 he tried to commit suicide with laudanum, but it acted as an emetic and the writer was saved.
Ending
His last reunion, in Richmond, with his former youth love, Sarah Elmira Royster, encouraged him once more to marry; the bride made the condition that he give up his bad habits. The wedding date was finally set for October 17, 1849. The writer was seen in the city of Richmond enthusiastic, and even happy. It is at that moment that he loses track of her, until his last appearance in Baltimore.
On October 3, 1849, Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore in a delirious state, "much distressed, and in need of immediate help". He was transported by his old friend James E. Snodgrass to Washington College Hospital, where he died on Sunday, October 7, at 5:00 in the morning. At no time was he able to explain how he had come to this situation, nor for what reason he was wearing clothes that were not his. The legend, collected by Julio Cortázar and other authors, tells that in his last moments he obsessively invoked a certain Reynolds (perhaps the polar explorer who had served as a reference for his fantastic adventure novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), and that upon expiring he uttered these words: "May God help my poor soul!".
Both the medical reports and the death certificate were lost. Newspapers at the time reported that Poe's death was due to "congestion" or "inflammation" of the brain, the euphemism often used for deaths from more or less shameful reasons, such as alcoholism.
Today, the exact cause of death remains a mystery, although since 1872 it is believed that it could have been due to the abuse of unscrupulous electoral agents, who at the time used to use poor unsuspecting people, getting them drunk, to make them vote several times by the same candidate. Speculations have included delirium tremens, heart attack, epilepsy, syphilis, meningitis, cholera, and even murder.
Within Poe's epistolary work, intense throughout his life, the one that refers to his last months of life is overwhelming to read. In these letters, one can see how the writer alternated between lucid attacks and sudden enthusiasm with others of the blackest despair. At this time, Poe used to give evidence of his desire to die, and on some occasion he even asked his aunt, Maria Clemm, the only living being with whom he was united by a tender affection, to die by his side.
We only have to die together. Now it's no good to reason with me; I can't do it anymore, I have to die. Since I've published EurekaI don't want to live. I can't finish anything else. For your love life was sweet, but we must die together. [...] Since I met here, I've been in prison for drunkenness once, but I wasn't drunk that time. It was for Virginia.Maria Clemm, 7/7/1849.
Griswold's "memory"
On the day of the writer's death, a long obituary appeared in the New York Tribune newspaper signed by a certain "Ludwig". This obituary was reproduced by numerous media throughout the country. It begins like this: "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died the day before yesterday in Baltimore. This news will surprise many, and some will be saddened." "Ludwig" was soon identified as Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a publisher, critic, and anthologist who had shown a great dislike of Poe as early as 1842. However, Griswold incomprehensibly managed to become the writer's literary executor, setting out to destroy his reputation after his death.
This individual later wrote a long biographical article on the writer titled "Memoir of the Author," which headed a volume of Poe's works. Here he was described as depraved, drunk, drug addicted and disturbed, and various letters from Poe himself were given as evidence, many of his statements being gross lies or half-truths. For example, it is now proven that Poe was not a drug addict. Griswold's version was denounced by those who knew Poe well, but it could not be prevented from becoming the most popularly accepted. This was partly because it was the only complete biography available, reprinted several times, and partly because readers were excited by the idea that they were reading the works of an evil. by Griswold as evidence they were soon shown to be nothing more than forgeries.
Work
Poe wrote short stories of different genres, poetry, literary criticism and essays, this one on the most varied subjects, as well as a long novel. Throughout his life he also wrote numerous letters.
Influences
Critics usually agree when determining the literary sources from which this author drank. In the early tales he follows Boccaccio and Chaucer.He was also inspired by all of the English Gothic novel: Horace Walpole, Ann Radcliffe, Matthew G. Lewis, and Charles Maturin, among others.
He was well acquainted with the German Gothic (E.T.A. Hoffmann, Baron Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué, etc.). From his country, he took into account the pioneers Charles Brockden Brown and Washington Irving. Other authors Englishmen he greatly admired: Daniel Defoe, Walter Scott, William Godwin, and Edward Bulwer-Lytton. Poe was also inspired by the sometimes outrageous stories that used to appear in the Edinburgh magazine Blackwood's Magazine, which the Bostonian came to satirize in his most bizarre stories: "The Lost Breath", "How to write an article in the Blackwood's way", etc.
In poetry, he was captivated from a very young age by Lord Byron. Within this genre he greatly appreciated French and Germanic nocturnal poetry, as well as all the English romantics: Shelley, Keats, Wordsworth (whom, however,, criticized his didacticism) and Coleridge. He also highly valued Tennyson.
Poe was also well acquainted with the work of the most important scientists: Laplace, Newton, Kepler, etc. But the author who is probably cited the most times in his works is the English philosopher Joseph Glanvill.
Stories
Julio Cortázar orders his stories according to the «interest» of their subjects. «Her best tales of him are the most imaginative and intense; the worst, those where the ability is not enough to impose a topic that is poor or alien to the author's string.” When translating them, he grouped them into: 1. Horror tales; 2. Supernatural; 3. Metaphysical; 4. Analytics; 5. Of anticipation and hindsight; 6. Landscape; and 7. Grotesque and satirical. Cortázar highlights what Poe expressed in a letter: "When writing these stories one by one, at long intervals, I always kept in mind the unity of a book."
Macabre
Terror tales or Gothic tales constitute his best-known and truly genuine work. A direct heir of this current, according to the scholar Benjamin F. Fisher, Poe intends, however, not so much to "chill the blood" of the reader ("curdling the blood", English expression of the time) how to make the Gothic compatible with psychological plausibility, managing to elevate the genre to the category of great art. The Bostonian modifies Gothicism, in addition, subtracting supernatural elements, as in his story "The Black Cat", in which the trigger for the final horror is a alive cat. What Poe traces in some way in the main stories of him is a kind of "geography of the imagination." Among the direct heirs of Poean Gothicism, Fisher adds, are Edith Wharton, William Faulkner, Flannery O'Connor, Hart Crane, Stephen King, and many others.
Regarding their artistic quality, the Irish writer and critic Padraic Colum assured that stories like "The Barrel of Amontillado", "The Pit and the Pendulum", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "Ligeia", etc.., are among "the best short stories in the world", while for the Spanish critic and translator Mauro Armiño, "almost one hundred and fifty years away, they continue to be the most suggestive stories of the century XIX". time".
Horror was a genre that Poe adopted to satisfy the tastes of the public of the time. Edmund Wilson emphasizes the dreamlike and symbolic contents in his stories, while Van Wyck Brooks wonders what role they could play in the stories. himself the strange dreams and terrible nightmares that he suffered from his adolescence. According to this critic, "one shares Poe's nightmares more intensely than lives one's own".
In this regard, the poet Richard Wilbur stated that Poe's greatness comes mainly from his purely literary genius, but also from his mastery of defining moods, as well as the transitions between them, and of its possible meanings and implications, all of which manages to frame it in dream structures.
De Riquer and Valverde highlight in this type of stories the recreation of an "atmosphere of cerebral terror". Harry Levin, for his part, glimpses in stories such as "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" and "A Descent into the Maelstrom" an "impatience to face the unknown" that "approaches the very edge of the abyss, and beyond, towards the unexplored country from whose border no traveler returns, although it is given to send messages of despair, bottled manuscripts, so to speak. like this".
In these stories, the most recurring themes have to do with death, including its physical manifestations, the effects of decomposing corpses ("The truth about the case of Mr. Valdemar"), themes also related to premature burial ("The premature burial"), the resuscitation of corpses ("Conversation with a mummy", "The fall of the House of Usher") and other mournful matters. In this way, the obsession between necrophilia and sadism has often been pointed out. of the author, manifested in different levels and nuances, according to the stories.
No more signs of life were warned in Valdemar and, in the opinion that he had died, we entrusted him to the care of the nurses. At that time we observed an intense vibrational movement in the tongue. The fact continued through space maybe a minute. At the end of this period, a voice, a voice, a voice that would be foolish to try to describe emerged from the relaxed and immobile jaws.(From "The Truth About Mr. Valdemar's Case", 1845)
"Eros and Thanatos are one, in Poe," writes Llopis. The death of the beloved determines her love for death. But the love of death is the death of love. Poe's necrophilia is, at the same time, his necrophobia. What attracts him most is what produces the supreme horror. And it is precisely this macabre horror, this terror of the soul, which is born only from his sick soul, which connects Poe with the black tendency of English pre-romanticism". For his part, Krutch, and Wilson from him, suggest that the egregious sadism in Poe's later tales is due to some kind of emotional repression. Poe's strange relationship with his wife, Virginia Clemm, and her feelings of ambivalence in the face of his illness and death, would explain the acute remorse that so often affects his heroes.
Other themes in his macabre stories are revenge ("Hop-Frog," "The Barrel of Amontillado"), guilt, and self-punishment ("William Wilson," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Demon of Perversity"), the influence of alcohol and opium ("The Black Cat", "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Plague King"), the power of will ("Ligeia", " Morella"), claustrophobia ("The Barrel of Amontillado", "The Premature Burial", The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym), etc.
On the occasion of his first publications in the genre, critics accused him of letting himself be carried away excessively by the influence of German fantasy, for example by Hoffmann. To which the writer replied, in the prologue to his book Tales of the grotesque and arabesque:
If many of my productions have had terror as thesis, I submit that terror does not come from Germany, but from the soul; that I have deduced this terror only from its legitimate sources, and that I have led it only to its legitimate results.
In the preface to a Russian translation of Poe's works, Dostoyevsky notes that the American was a realist compared to a German idealist like Hoffmann. His fantasies were strangely materialistic "even in his wildest imaginations [and with it] he reveals himself as a true American."
The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural, however, after highlighting the diverse and even bitterly contradictory opinions that Poe's work arouses, defends just the opposite: "Nothing in Poe, for Of course, it's nowhere near realistic, and, as Julian Symons has wisely pointed out, "There's no adequate reason for the terrible things we see happen." This ghostly air has managed to fascinate generations of readers."
Lovecraft, in his essay Supernatural Horror in Literature , charges the inks: «Poe has left us the vision of a terror that surrounds us and is within us, and of the worm that is it writhes and drools in a ghastly near abyss. Seeing through each of the festering horrors of the gaily painted joke that bears the name of existence and the solemn masquerade that is human thought and feeling, that vision has the power to project itself into crystallizations and transmutations darkly magical".
For Baudelaire (in Edgar Poe, his life and works, 1856), this type of literature is «of rarefied air», and in it «the nature called inanimate participates in the nature of living beings, and, like them, shudders with a supernatural and galvanic shudder."
Cortázar, more technically: «In "El tonel de amontillado", "The tell-tale heart", "Berenice", "Hop-frog&# 3. 4; and so many more, the atmosphere results from the almost absolute elimination of bridges, presentations and portraits; the drama is put on us, we are made to read the story as if we were inside it. Poe is never a chronicler; The best stories of him are windows, word holes ».
“What American writers and their exegetes have adored in Poe,” declares Harold Bloom, “without hardly being aware of it, is his more than Freudian, oppressive and curiously original perception and sensation of overdetermination. Walter Pater once commented that museums depressed him because they made him doubt that anyone had ever been young. No one was ever young in any of Poe's stories. As an angry D. H. Lawrence remarked, everyone in Poe is a vampire, particularly Poe himself."
As for these narratives, it is also possible to suggest that Poe was able to recreate them as isolated aspects of Gothic novels, as passages cut off from a larger narrative set, thus standing out powerfully for their terrible contents, free of all adornment.
Many of the stories that have just been cited have been framed within the so-called dark romanticism, in which authors such as Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville accompanied him. This movement arose as a reaction to the transcendentalism of the time, which Poe detested. He described the followers of this movement as frogpondians Boston) and ridiculed their writings as "metaphor-run mad" who indulged in "darkness for darkness's sake" and "mysticism for mysticism's sake". however, in a letter to his great friend Thomas Holley Chivers, he wrote that he did not hate transcendentalists, but "only the sophists who number among them".
Detectivesque
Poe also gave rise to the detective story through his analytical and mystery stories: "The Stolen Letter", "The Murders of the Rue Morgue", "The Gold Bug" and "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", who fully influenced later authors such as Arthur Conan Doyle, whose Sherlock Holmes is directly inspired by Poe's Auguste Dupin (vid. Legacy and influence).
Poe's contemporaries compared Dupin's investigations to those of a lawyer, and also to the character himself, and some prosecutor of his time opined that such accounts were truly "miraculous". However, he is not the complete character that he intends to appear, since "he is not so much the direct rival of the criminal he is pursuing as a figure deeply contaminated by that same underworld that he intends to reveal." This can be seen, for example, in the striking similarities (both are poets, both steal a letter, their last name begins with D...) between the detective and the criminal minister of "The stolen letter"; on the other hand, the interdependence between detective and criminal is clear.
These stories were recognized by Poe as some of the most widely read of his own; they owed his popularity to the fact that they were “something in a new key.” His greatest literary success in prose, indeed, came from one of these stories: “The Gold Beetle.” Other than "The Crow," it was the most widely circulated work of his life, and for it he received a hundred-dollar prize in a contest, the highest amount he ever got for his writing.
This represents quite well a skull, and I would even dare say that it is an excellent skull, according to the vulgar notions on that anatomical region, and if its beetle looks like it, it must be the rarest beetle in the world. We could even give rise to a small superstition full of appeal, taking advantage of the resemblance.(From "The Golden Beetle," 1843)
"The crimes of the Rue Morgue", among all his stories, is one of the most important. It was published in 1841 and is still considered the first modern detective story. Poe called it a "reason tale".
About this very story, Matthew Pearl wrote that the experience of reading it "is that our own role as investigators emerges along with that of the narrator, and of course the fact that the narrator himself remains unnamed all the time facilitates our identification with him next to Dupin'. He also recalls that these elucidatory accounts of the Bostonian all revolve around female victims, which contrasts with others such as & # 34; Usher & # 34; or "Berenice", in which the loss of the woman "signals the full and final disintegration of any dominant order".
“Not even in his analytical tales,” Julio Cortázar notes, “Poe is spared from his worst obsessions. [...] Poe's genius has ultimately nothing to do with his neurosis, which is not the "sick genius", as it has been called, but that his genius is in splendid health, to the point of being the doctor, the guardian and the psychopomp of his sick soul".
Harry Levin affirms that the essence of Poe's genius lies in the shadow-doubt dichotomy, and this is manifested in his most beloved character, the raisonneur Auguste Dupin, who oscillates between the creator and the revealer of mysteries. On the other hand, these stories are closely related to those of exploration; Both in one and in the other, the resolution of the mystery of the universe seems to be sought.
According to Mauro Armiño, in his detective stories Poe strays far from current uses, which are based on «losing the reader in a tangle of false data that precisely hides the central element; [...] Poe emphasizes not the gross confusion of the reader: what interests him most is following the reasoning process that leads Dupin —a direct predecessor of Sherlock Holmes— to the resolution of the mystery».
Science Fiction
The Bostonian also gave a significant boost to the emerging genre of science fiction, thus responding to recent scientific and technological advances, such as the hot air balloon, in his short story "The Balloon Hoax." Although it has been said that Poe invented the genre, according to John Tresch, what he actually did was "discover" it within a pre-existing tradition, reforming it and adapting it to the rhetoric and technical innovations of his time. On the other hand, it laid the foundation for some of the modes and themes that would take on a natural foothold in the second half of the 20th century.
It has already been pointed out that the author wrote a large part of his work in accordance with the popular tastes of the time, which sold him. To this end, his stories often include elements of the pseudoscience, phrenology and physiognomy.
Hugo Gernsback, creator of the term science fiction that gave its name to the Hugo Awards, cited only three authors of the genre prior to the 1930s: Poe, Verne and Wells. In Spanish there is an edition of science fiction stories of the author that contains thirteen works, from "Von Kempelen and his discovery" to "A tale of the rugged mountains", and even "Manuscript found in a bottle".
In his most obviously macabre stories, elements of science fiction sometimes appear, and vice versa, so that it is sometimes difficult to determine the exact genre to which works such as "The truth in the case of Mr. Valdemar" belong, «Manuscript found in a bottle»... On the other hand, there is a piece that combines science fiction, horror and poetic prose: «The conversation of Eiros and Charmion», or satire and science fiction («Mellonta Tauta»), and the essay "Eureka" has sometimes been framed within this. It is well known that the hybridization of genres today dominates the entire field of fantastic literature, but Poe also, according to Domingo Santos, prefigures some of the central themes of modern science fiction: alternative universes ("Mesmeric Revelation"), space travel ("The balloon scam"), time travel ("Mellonta tauta")...
Referring to some of these stories, Harry Levin states that Poe lacked the gift of serendipity (fortunate find), and that his discoveries are never happy, but rather tormented visions forever trapped in his hapless universe.
About the story «The incomparable adventure of a certain Hans Pfaall», Baudelaire comments: «Who, I ask, who among us –I speak of the most robust– would have dared –at twenty-three, at the age in that we learn to read – head for the moon, equipped with sufficient astronomical and physical notions, and grasp imperturbably its mania or rather the gloomy hippogriff of verisimilitude?»
Regarding his repercussion within this field, through the mixture of different logical levels in stories such as "The Oval Portrait" or "William Wilson", Poe is a clear precursor of the metafictional literature of authors such as Borges, Italo Calvin, Nabokov, John Barth and Paul Auster. And the mixture of pathological levels of reality will prefigure fundamental works by other authors such as Ursula K. Le Guin, Philip K. Dick or Stanislaw Lem.
Satirical and poetic
The writer also dedicated many stories to satire, humor and even humorous mystification (hoax). To create the comic effect, he used to use irony and absurd extravagance, in an attempt to curb the reader's ideological conformism. Thus, "Metzengerstein", his first published short story, and also his first foray into terror, It had been initially conceived as a satire of the genre, and it has already been said that it was very popular at the time.
"There are no tomorrows in Poe's world...," Brooks argues, "and if some of his tales are humorous, they are perhaps the most sinister of all, for one rarely finds any warmth in their humor.", in which he did not want to follow his admired Dickens. "His humor was of those that give chills, the type of macabre jocularity for which nothing is so funny as the horrible and that finds delight in pinching the nose of a corpse".
Harry Levin describes the poetic structures as «imaginative», which makes it possible for, in this type of pieces, comedy to appear covered in hysteria; "His cultivation of the strange in proportions leads him from beauty to caricature. As the son of actor parents, it was normal for him to end up becoming a literary actor and for his narrative technique to sprout animated from "drama" ".
The scholar Daniel Royot in his article "Poe's humor" writes that Poe's humor, free of ethical pretensions, "is clothed in the most unexpected impulses in his stories with absurd endings with the purpose of recreating a a kind of anarchic, Dionysian euphoria. [Poe] Introduces the absurd in order to shred the shell of univocal meaning and provoke a paroxysmal experience".
Julio Cortázar points out that the satire in stories like «The scam considered one of the exact sciences», «The businessman» or «The glasses» turns into contempt. This is evidenced in his characters: «Cunning beings that deceive the despicable mass, or miserable dolls that go from bump to bump, committing all kinds of clumsiness. [...] And when he incurs humor ("The Lost Breath", "Bon-Bon", "The Plague King") he usually derives immediately into the macabre, where he is on his own ground, or in the grotesque, which he regards with contempt as the ground of others". All of which follows from Poe's inability "to understand the human, to peer into the characters, to measure the alien dimension... that's why Poe will never be able to create a single character with an inner life".
Seeing that I remained immobile (because I had all the dislocated members and the twisted head to one side), he felt somewhat concerned; waking up the rest of the passengers, he told them in a very determined way that, in his opinion, they had been engulfed by a corpse pretending that it was another passenger, and he sank a finger in the right eye as a demonstration of what he was holding.(From "Lost Breath", 1832)
In this sense, Baudelaire stated, in the prologue to his translation of the Extraordinary Stories of the American: «[They are] tales full of magic that appear gathered under the title of Tales of the Grotesque and the Arabesque, a remarkable and intentional title, since the grotesque and arabesque ornaments shun the human figure, and we shall see how Poe's literature is in many ways extra or supra-human." And Robert Louis Stevenson, in a well-known essay on Poe, went so far as to affirm: «Whoever was capable of writing "Plague King" he ceased to be a human being.” These narratives, however, due to their extravagance, were highly appreciated by surrealist poets.
His poetic and metaphysical stories deserve a special mention, many of them authentic prose poems, with pure aesthetic virtues: «The conversation of Eiros and Charmion», «The colloquium of Monkeys and Una», «The moose», «The island of the fairy», «Silence», «Shadow», etc. Authors like Brooks argue that the musical beauty of some of Poe's stories was comparable to that of his best poems; in them we also find "dark swamps, wild and sad landscapes, and ghostly figures gliding to and fro".
“Listen,” the Demon said, imposing his hand on my head. "The land I speak to you is a gloomy region in Libya, on the banks of the river Zaire. And there's no peace there, no silence.
The waters of the river are of a cramped and sick tone, and do not flow to the sea, but they palpitate eternally under the dark eye of the sun, with tumultuous and convulsing agitation."(From " Silence (a fable)", 1839)
Technique
Regarding his technique, and his often noted narrative intensity, Poe "understood that the effectiveness of a tale depends on its intensity as an event. [...] Each word must come together, concur with the event, with the thing that happens, and this thing that happens must only be an event and not an allegory (as in many Hawthorne stories, for example) or a pretext for psychological, ethical generalizations or didactics. [...] The thing that happens must be intense. Here Poe did not ask himself sterile questions of substance and form; he was too lucid not to notice that a story is an organism, a being that breathes and beats, and that his life consists -like ours- of an animated nucleus inseparable from its manifestations».
Edmund Wilson also highlights this intensity in Poe, relating it to the poetic virtues of his prose: «We read Poe's tales in our childhood, when all we can get out of them are chills, and yet such tales are also poems expressing the most intense emotions." Thus, Poe's short story "William Wilson" is superior to Dr. Stevenson's Jekyll and Mr. Hyde for their "sincerity and intensity".
Harry Levin argues that Poe's main technical contribution to narrative is his emphatic way of interpreting sensation, to the point that André Gide credited him with inventing the interior monologue.
According to Peter Ackroyd: «He calculated his effects with a master hand, always maintaining a strict technical control of his narratives. It is significant that he reviewed his works without ceasing, making specific changes and other more general ones. It is also worth noting that his writing was a model of calligraphy ».
Padraic Colum, for his part, places him as the creator of the concept of atmosphere in literary art. Cortázar calls this resource "creation of environments", and compares Poe with other masters in this technique like Chekhov, Villiers de L'Isle-Adam, Henry James, Kipling and Kafka.
Poe valued imagination above all else in the short story, as well as originality and verisimilitude. Therefore, the criterion that he prevailed in this type of stories was exclusively aesthetic. According to the critic Félix Martín, «known were his pronouncements on the supremacy of the imagination, his explicit condemnation of moral intention in the work of art and of moral allegory, both in poetry and in narration, as well as the rejection of all kinds of of truth inherent in the facts of the story. [...] By discarding moralizing didacticism as the objective of the work of art, Poe frees it from external verisimilitude criteria and gives free rein to those fantastic and formal elements that shape it aesthetically, appreciable configuration above all through the effects that produces in the reader".
In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, critic Scott Peeples states: "Although Poe theorized the tale as a closed system, each word of which was to contribute to a preconceived effect, his own stories often present situations where an enclosed space ("The Lost Breath", "The Murders of the Rue Morgue", "The Masque of the Red Death", & #34;The premature burial", "You are the man!", "The stolen letter") or a perfect plot ("The tell-tale heart", "El gato negro", "El demonio de la perversidad") are broken: the empty space was not really empty, the perfect crime is frustrated by the work of a guilty conscience or "wickedness," or, as in "Usher", the corpse is not really dead. Time and time again Poe shows us that control is an illusion, though he insists that the work of fiction itself remains under control."
Novel
Poe is the author of a single novel: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket) (1838). It is a tale of episodic marine adventures, centered on its intrepid protagonist, who would later find an echo in Stevenson's works. The author sought his sources mainly in old seafaring legends, such as that of the Flying Dutchman, and in his readings of Daniel Defoe and S. T. Coleridge ("the most pronounced affinity is with The Lay of the Old Mariner, that soul agony that reaches life through death", according to Levin). Due to the abundance of macabre details it contains and its indecipherable outcome, the work has always been surrounded by controversy. This novel was highly valued by the surrealists, that highlighted in her her mastery in the recreation of unconscious elements. For this reason it has also been widely studied by psychoanalysis. Jules Verne wrote a continuation: The Ice Sphinx.
According to Cortázar, «the work has the double value of an adventure book full of episodes "lived" and at the same time of an elusive and strange subterranean current, a background that could be considered allegorical or symbolic, if we did not take into account the contrary tendency of the author, and his explicit references in this sense". Due to the constant "trend to the South" that is observe in the plot, in Arthur Gordon Pym the strong southern self-awareness of its author becomes evident; a certain dose of racism towards blacks is also revealed, which is also manifested in "The Gold Bug" and "The System of Dr. Tarr and Professor Fether".
Harry Levin notes that Poe tried to achieve the "plausible and believable" style he admired in Robinson Crusoe, and that this was astutely documented through maps, logbooks, chronicles, and marine reports. The work cannot avoid being the receptacle of the author's claustrophobic obsession, which is embodied even within the framework of the open ocean; as to his ending, "had Poe been more of an allegorist than a materialist, we would be tempted to view Pym's salvation in theological terms".
Then Nu-Nu shuddered at the bottom of the canoe, but by touching it we discovered that his spirit had abandoned him. And suddenly we were rushed into the embrace of the cataract, and an abyss opened in it to receive us. But a veiled human figure, whose proportions were much greater than those of any inhabitant of the earth, arose at our pace. And the skin of that figure had the perfect whiteness of the snow.
Poe left another adventure novel unfinished: The Diary of Julius Rodman, which appeared in the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine serial. Only the first six came out, from January to June 1840. This work narrates a fictitious trip to the Rocky Mountains at the time of the conquest of the West, a theme that would be very frequented in American literature, with a contemporary of Poe, James Fenimore Cooper, in the lead. This story was published for the first time in Spanish in 2005.
Poetry
Probably, if he hadn't had to work as a journalist, Poe would have dedicated himself exclusively to poetry. "Reasons beyond my control have prevented me at all times from making a serious effort for something that, in happier circumstances, would have been my favorite terrain", he stated in the prologue to El cuervo y otros poemas. This will be his most controversial genre and the one that will earn him the worst criticism.
The most intense periods of poetic creation occurred at the beginning and end of his career. His ideas on poetry, which appeared in his essay on "The Raven" entitled "Philosophy of Composition", may seem contradictory. He declared that poetry was a mere artifice planned and carried out with a watchmaker's technique, however, the truth is that he admitted in it everything that comes "from the irrational, from the unconscious: melancholy, nocturnal life, necrophilia, angelism, dispassionate passion, that is, the passion [...] of one who invariably cries for a dead woman» whose love can no longer disturb him.
One time I was about to be sad night, I was evoking,
fatigued, in old books, the legends of another age.
I already bark, sleeping; when there, with soft touch,
With an uncertain rock, weak, at my door I heard a call.
“—At my door a visitor—I muttered—I feel like calling;
That's all and nothing else."«The Crow»
Despite having started in poetic work with two long poems ("Tamerlane" and "Al-Aaraaf"), he always declared himself against long works such as epics. In his essay "The poetic principle" he did not conceive of a poem of more than a hundred verses, although he also deplored works that were too short. The goal of the poem is aesthetic, its ultimate goal is beauty. Poe disbelieved in didactic and allegorical poetry: the poem should never propose truth as an end. For this reason he prefers Coleridge and Tennyson over Wordsworth. (It is well known that his other great influence, from a very young age, was the of Lord Byron.) But, as has been seen, for Poe poetry should not be the product of passion either, a statement that Julio Cortázar points out, for whom "El cuervo" is born more from passion than from reason, and this is worth also for the rest of his great poems: "To Helen", "The Sleeper", "Israfel", "The City in the Sea", "For Annie", "The Conqueror Worm" and "The Haunted Palace", poems whose fundamental impulse is analogous to the one that moved the author to the execution of his "most autobiographical and obsessive" stories. [...] only its finishing, its retouching were dispassionate". About Riquer and Valverde, about "El Cuervo": "[...] even with its sensationalism and its rhythmic mashing [...] it demonstrates its legitimacy when it is read directly, before knowing that there is an essay on its composition and that of poetry in general".
Two of his best poems are «Annabel Lee» —which many say was inspired by the death of his wife—, a work that, despite what its author expressed, Cortázar says could never have arisen from a careful and patient combination of elements, and "Ulalume", of which the Argentine points out that "Poe did not know what he had written, as a surrealist who wrote automatically could affirm"; for Edward Shanks this poem "transfers from the poet to the reader a state of mind that neither could define in precise terms".
The Argentine poet Carlos Obligado wrote about Poe's most outstanding compositions: «[It is about] one of the zenithal constellations of modern lyric; there are twenty-five or thirty inspirations of a hallucinating pathetic virtue, of an angelic idealism, of a mysterious formal perfection [...] thanks to a gift that no one possessed to such a degree: that of erasing the border between the sensible and the ideal».
Regarding his poetic technique, his ardent French defender, Charles Baudelaire, recalls that «Poe attached extraordinary importance to rhyme, and that, in his analysis of the mathematical and musical pleasure that the mind receives from rhyme, he put as much care, as much subtlety as in all the subjects related to the poetic profession. [...] he makes particularly successful use of the repetitions of the same verse or several verses, obstinate returns of phrases that simulate the obsessions of melancholy or fixed ideas... ». He also speaks of Poe's famous "leonine verse" (the one that includes an interior rhyme in the hemistich; Poe used it extensively in "The Raven"). For Baudelaire, in a word, Poe's poetry was "deep and reverberant as dream, mysterious and perfect as crystal."
According to T. S. Eliot, the Bostonian "possessed, in an exceptional degree, the sense of the rhythmic element of poetry, of what we could call, in its most strictly literal meaning, the magic of verse".
Essay and criticism
Poetics
Poe developed his own theory of literature, which is outlined in his critical work and in essays such as "The Poetic Principle". This work constitutes a radical aestheticist manifesto:
An immortal instinct, deeply rooted in the spirit of man, is in this way, said bluntly, a sense of the Beautiful. This is what it manages for its delight in the multiple forms, sounds and smells in which it exists. And just as the lily is reflected in the lake, or the eyes of Amarilis in the mirror, so the mere oral or written repetition of these forms, sounds, colors, smells and feelings, is a duplicate source of delight.
The author always gave evidence of abhorring didacticism and, despite the fact that several of his works use this resource, allegory. He believed that meaning in literature runs beneath the express surface. Works with too obvious a meaning, he wrote, cease to be art. He also believed that those should be brief and focused on causing a very specific effect, for which the writer had to calculate each effect and idea. In another well-known essay On the subject, «Philosophy of composition», the writer describes the method he followed in writing «El cuervo», stating that it was such a cold system that he used. It has often been questioned, however, whether this is true. The poet T. S. Eliot wryly stated in this regard: "It is difficult for us to read this essay without reflecting that if Poe carried out the poem with that calculation, he should have gone to more trouble with it: the result does not prove the method." Joseph Wood Krutch described the essay as "a most ingenious exercise in the art of rationalization".
Poe's guiding ideas, both for poetic and critical purposes, were originality, which he proposed as a method of seeking literary effect, and the method itself, according to Paul Valéry knew how to see very well. He also attached great importance to seriousness or verisimilitude, in his own words. Valéry also underscores an innovative aspect in Poe's aesthetics that would only be appreciated many years later of his death: "For the first time, the relations between the work and the reader were elucidated and considered as the positive foundations of art".
Essay
Poe wrote essays on the most varied topics: the long cosmological meditation «Eureka», the short comments collected in Marginalia, and the monographic works «Cryptography», «Philosophy of furniture», « Stony Arabia", "Maelzel's Chess Player", etc.
"Eureka", an essay written in 1848, assumes a cosmological theory that in some passages seems to presage that of the big bang, the theory of relativity, space-time ("[...] the considerations that we have followed step by step in this essay allow us to perceive in a clear and immediate way that space and duration are one single thing"), black holes, as well as the first known solution to the so-called Olbers paradox:
Being the succession of endless stars, the bottom of the sky should present for us a uniform luminosity, such as the one shown by the Galaxy, since there could be no reason why, against all points of that background, there is no highlight at least one star. The only reason, therefore, in such circumstances, for which we could understand the voids that our telescopes find in countless directions, would be assuming the distance from the invisible background so immense that no lightning from that background has been able to reach us yet.From Eureka
Poe does not claim to use a scientific method in this essay but rather writes based on pure intuition. For this reason he considered the piece a non-scientific "work of art", insisting that, despite Therefore, its content was truthful and he judged it his masterpiece.
In fact, Eureka is full of scientific errors. In particular, the author's claims contradict Newtonian principles when considering the density and rotation of the planets. This work was highly valued by the poets Paul Valéry and W. H. Auden.
Harry Levin sees in Eureka something “more than the height of mystification or a megalomaniacal rhapsody. It can be read as a rationalist refutation of the metaphysics of Transcendentalism, or as a pioneering experiment in the embryonic genre of science fiction."
The writer of this genre, Domingo Santos, also associates Eureka with it, but for him it constitutes rather "a brilliant glimpse of foreknowledge".
Another great hobby of this author was cryptography, to which he dedicated excellent pages. He once challenged the readers of a Philadelphia newspaper to submit encrypted writings that he was able to solve. In July 1841, he published an essay entitled "A Few Words on Secret Writing" in Graham's magazine.;s Magazine, and understanding the great public interest in the matter, he wrote one of his great stories "The Gold-Bug" ("The gold beetle"), a work that incorporated cryptographic riddles. His success in the Cryptography was due, however, according to the experts, to the ignorance on the subject of his admired readers, since his method was very elementary. In any case, his effort contributed to popularize this discipline in his country. One of his His most enthusiastic followers, the famous codebreaker William F. Friedman, was a great reader of "The Gold Bug" in his youth, which helped him during World War II to break the Japanese PURPLE code.
Criticism
Poe always lived isolated from the dominant cultural currents in his country, and yet he embarked on a critical battle that occupied the last years of his life. In this facet, his reviews of Longfellow, Dickens and Hawthorne are remarkable. The culture that he displays in his criticism is abundant, but not as amazing as he tried to make it appear; It had large gaps. It must not be forgotten that his academic education was reduced to his college years and the only year he spent at the University of Virginia. According to Cortázar, his access to direct bibliographic sources was almost always replaced by centions, summaries, expositions of second or third hand, although his intelligence and memory worked wonders. In Cortázar's words, "it provides a clear vision of his cultural latitude, his interests and his ignorance". In one of these essays he defined criticism as a work of art.
Today his importance as a critic is debated. While Edmund Wilson considers this part of his work to be the "most remarkable critical body produced in the United States," other scholars point to its lack of value.
Critic Kent Ljungquist, in his article on the author "The poet as critic", argues that "whatever the sources of [Poe's] literary practice and critical principles - probably a combination of English and German sources (Coleridge, the Common Sense philosophers, A. W. Schlegel, perhaps Kant and Schiller) – their influence has been immense. Hawthorne's reviews of him mark him as the first significant theorist of the modern short story. [...] Robert L. Stevenson, Jorge L. Borges, and Vladimir Nabokov have used Poe's tales as pretexts for their own literary experiments."
The need to keep the secret carefully is obvious. If the truth is filtered before the climax of the dénouement, the effect sought to give place to the greatest of the confusions. If the mystery is cleared against the will of the author, his purposes will be immediately frustrated, because he writes based on the assumption that certain impressions must take hold of the spirit of the reader, which It's not. so in reality if the mystery has ceased to be.(From a review of Poe about Charles Dickens)
Poe never judged the ideas expressed in the works, his criticisms were literary and only literary, and excessively acid and ruthless at times, as his friend Lowell recalls. W. H. Auden, however, said of critical Poe: "No one in his day put so much energy into trying to get his poetic contemporaries to take his craft seriously."
Poe will denounce the Anglicizing snobbery of his contemporaries, their servile submission to overseas authors and the verdict of the London and Edinburgh magisters. Julio Cortázar, on this facet of the author, summarizes that in the vast majority of cases in his criticism Poe was right , and that he was only wrong when condemning Thomas Carlyle literaryly.
Legacy and influence
The scope of Poe's influence in all literary spheres is endless. The critic David Galloway has highlighted that it is based on "the strength of his deep creative intelligence that was able to crystallize attitudes, techniques and ideas that seem particularly modern to us". The Spanish scholar Félix Martín specifically mentions its repercussions on French symbolism., in the aesthetics of English decadence, in detective fiction, in the development of the narrative figure of the Doppelgänger (the double), as well as in contemporary formalist and structuralist theories. Other equally obvious influences: its incidence in science fiction and terrifying literature, in the grotesque absurdism of the southern gothic, its aesthetic impact among North American transcendentalists, and the scope of its scientific philosophy and its psychological and parapsychological knowledge, as well as that of its literary criticism.
Throughout his life, Poe was primarily recognized as a literary critic. His friend, fellow critic, James Russell Lowell, called him "the most exacting, philosophical, and unafraid critic of imaginative work that has written in America", although he wondered if he ever used prussic acid instead of ink. Lowell also arrived. to state: "We know of no one who has displayed more varied and astonishing abilities." Also well known in his time as a writer of fiction, he was one of the first American authors of the 19th century to become more popular in Europe than in his country. The respect held for him in France is due mainly to Charles Baudelaire's early translations of his work, translations which were soon considered definitive throughout Europe.
Poe's detective works starring the fictional C. Auguste Dupin, directly and decisively illuminated all subsequent genre literature. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, “father” of Sherlock Holmes, declared: “Each of these works constitutes a root from which a whole literature has sprung. [...] Where was detective literature before Poe breathed life into it?" The Mystery Writers of America association has named its most important awards the Edgars in his memory.
Poe also had a decisive influence on science fiction, most notably on the Frenchman Jules Verne, who wrote a sequel to Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym. Verne titled it The Sphinx of the Ice. the South Pole a century ago." As early as the 20th century, such prominent science fiction and horror writers as H. P. Lovecraft and Ray Bradbury have openly drawn inspiration from Poe.
Like other famous artists, his works have known many imitators. A very interesting current is that of those clairvoyants or people with paranormal powers who proclaim themselves channels from beyond the grave of Poe's poetic voice. One of the most unusual was the poet Lizzie Doten, who, in 1863, published Poems from the Inner Life (Poems from the Inner Life), a book in which alleged poems appear. received from the spirit of Poe. These pieces were no more than rehashes of poems like "The Bells", but reflecting a new and positive significance.
Kevin J. Hayes, editor of The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, defines it, in the context of the century XIX, as a "unique" of modern art and "art for art"s sake", which dominated the following century, and he mentions, with abundant data, only some of the plastic artists whom he decisively influenced: Edward Hopper, Édouard Manet, Odilon Redon, Paul Gauguin, Max Ernst, Salvador Dalí, Alberto Martini, René Magritte, Marcel Duchamp, the German expressionists, the filmmakers Alfred Hitchcock and Robert Wiene, etc.
Poe did not manage to arouse in Spain the extraordinary interest that he aroused in France, but his weight in the context of Spanish-American narrative is well known, led by Cortázar and Borges. According to Félix Martín, "The constant reissue of his Narrative work, however, is undoubtedly the most reliable proof that Poe continues to exert a powerful and magnetic influence on the Spanish reader. The scarcity of critical studies in Spanish deserves to be excused for this reason".
The historical figure of the writer has appeared as a fictional character in a multitude of literary, musical and audiovisual works, in which the topic of the "mad genius" or the "tormented artist" is usually emphasized, also exploiting his personal misfortunes. Sometimes Poe appears mixed with his own characters, with some of whom he exchanges identity. In the novel Poe's Shadow, by Matthew Pearl, two amateur detectives compete in the task of unraveling the death of the poet; one of them would have served as inspiration for the Auguste Dupin.
The renowned Beatles song written by John Lennon and credited to the Lennon/McCartney duo from 1967 "I Am the Walrus" he names it directly between his lines when he says: & # 34; Elementary penguin singing Hare Krishna / Man, you should have seen them kicking Edgar Allan Poe & # 34;. The reason why the author quotes him is in reference to the poet Allen Ginsberg, whose work was greatly influenced by Poe's poems.
In 2009, one of the first copies of his book Tamerlane and Other Poems (only twelve are believed to survive worldwide), sold for a record price in American literature: $662,500. It has been estimated that, in his lifetime, Poe earned no more than $300 for all of his published work.
Controversies
Poe was not only praised. The poet William Butler Yeats was highly critical of the author of "The Raven", calling it "vulgar". The transcendentalist Ralph Waldo Emerson reacted against the poem, stating: "I see nothing in it" and referring to its author as "the tinkerbell man", a phrase recalled by Borges in writing about Poe. Aldous Huxley wrote that Poe's writing "incurred in vulgarity" by being "too poetic", and saw its equivalent in his wearing a diamond ring on each finger.
The controversy surrounding his figure is striking, especially with regard to his poetry. Critic Harold Bloom ranks Poe twelfth among nineteenth-century American poets, and draws attention to the constant overvaluation of him by French critics. Other authors such as Yvor Winters and Aldous Huxley, as we have seen, are in the same vein, but it was his dedication to narrative art that definitely established him as a literary genius; In the stories, the reader can fully appreciate the richness and complexity of his literary contribution.
His controversial figure was forged in his homeland mainly from the manipulations of his direct literary enemies, Rufus W. Griswold or Thomas Dunn English, and also from primitive analyzes of a psychoanalytic nature, such as those practiced by Marie Bonaparte or Joseph Wood Krutch. These distorted and manipulated versions persisted for many decades, however, until they were challenged and finally dismissed as grotesque and false, through the study of great scholars such as John Henry Ingram and Arthur Hobson Quinn, well into the 20th century. According to Van Wyck Brooks, in any case, Poe did not know as many enemies in life as is supposed. There were more people who supported him than those who denigrated him, and, more than being a bohemian, he always had a reputation as a hard worker, punctual and constant.
Institutions
In the United States there are several institutions dedicated to the memory of Poe and located in places where the writer lived. Among others, the Edgar Allan Poe Museum of Richmond. His dormitory at the University of Virginia is also preserved. His Baltimore home, where he lived at age twenty-three, is today the Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, home of the Edgar Allan Poe Society. The last house where he lived is preserved in Philadelphia. Now the Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site, his last cottage in New York's Bronx remains, in its original location, as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage.
Other comments about the author
In English
Noted American horror writer H. P. Lovecraft opined of his illustrious predecessor: "Poe's fame has been subject to the most curious vicissitudes, and it is now fashionable among the advanced intelligentsia to minimize his importance as Writer and his influence. However, it would be difficult for an impartial critic to deny the enormous value of his work and the penetrating power of his thought as a creator of artistic visions". Poe began a path in literature, "he was the first to set an example and teach a an art that his successors, with the path open and with his guidance, were able to develop much more. Despite his limitations, Poe achieved what no one else had done or could have done, and to him we owe the modern horror novel in its final and perfect state." On the power of Poe's imagery, he added: "In this way the Poe's specters took on a convincing malignancy that those of none of his predecessors possessed, and he founded a new standard of realism in the annals of literary horror."
Robert Louis Stevenson makes a not very flattering portrait of Poe in an article he published on the occasion of the publication, in 1874, of the book The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, although he acknowledges that he had « the true instinct of the storyteller". he ceased to be a human being. For his sake, and out of infinite pity for such a lost soul, we are glad to leave him for dead." of your imagination. However, this is not always the case; for sometimes he adopts a high falsetto voice; other times, by something like a magic trick, she derives more from his story than he has known how to invest in it; and while on the esplanade the garrison in full parade before our eyes in flesh and blood, from the battlements he continues to terrify us with cheap cannons and multiple fierce-looking moriones that hang from broomsticks". As the most surprising characteristic of the American, he proposes his "little less than implausible sharpness on the slippery terrain between sanity and insanity", in stories such as "The Man in the Crowd", "Berenice" and "The Tell-Tale Heart". And if he «he is exceedingly entertaining in the trilogy by C. Auguste Dupin [...] this display of wit ends up boring us».
The poet and critic T. S. Eliot had mixed feelings about this author: «In reality, with Poe the critic always stumbles as judge. If we examine his work in detail, it seems to us that we find in it nothing more than scruffy phrases, puerile thoughts that are not based on extensive reading or deep studies, random experiments in various literary genres, carried out mainly under the pressure of a need for money, without perfection in any detail. But this would not be fair. Because if, instead of examining his work analytically, we move away to contemplate it as a whole, we see a mass of singular shape and impressive dimensions, to which the gaze is constantly turned. Poe's influence is also puzzling. In France the poetry of his and his poetic theories has been immense. In England and America it seems almost insignificant. Can we point to a poet whose style you say was formed in Poe's study? The only name that is immediately hinted at is that of Edward Lear."
The Irish writer Padraic Colum, in the introduction to an English edition of his short stories, states: "The expression in the margin admirably describes Poe's entire imaginative work, both in poetry and prose. Both are marginal, not central; they come to us, not from the mainstream of life, but from the fringes of existence". they offer no cutting surface for the knife of criticism. Colum highlights the great dramatic force in Poe's works, which makes him regret that the American never dedicated himself to the theater and, due to his great analytical power, affirms that his critical capacities probably exceeded his imaginative ones. Poe, Finally, he was a great psychologist more in his critical side than in his purely creative one, and he had a deep knowledge of the mental movements related to fear.
In his book The Power of Blackness. Hawthorne, Poe, Melville [The power of darkness. H., P., M.], the critic Harry Levin, finding certain literary links between Dostoyevsky and Poe, titled "Notes from the Underground" one of the chapters dedicated to the latter. On his peculiar style: «Always working under pressure, he could not claim to be devoted to the exact word. Instead, he was fumbling around with various approximate synonyms, so that the text would sound cultish. Although his materials were concrete, his vocabulary tended toward the abstract, so that the reader found himself in a position to be instructed on how to interpret this or that. For example, the adjective terrific (scary) does not act as a stimulus, but rather as a programmed response». Levin also mentions the excess of exclamations, hyphens, superlatives, Gallicisms...; Baudelaire, in his translations of Poe, often replaced the latter with the more elegant circumlocutions.
The American critic Harold Bloom includes Poe among the canonical or fundamental writers of the literary age that he calls "democratic", along with his compatriots such as Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Walt Whitman, etc., but in his Canon does not study her figure in depth. Bloom disadvantageously compares Poe to Dickens: "Poe's phantasmagoria seldom found a language suitable to its intensities."
One of the most distinguished critics of his time, the American Edmund Wilson, in his 1926 essay "Poe in his country and abroad", refers to the "absolute artistic importance" of this author, and treats to correct some absurd clichés about him, pointing out vindictively: «When referring to figures like Poe, we North Americans still show ourselves almost as provincial as those of his contemporaries who now seem ridiculous to us for not having been able to recognize their geniuses. Today we take their eminence for granted, but we still cannot help considering them, not from the point of view of their real contributions to Western culture, but mainly as compatriots whose activities we feel compelled to explain in American terms, and whose personal existences we are, as neighbors, in a position to investigate. Thus, at this point in which "Edgar Poe" has been figuring in Europe for three-quarters of the century as a writer of paramount importance, we in America still worry—though no longer indignantly—about his bad reputation as a citizen."
In The Penguin Encyclopedia of Horror and the Supernatural we read: «The Poean hero must inquire into what is shrouded in mystery, must face what he fears most. Isn't he always raiding tombs precisely because "to be buried alive is, beyond doubt, the most terrifying of extremes [...] ever to fall to the lot of mere mortality?" This intense desire to "know" it informs tales of horror and also explains that "spirit of wickedness," which, Poe said, represents the "soul's longing to torment itself""".
D. H. Lawrence defined Poe as "an adventurer into the crypts, cellars, and hideous subterranean passages of the human soul".
Van Wyck Brooks wrote of his work in the press: "Poe took what he described as 'the true spirit of journalism' very seriously, partly because newspapers were his livelihood, but mainly because he had a presentiment that this medium would become "the most influential of the estates of letters". [Founding his own magazine would allow him to become] the unquestioned arbiter of his country's intelligentsia ».
For his most recent biographer, Peter Ackroyd, Poe “had an instinctive vision of what could attract and hold the attention of a newly formed reading public. He understood the virtues of conciseness and unity of effect; he realized the need for sensationalism and exploiting "passing fads." Throughout his life he was often dismissed as a mere "magazineer"; but this risky and poorly paid activity would be the trigger for his genius ».
In French
The poet Charles Baudelaire was truly devoted to this author. Already in 1848, a year before Poe's death, he praised him for the publication of his first book of short stories in French, comparing him, as a philosopher, with Diderot, Laclos, Hoffmann, Goethe, Jean Paul, Maturin and Honoré de Balzac. In a later article, after Poe's death, he seems to try to excuse him for his vices: "To be completely fair, a part of his vices, and particularly his drunkenness, must be attributed to the severe society in which Providence imprisoned him".
And he spares no praise: enlightened and wise. In a tender dedication of his own translations of Poe to his mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, he declares that he was "one of the greatest poets of this century". In his 1856 work Edgar Allan Poe, his life and works, Baudelaire tries to imagine the context in which the tragedy of the American man took place: «Unfortunate tragedy that of the Edgar Poe life! His death, a terrible denouement whose horror increases the triviality! All the documents I have read have led me to the knowledge that the United States was not for Poe but a vast prison that he ran through with the feverish agitation of a being created to breathe in a world more aromatic —than that of a great barbarism illuminated with gas—, and that his inner, spiritual life, as a poet or even as a drunkard, was nothing but a perpetual effort to escape the influence of this unpleasant atmosphere. Ruthless dictatorship of opinion in democratic societies; do not implore from her charity or indulgence.
The poet Stéphane Mallarmé, in an 1876 letter to Poe's former girlfriend, Sarah Helen Whitman, stated: "Allow me to tell you that someone in Paris thinks of you often and joins you in preserving a deep veneration for that genius who has probably been the intellectual god of our century. Thanks to the noble biography of your friend, Ingram, and to the religious zeal with which Miss Rice has dedicated herself to the construction of a commemorative monument, today her figure has been vindicated." Mallarmé dedicated a famous sonnet entitled &# 34;Edgar Allan Poe's grave". This begins: «Just as eternity finally changes him in himself, / The Poet stirs up with his bare sword / the century of him frightened for not having known / That death triumphed in that strange voice».
The poetic art developed by Poe in his controversial «Philosophy of Composition» has its best follower in the poet Paul Valéry, also a great supporter of «Eureka». Valéry, already in his youth, in a letter to Mallarmé, acknowledged: «I hold Poe's theories in high esteem, learned in a way as deep as it was insidious; I believe in the omnipotence of rhythm and especially in the suggestive phrase". a new aesthetic discipline". the inventor of the newest and most seductive combinations of logic with imagination, of mysticism with calculation, the psychologist of the exception, the literary engineer who delves into and uses all the resources of art, are revealed to him [to Baudelaire] in Edgar Poe and marvel at it. So many original visions and extraordinary promises fascinate him. With this his talent is transformed, his destiny is magnificently modified". modern cosmogonic poem, of the criminal investigation novel, of the introduction into literature of morbid psychological states, and that all his work manifests on each page the act of an intelligence and a will to intelligence that are not observed at that level in no other literary trajectory".
The surrealist André Breton includes a text by Poe in his Anthology of Black Humor, specifically the story «The Angel of the Singular». Breton recalls the words of Guillaume Apollinaire: «Literary grudges, vertigos of infinity, pains of marriage, insults of misery, Poe, explains Baudelaire, fled from everything in the darkness of drunkenness, as in the darkness of the grave; since he did not drink like a connoisseur, but like a barbarian... In New York, the same morning that the Whig magazine published "The Raven", while the name of Poe it was on everyone's lips, and everyone was vying for his poem, he crossed Broadway bumping into houses and stumbling». To which Breton adds: «Such a contradiction would suffice by itself to generate humor, either because it nervously explodes from the conflict between the exceptional logical faculties, the high intellectual level and the mists of drunkenness ("The Angel of the Singular& #34;), either because, in a darker form, it revolves around human inconsistencies that reveal certain sick states ("The Demon of Perversity").
The French writer and biographer Émile Hennequin draws a psychological profile of Poe in which he agrees with other authors: «The testimony of those who treated Poe, the behavior observed during his life and his own statements show the continuous variations of his humor, oscillating between sadness and excessive confidence. But it is curious that precisely this feeling of optimism prevailed. Poe insisted on continuing to believe, until his death, that he would finally escape his misery: the memory of the unbroken series of his failures was not enough to dispel his illusions. That fever of hope is reflected in a special way in the tenacity with which he imagined he could control his tendency to alcohol ».
This optimism of Poe is recorded in many of his letters, such as this one to Annie Richmond in January 1849 (year of his death):
I'm starting to get things out of my mouth about money, because I'm better in the mood, and soon, Very soonI'll be out of my scouts. Couldn't get any idea how industrious I am. I've solved it. enrich mein the name of his sweet love.
About his personality and manners, the critic Michel Zéraffa recalls that, endowed with great intelligence, Poe was a very courteous man but unparalleled fierceness, which made him at odds with many people. His friends were surprised by his careful appearance to the extreme and the clarity of his elocution. His manuscripts are characterized by the consistency, regularity and elegance of their writing, as well as the absence of erasures. Often, he wrote on notebook sheets that he later glued together to create scrolls. «His manuscripts of him reveal an intelligence that & # 34; he never slept & # 34;, an extreme independence regarding his convictions and that he controls or always seeks to control an extraordinary sensitivity; after all, a "cerebral"".
The author of his extensive biography in French, Georges Walter, wonders in the introduction to it if he was not the only somewhat well-known deceased in his country who, barely buried, found himself covered in opprobrium by a national newspaper. He then recalls that afterwards, for more than a quarter of a century, it was seen how “the glory of the poet oscillated between the picturesque and the sordid, between anathema and sob. What surprises are not the tribulations of his bones, unusual and extravagant as they were, but the singularity of a posthumous adventure filled with conflicting passions, the fluctuations of a posterity deprived by this annoying deceased of any fair judgment, that is, of rest. of the spirit." Walter points out that the final episode of Poe's life presents all the signs of a murder scorned by justice.
In Spanish
Jorge Luis Borges wrote in 1949: «In neurosis, as in other misfortunes, we can see an artifice of the individual to achieve an end. Poe's neurosis would have served him to renew the fantastic tale, to multiply the literary forms of horror. It could also be said that Poe sacrificed his life to the work, the mortal destiny to the posthumous destiny. [...] Poe inextricably belongs to the history of Western letters, which cannot be understood without him. Also, and this is more important and more intimate, he belongs to the timeless and the eternal, for some verse and for many incomparable pages. Of these I would highlight the last of the Story by Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which is a systematic nightmare whose secret theme is the color white". Among his stories, Borges highlights "The truth about the case of Mr. Valdemar", "A Descent into Maelström", "The Well and the Pendulum", "Manuscript Found in a Bottle" and "The Man of the Crowd". The Argentine writer dedicated a sonnet to Poe, which opens: " Marble pomps, black anatomy / outraged by sepulchral worms, / from the triumph of death the glacials / symbols assembled. He was not afraid of them ».
Rubén Darío, in his book Los raros, described Poe as "the prince of cursed poets". He added: "Poe's influence on universal art has been sufficiently deep and transcendent for his name and his work to be continually remembered. Since his death here, there is hardly a year in which, either in the book or in the magazine, critics, essayists and poets do not deal with the exalted American poet. Ingram's work illuminated the life of the man; nothing can increase the glory of the marvelous dreamer."
Carlos Obligado explains the many antipathies he aroused: for his shrewd and biting criticism, for the amoralism of his art, "for his inconceivable blasphemies against democracy and against his inherent intelligent dogma that any future time will be better." Poe conveyed a "peculiar timbre and even constructive norms to the heavy-minded, intellectual poetry that culminates in the present hour".
One of the great connoisseurs of the author, Julio Cortázar, underlines an essential feature in the work of the Bostonian: «Of all the elements that make up his work, be it poetry or short stories, the notion of abnormality stands out violently. Sometimes it is an angelic idealism, an asexual vision of radiant and beneficial women; sometimes those same women encourage burial while alive or the desecration of a grave, and the angelic halo is exchanged for an aura of mystery, of fatal disease, of inexpressible revelation; sometimes there is a cannibal feast on a drifting ship, a balloon crossing the Atlantic in five days, or landing on the Moon after amazing experiences. But nothing, day or night, happy or unhappy, is normal in the ordinary sense, which we even apply to the vulgar abnormalities that surround us and dominate us and that we almost no longer consider as such. The abnormal, in Poe, always belongs to the great species."
Martín de Riquer and José María Valverde write: «Poe, in his mathematical darkness, has sung Neruda, expressing that singular but essential contrast of the analytical coldness of his reflection with its depth of mystery, both united in a single suggestion: accuracy, contemplated in a vacuum, ends up having the character of magical horror". of mystical tendencies to attend only to the intrinsic functioning of poetry: it preludes, then, l'art pour l'lart and literary objectivity". And the sentence of the Sevillian poet: the The 19th century was characterized as "the lyrical century that accentuated its best poem with a temporal adverb", in reference to the "Nunca más" from "The Raven".
The affiliation of Uruguayan Horacio Quiroga to Poe is well known. In the "Decalogue of the perfect storyteller" By this author, the First Commandment reads as follows: "Believe in a teacher—Poe, Maupassant, Kipling, Chekhov—as in God himself."
About the striking artistic diversity of the author, Domingo Santos points out: «Poe's varied work cannot be considered in a separate way. It is, perhaps, one of the most coherent works that have ever come from the pen of a single man, perhaps because it reflects, as it has rarely reflected on other occasions, the personality of its author ».
According to Mauro Armiño, this author dignified the short story in front of the novel: «Poe rigorously and clearly establishes bases that allow differentiating a short story from any other generic form. [...] We are not dealing with "well-written" stories, understanding by this a caramelized, ornamental and vacuous literature, but with stories written so that the reader [...] is subject to the domain of the author.
The historian of terror Rafael Llopis clarified about Poe: «By virtue of that dialectic of art, which makes the majority what was once a minority, and the minority the majority, Poe has become the very symbol of the horror story. However, it is unfair to classify him in this literary genre, from which he overflows everywhere. Poe was above all, as he himself said, a poet; a poet who made poetry of terror, which is perhaps the first and purest of poetry. Hence, he belongs to the terrifying genre and, at the same time, that he transcends it ».
About the essayist Poe in «Filosofía de la composición», the Spanish philosopher Fernando Savater wrote: «What to think of this surprising demystification of the muses that, according to tradition, blow on the poets' foreheads? The most obvious thing is to declare this text as an ingenious tour de force, in which, from the already composed poem, Poe deduces the operation of each one of its parts on the mind of the impressed reader, pretending that everything was planned; This opinion is confirmed by Poe himself who declared his writing —and I am surprised that Cortázar does not mention it— a mere hoax, a simple mystification". About the notes of Marginalia: «Here his arbitrary taste triumphs, but always reasoned in his own way; his apocryphal scholarship, in which he precedes Borges; his lofty and courageous conception of life".
Carlos Fuentes catches a glimpse of the Bostonian's fantasies: «Stripped of their gothic garb, Poe's narratives take place in a cloudy dawn of the world. In that dawn that still does not leave the night, nor does it allow us to believe that it has abandoned us, terrible ways of enduring begin to emerge. The dead listen. The graves open. The ghosts knock with their knuckles at the entrance to the tombs. "Poe," writes Paul Valéry, "creates form out of nothing."
Works
Stories
- "A dream" ("A Dream"), 1831. (I doubtful autology attributed to Poe by some critics but denied by others.)
- Metzengerstein, 1832.
- "The Duke of l'Omelette" (The Duc De L'Omelette), 1832.
- "Table of Jerusalem" ("A Tale of Jerusalem"), 1832.
- "The Loss of Breath" (1832).
- "Bon-Bon," 1832.
- "Four Beasts in One-The Homo-Cameleopard"), 1832.
- "Manuscript found in a bottle" ("MS. Found in a Bottle"), 1833.
- "The Assignation", 1834.
- "Leons" ("Lionizing"), 1835.
- "Sombra" ("Shadow - A Parable"), 1835.
- "Silence - A Fable", 1835.
- "Berenice," 1835.
- "Morella", 1835.
- "The Peste King" ("King Pest"), 1835.
- "Mixification" ("Mystification"), 1835.
- "Ligeia," 1838.
- "How to write an article in the Blackwood way" ("How to write a Blackwood Article"), 1838.
- "The Devil in the Bell" ("The Devil in the Belfry"), 1839.
- "The Man That Was Used Up," 1839.
- "The Fall of the Usher House" ("The Fall of the House of Usher"), 1839.
- William Wilson, 1839.
- "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion", 1839.
- "Why the Little Frenchman Wears His Hand in a Sling," 1839.
- "The Business Man," 1840.
- The Man of the Crowd, 1840.
- "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", 1841.
- "A descent to Maelström" ("A Descent into the Maelström"), 1841.
- "The colloquium of Monkeys and One" ("The Colloquy of Monkeys and One"), 1841.
- "Never bet the Devil your head" (1841).
- "Eleonora", 1841.
- "Three Sundays in a Week," 1841.
- "The oval portrait" ("The Oval Portrait"), 1842.
- "The Red Death Mask" (1842).
- "The well and the pendulum" ("The Pit and the Pendulum"), 1842.
- "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt", 1842-1843.
- "The heart of the delator" ("The Tell-Tale Heart"), 1843.
- "The Gold Bug" ("The Gold Bug"), 1843.
- "The mystery of Marie Rogêt" ("The Mystery of Marie Roget"), 1843.
- "The Black Cat," 1843.
- "The Timus (Diddling)" ("Diddling, Considered as One of the Exact Sciences"), 1843.
- "The glasses" ("The Spectacles"), 1843.
- "The Oblong Box" (1844).
- "A Ragged Mountains Story" ("A Tale of the Ragged Mountains"), 1844.
- "The Premature Burial" burial, 1844.
- "The stolen letter" ("The Purloined Letter"), 1844.
- "Dr. Tarr's system and Professor Fether" ("The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"), 1844.
- "Mesmeric Revelation" (1844).
- "The balloon camel" ("The Ballon Hoax"), 1844.
- "You are the man" ("Thou Art the Man"), 1844.
- The Angel of the Odd, 1844.
- "The Literary Autobiography of Thingum Bob, Esq." ("The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq."), 1844.
- "The thousand and two tale of Scheherazade" ("The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade"), 1845.
- "Conversation with a mummy" ("Somme Words with a Mummy"), 1845.
- "The Power of the Words," 1845.
- "The Demon of Perversity" ("The Imp of the Perverse"), 1845.
- "The truth about Mr. Valdemar's case" ("The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar"), 1845.
- "The Sphinx" (1845).
- "The Cask of Amontillado", 1846.
- "The domain of Arnheim or the landscape of the garden" ("The Domain of Arnheim"), 1846.
- "Mellonta Tauta", 1846.
- "The Landor cottage" ("Landor's Cottage"), 1849.
- "Hop-Frog", 1849
- "Von Kempelen and his discovery" ("Von Kempelen and His Discovery"), 1849.
- "X on a loose" ("X-ing a Paragrab"), 1849.
- "The Light-House", 1849.
Poetry
- "Tamerlane" (1827)
- "A..." ("A...") (1827)
- "Dreams" (1827)
- "Spiritus of the Dead" (1827)
- "Dawn Star" (1827)
- "A Dream" (1827)
- "The happiest day, the happiest time" ("The Happiest Day, The Happiest Hour(1827)
- "The Lake: A..." ("The Lake: To...") (1827)
- "Al Aaraaf" (1829)
- "Sound to Science" (1829)
- "Alone" (1829)
- "To Elena" (1831)
- "The City in the Sea" (1831)
- "The Sleeper" (1831)
- "The Valley of Unrest" (1831)
- "Israfel" (1831)
- "The Colosseum" (1833)
- "To Someone in Paradise" (1834)
- "Himno" (1835)
- "Sound to Zante" (1837)
- "Bridal Ballad to..." (1837)
- "The Enchanted Palace" (1839)
- "Sound of silence" (1840)
- "Lenore" (1843)
- "The Conqueror Worm" (1843)
- "Land of Dreams" (1844)
- "The raven ("The Raven") (1845)
- "Eulalie, a song"Eulalie, A Song") (1845)
- "Ulalume" (1847)
- "A dream in a dream" (1849)
- "Annabel Lee" (1849)
- "The Bells" (1849)
- "To My Mother" (1849)
Novel
- The Story of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838)
Essay
- "Philosophy of Composition" (1846)
- "The Poetic Principle" (1848)
- "Eureka" (1848)
- "Charles Dickens"
- "Longfellow"
- "Hawthorne"
- "Criptography"
- "Pestrian Arabica"
- "Marginalia" (1844-49)
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