Poe's Inner Life

The early nineteenth century was a tumultuous time in American history, and most of the poets of his day wrote on the issues of the day, such as slavery and the importance of the Union. But Edgar Allan Poe was totally insular. He seemed to spend his whole writing career working out issues of his own life.

He was particularly concerned with death and its resulting abandonment, and with the fine line between life and death, which his characters often cross over.
This isn't too surprising when you consider that he was orphaned by the age of three.  Consider “The Premature Burial,” and that premature burial is like the ultimate abandonment. Much the same thing happens in “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Then consider that characters in both are released and return to the world. So maybe Poe was thinking, or hoping, that death is not the end, after all.

Poe's characters live in a fantasy world, much as Poe often lived in his own world of fantasy, drugs and alcohol. The world of his stories is sort of European (he spent five years in England as a child), and he uses old-world language, such as “tarn” for “lake” in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” The time of the stories is indeterminate, running somewhere from the Middle Ages in “Metzengerstein” and “Hop-frog” to maybe the 18th century in “The Cask of Amantillado.” The closest Poe comes to an identifiable place and its history is in “The Pit and the Pendulum,” which is set in Toledo during the counter-reformation. But you could put down a lot of his stories anywhere in a 500 year period. After all, who needs the real world? The real world is full of horrors you can't control. At least you can manage the horrors in your own mind.

The real world was never a place Poe fit in. He fell out with his wealthy foster father over his literary ambitions and over debts incurred in college. Later he became engaged, and, since he wasn't going to inherit his foster father's money, both sets of parents combined to break up the relationship. Needing money, Poe set out to become a poet and magazine writer and editor. His work was respected by his colleagues, but he barely scraped by financially. He drank too much and had a nasty wit that he didn't mind sharing. Poe jumped from job to job and left behind a trail of people he had antagonized.

Imagine with what relief and joy Poe found himself alone to compose, to work out the shining but unformed images in his mind until they were a fully realized and well-crafted story or poem. In “The Philosophy of Composition” Poe writes, “That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful.”

Poe's poems show him to be a thorough romantic, even if a somewhat morbid one. Many of them are about a love lost in circumstances so tragic that the poet has pushed them to the recesses of his mind. In “Ulalume” it takes him a long time to remember where he is and what happened there only a year ago. In “The Raven” he doesn't want to remember. The lost love is always wildly idealized. She is a Nicean bark or a moonbeam. Somehow we don't mind this; Poe's sincerity is able to give these fantastic images credibility. Poe is one of a kind. Somehow he makes it work because he's Poe.

Poe had a real love in his life, his cousin Virginia Clemm. They and her mother lived happily together many years, although it was all Poe could do to support two other people besides himself. But Virginia and her mother loved him and leaned on him, and he was eager to do everything for them. Poe and Virginia were married for fifteen years, until she died. Virginia's death was a crushing blow to a man already haunted and beset. Poe's life was now reflecting his poetry, as well as his poetry reflecting his life.

One scholar said that Poe, Virginia and her mother lived in their own little world, like orphans in the storm. It's generally thought that "Annabel Lee,” which Poe wrote after her death, is about Virginia.  In “Annabel Lee” he says that they lived in “a kingdom by the sea.” A kingdom suggests a castle, which is fortified, and being by the sea makes it an even better stronghold.  Perhaps Poe himself thought of his family and his home as a refuge or defense against a hostile world.

But when Virginia died, Poe’s defense was gone.  His most famous poem “The Raven” moves beyond mourning to a new and more terrible phase. In it the poet is trying to find forgetfulness, to get rid of the awful burden of sorrow he carries for the “lost Lenore.” But he is unable to. His soul is trapped under the shadow of despair, personified by the raven, which never goes away. Time will not heal because for him time is standing still. And it's almost as if his own grief is mocking him.

Poe's work also has to do with guilt, and people who try to hide guilt that invariably comes out in the end. Examples are “The Black Cat” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.” But for all his shortcomings, Poe was nothing like the insane murderers in these stories. Did he in some way feel responsible for the deaths of loved ones? Was his love somehow fatal? Maybe he carried a terrible burden of vague but tenacious guilt, all the worse because he could not pin it down to anything.

It's no surprise that Poe lived only two more years after Virginia died. Both his outer and inner life overwhelmed him. At the age of 40 he parted that veil which he had always considered so thin.

No discussion of Poe would be complete without some Poe-etry. Here is a beautiful verse from “Israfel”:

If I did dwell where Israfel
Hath dwelt, and he where I,
He would not sing one half as well
One half as passionately,
And a stormier note than this would swell
From my lyre within the sky.

Poe sang many a stormy note at one time or another.