Virginia begins to show symptoms of tuberculosis. Poe publishes “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death.”

Introduction

As a student of Edgar Allan Poe’s classical learning has stated, “If Poe had a ‘ruling passion,’ it was to acquire and to sustain the pose of a classical scholar and Virginia gentleman.”1 This yearning for fame and fortune, transmuted onto the literary plane, repeatedly caused him anguish and earned him meager profits; yet it inspired some of the most fascinating poetry and fiction in the English language. Poe’s wish to appear erudite has sometimes created difficulties with his language and allusions for modern readers. His literary motives have often been baffling, especially those underlying his fiction. His fiction often made fun of what he wrought best: terror tales. In his writing about his own writing, controversies and ironies continue to swirl, often blurring where Poe the person stops and Poe’s creative writings begin. Contrary to long-lasting mythologies, Poe—exceptionally conscious artist that he was—is not the protagonist in his tales and poems. Though autobiographical portraiture often colored literary productions in his era (and in a few cases entered his own work, but in minor ways), as it continues to do in many instances today, it is not the dominant mode of Poe’s writings.

Born in 1809 in Boston to a British emigrant mother, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, and a Baltimore father, David Poe, Jr., he has repeatedly been associated with the antebellum South, where he spent much of the first half of his life as the foster son (never adopted) of John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. Sometime during 1811, David Poe, Jr., deserted his family; Mrs. Poe became ill and died in Richmond in December of that same year. Edgar consequently was taken in by the Allans, whence derives his middle name, often misspelled even today. Though he expected to inherit John Allan’s large fortune, Poe was disinherited and subsequently lived in poverty for much of his life. It is a wonder that he was able to create the artistic writings he did in light of the continual combat he waged against the wolf at his door during much of his brief life.

I

When Poe emerged as a writer during the 1820s, the American literary world was still very tentative about its achievements and prospects. Several major inspirations from abroad contributed to the literary milieu during that span, however, and creative writing in America seemed to increase between the immediate post-Revolutionary years and Poe’s era. While major literary influences came from Great Britain and Germany, American nationalism was developing in all areas of life, and responses to such foreign influences were mixed. Many American authors and critics hoped for the creation of a distinctively American literature, which, they felt, should break from what they saw as negative traditions of the Old World. From the eighteenth into the nineteenth century American literary circles inveighed against terror or horror literature—so-called Gothic literature—because it supposedly displayed too much class structuring or too many sacrilegious themes, all expressed in extravagant language and implausible characterization. Many British and American readers also shared a hostility toward writing branded as “German” or “Germanism,” supposedly because late-eighteenth-century German literature was seen both as vulgar and as manifesting many of the implausibilities of Gothic literature.

Despite the American and British criticism of Gothic literature (the term is most commonly applied to fiction, although many Gothic plays and poems exist) as too German, however, literary Gothicism is actually British in origin.