Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)
Life
Poe’s life is almost offensively Poesque. His parents were traveling actors; his mother coughed blood on stage and died of tuberculosis when he was two. He was fostered — never adopted — by a wealthy Richmond merchant who eventually cut him off for drinking and gambling at university. He enlisted in the army under a false name, got into West Point, deliberately got himself court-martialed, moved to Baltimore, and married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia. Virginia coughed blood at the piano one evening and started dying in front of him for the next five years. He drank more. She finally died. Two years later, in October 1849, Poe was found half-conscious on a Baltimore street wearing somebody else’s clothes, delirious and unable to explain what had happened. He died four days later. Nobody’s ever been sure of the cause — alcohol poisoning, rabies, cooping by a political gang, syphilis — and the mystery is, of course, perfect.
In between, he produced some of the most famous short stories in the English language, founded the detective genre single-handedly, wrote the best-known American poem of his century (“The Raven”), reviewed books with a cruelty that made him powerful enemies, and spent his entire life broke. He was the first major American writer who tried to live off his pen and discovered — correctly — that the market couldn’t sustain it.
What They Were Doing
Poe had two brains and let them take turns running the store. One was analytical, obsessed with logic, cryptography, and pattern — it wrote the Dupin detective stories (The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter), The Gold-Bug, and the essays on composition. That brain invented the detective protagonist, the “ratiocinator,” the man who solves the crime by reasoning backwards from effect to cause. Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, every forensic procedural on television — all downstream of Dupin.
The other brain was the one that couldn’t sleep. It wrote the Gothic tales — The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher, Ligeia, Berenice — where narrators who sound lucid describe, in calm prose, their own descent into murder, hallucination, premature burial, the obsessive destruction of whatever they loved. Poe called the engine of these stories the Imp of the Perverse: the inexplicable human drive to do the exact thing that will ruin you, because it will ruin you, because you know you shouldn’t. “Perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart,” one of his narrators says. That’s a century before Freud named it the death drive. Poe got there first, in fiction, working from his own life.
The two brains meet in the unreliable narrator — his great formal innovation. The Tell-Tale Heart’s killer insists he isn’t mad, and the insistence is the proof. The Imp of the Perverse’s essay-narrator analyzes the drive for forty paragraphs before confessing the murder it drove him to. You cannot trust the voice, and the discomfort of not trusting the voice is the story. Every piece of twentieth-century literature that uses an unreliable first person — Nabokov’s Humbert, Kazuo Ishiguro’s butlers, every psychological thriller — is using Poe’s move.
Influence
Poe is the secret starting point of multiple genres: the detective story (via Dupin), the psychological horror tale (via the Gothic stories), modern literary criticism (via his essays and The Philosophy of Composition), the cosmic horror that runs through Lovecraft, and — through Baudelaire, who translated him into French — the whole French symbolist movement. Baudelaire called Poe a brother. Mallarmé and Valéry worshipped him. Borges treated him as a founding father. Dostoevsky translated three of Poe’s stories into Russian and lifted the unreliable-narrator technique into [[crime-and-punishment|Crime and Punishment]]. The French re-exported him to the twentieth century; the Americans took longer to admit he was theirs.
He’s also the patron of every addiction-haunted writer who wrote anyway. The drinking, the debts, the buried wife, the impossible rent — Poe kept producing. The work is what remains.
Connections
- The Gold-Bug and Other Tales — the story-collection entry point. Analytic Poe (Dupin, Legrand) alongside Gothic Poe (Tell-Tale Heart, Usher, Ligeia).
- Fyodor Dostoevsky — translated Poe into Russian and absorbed the unreliable-narrator trick. The Underground Man is Poe’s Tell-Tale narrator with a philosophy.
- Beyond the Pleasure Principle — Freud’s death drive is Poe’s Imp of the Perverse given clinical apparatus. Poe had been writing the phenomenon for eighty years.
- Dream Psychology — Freud on the uncanny is Poe on the Gothic. The dead who don’t stay dead, the self that splits, the familiar turned hostile.
- Crime and Punishment — Raskolnikov’s fever dreams and his interior monologue of justification are straight Poe technique, scaled up to a novel.
- The Trial — Kafka’s guilt-without-charge has its short-fiction prototype in Poe’s confessional killers, who are also guilty in advance of the crime they will commit.
Key Works
- The Gold-Bug and Other Tales (c. 1839–1849)
- The Raven (1845)
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)
- The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
- The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)
- The Philosophy of Composition (1846)