Edgar A. Poe / Edgar Allan Poe

...Lawrence, Poe could say, 'I daren't sit in the world without a woman behind me.' Like George Orwell . . . Poe precipitously proposed to several ladies who rejected him...

...Late in his life, he seems to have written a pseudonymous letter defending Longfellow against accusations of plagiarism that Poe had made in his own signed articles...

...for his croak [is] the most eloquent imaginable...

...Fortunately, he'd had "lying by him" one published when he was ten...

...He wrote and published widely, but was paid next to nothing, even though some of his works—especially "The Raven"—were hugely popular...

...For such an audience, he could hardly have been expected to waste his time in writing a new poem...

...Meyers provides much commentary, but all is on the most superficial plane...

...Poe's first employer, Thomas Willis White of the Southern Literary Messenger, who hoped to rehire Poe after he had quit or been fired, warned him in a letter, "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast...

...The most astounding comes in the "Letter to Mr...

...The irony is that Poe's own writings are filled with wholesale liftings from other poets, critics, even encyclopedias...

...This he was unable to write...

...He is in truth 'A glorious devil, with large heart and brain.— But these relationships, which were passionate, if platonic, landed Poe in hot water, and when one of his jealous protegees accused him of slandering her, the salon doors were closed in his face...

...When John Allan died, leaving none of his ample fortune to his former ward, Edgar was 25...

...But he was hungry for acclaim in the city of his birth, and he arranged to give a reading at the Boston Lyceum, promising to deliver a new poem...

...He negotiated a release in order to attend West Point, but was not happy there either, and deliberately had himself court-martialed and dismissed.or was fired from each of them, working no longer than fourteen months at any one...

...Meyers lays out Poe's life in some detail, but includes almost nothing that can't be found more fully discussed in Silverman...

...You would have thought it had been written by a friend & a foe, each stark mad in love & hate, and writing the alternate paragraphs...

...In the sheer marshaling of details, he succeeds in creating a vivid picture, if not of Poe himself, at least of the world through which Poe's inscrutable figure stalks...

...On taking the stage, after a fifteen-minute apology for the "indefinitiveness" and "general imbecility . . . so unworthy a Bostonian audience," of the poem he was going to read, Poe launched into "Al Aaraaf," an astronomical fantasy almost 300 lines long...

...If he took but one glass of weak wine or beer or cider the Rubicon of the cup was passed with him, and it almost always ended in excess and sickness," noted a friend...

...This definition is almost exactly that given in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria, down to the italics...

...A number of society ladies, most of whom fancied themselves poetesses (Poe gladly puffed their writings in his reviews), fell under his spell: "I see," wrote one of them to another, "that your beautiful invocation has reached the Raven in his cote . . . May Providence protect you...

...But the oddest incident came at a reading Poe gave in Boston in 1845...

...Beginning by claiming that he had in fact been "cordially received" and that the poem had been read with "many interruptions of applause," he proceeded to attack the dullness of Boston, its bad hotels, its hostility toward himself, and its pathetic duck pond...

...Laing and Thomas Szasz, and the theme of Ken Kesey's novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest...

...But his reputation and his own ambivalence made marriage impossible...

...After his wife died of tuberculosis, Poe carried on intense relationships with four women simultaneously, and thought of at least two of them as possible wives...

...At a reception afterward, Poe claimed that "Al Aaraaf' had been written when he was 12 (actually, it probably dated from his twentieth year...

...Poe's story "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether" describes the mutiny of patients in a lunatic asylum...

...I'm especially fond of his penchant for revealing the countless names in Poe's writing that include the double a's and /'s of "Allan...

...Poe died in the course of a protracted alcoholic binge, dressed in clothing that was not his, "bloated and unwashed, his hair unkempt, and his He took refuge with his father's sister, Maria Clemm, who would mother him for the rest of his life, and eventually married her daughter when she was 13...

...But many of the supposed influences are tenuous indeed...

...Poe's idea of plagiarism was obsessive and odd: no actual lines, or even words, had to be purloined...

...rather it was the general subject that was craftily stolen...

...He repeatedly turned on those who had tried to help him, and Elizabeth Barrett described the review of one of her books as vacillating between "the two extremes of laudation and reprehension, folded in one another...

...He was taken in by the Richmond merchant John Allan, who "never allowed him to lose sight of his dependence upon his charity," and sent him to the University of Virginia with too little money to pay for his classes...

...0 n returning to New York, he announced in the Broadway Journal that "we have been quizzing the Bostonians, and one or two of the more stupid of their editors and editresses have taken it in high dudgeon...

...Poe took to drinking, ran away from home, then joined the army...

...When this provoked further attacks, Poe laid out a full "explanation" of his actions...

...The facts are well known...

...Silverman's analysis of the writings is not particularly profound, but he usefully traces the thematic connections among various works...

...oe also felt compelled to underp mine himself...

...he quit whole physique repulsive...

...Poe lived fifteen more years of poverty and misery...

...He worked for a succession of magazines, whose editors were impressed by his brilliance but alienated by his personal habits...

...This is Jeffrey Meyers's ninth biography, and Silverman's renders it almost useless...

...Poe was a particularly unpleasant drinker: he would gulp down his drinks, driving himself into a state of total intoxication as quickly as possible, and his belligerence would overwhelm his usual studied courtesy...

...He constantly invented false histories for himself, claimed that various poems had been written much earlier than they really had, misstated his own date of birth to make himself younger than he was, and produced all manner of bizarre rationalizations for his own behavior...

...A manipulative streak seems to have characterized his relations with virtually all of his friends and employers...

...Even though his enemy Rufus Griswold—who described Poe as "exhibit[ing] scarcely any virtue in either his life or his writings"—was given control of his literary estate, Poe's collected works were in their seventeenth edition within nine years of his death...

...enneth Silverman's book is in K many ways a perfect academic biography: Silverman has consulted a vast amount of primary material and assembled it unexceptionably...

...Poe's only contribution is the phrase "in my opinion," which it exactly isn't...

...Poe was clearly a maddening man, "a chaos of deep passion," as he says in the early poem "Dreams...

...As a book reviewer, he denounced almost everything that came before him, thus earning him the eternal enmity of that part of the literary world he had not already alienated with his drinking sprees...

...Many listeners fled...

...in which Poe announces that "a poem, in my opinion, is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth...

...Meyers's two final chapters—"Reputation" and "Influence"—have a certain summary usefulness as a catalogue of later writers' responses to Poe, including a nice description of Baudelaire's fascination with him...

...Poe then published five rejoinders to his own pseudonymous attack on himself...

...For a few months after publishing "The Raven," Poe found himself lionized in literary salons...

...this "prefigures the ideas of iconoclastic thinkers like R.D...

...Poe writes a piece on premature burials...

...His brother was a rover and a drunk, his sister apparently retarded...

...Born in Boston, Poe had lost his parents, both actors, by the time he was three: his father had abandoned the family and his mother had died...

...He all too frequently tries to illuminate Poe's behavior by adducing parallels from other writers, many of them subjects of previous Meyers biographies: "Like D.H...

...The audience—which had already endured a two-and-ahalf-hour speech by the American commissioner to China—found it interminable and pointless...

...Yet Poe's life has always exercised a fascination over the reading public, derived in equal measure from Poe's untruths and foes' slanders—and from the raptures of Baudelaire...

...Poe had always been at odds with the New England transcendentalists—for one thing, they were abolitionists, while Poe thought blacks sub-human...

...in Ulysses, Bloom meditates on the horror of being buried alive...