Repeatedly Allan’s failure to respond led the disgruntled Poe to disgrace himself more thoroughly than he had initially succeeded. As a result, history remembers his college gambling but not his prizes; his West Point court martial for neglect of duty and disobedience of orders, but not his rapid rise through the military ranks.

Poe’s search in his career for masculine approval was matched in his private life by a yearning after familial affection. Recoiling from the untimely deaths of both his birth mother Eliza Poe and his foster-mother ‘Fanny’ Allan, Poe sought in women less life-partners than surrogate mothers or sisters. The longest of his female relationships—the sixteen-year ménage with his aunt Maria Clemm and her pre-pubescent daughter Virginia—epitomized the idiosyncrasies of Poe’s emotional life. It is impossible to agree with those early ill-wishers who read the situation as sexually degenerate. As an economic and living unit, the household was quite successful, and Poe was adored by both his aunt and the cousin he eventually married. Yet the sexual reticence of the arrangement remains disconcerting. Far from degenerate, the relationship was apparently sexless, with the childlike, childless Virginia remaining ill for much of their eleven-year marriage. The emotional aimlessness and the repetitive circularity of his personal relations found a fitting end in Poe’s death while travelling to bring his former mother-in-law to his new marriage with a long-lost love from childhood.

Poe’s professional life was as untidy as his private one. Although not the habitual dissolute that later writers made of him, Poe did over-indulge occasionally in laudanum and more frequently in alcohol, for which his system had little tolerance. His addictions did not, however, affect his professional accomplishments. He remained a tireless journalist and a canny editor who, in addition to his creative work, produced large quantities of reviews and occasional prose while increasing the circulation of his periodicals as much as fivefold. If anything, his intensity impeded his career more than alcohol did. As exhausting a friend as he was a foe, his enthusiasms for James Russell Lowell and Thomas Chivers were only slightly less discomforting to these patrician poets than was the venom he directed at Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and Margaret Fuller. However engaging, his energy and optimism were seldom grounded in a mature assessment of the literary market-place. Poe’s repeated failures to find backing for his collection of interconnected stories ‘Tales of the Folio Club’ or his literary journal The Stylus may mark merely the short-sightedness of mid-century publishing. Yet one can only stand bemused before his final enthusiasm—the foolish belief that Eureka, his dense and obscure lecture on Newtonian physics, would be a crowd-pleaser.

The problem of Poe began with his hapless life. Honest but wholly without luck, Poe was never able completely to master his environment or his emotions. Yet the difficulty did not end with his death. His supporters compounded the error by praising his foibles as virtues. Modern readers continue to resist taking Poe seriously in part because of what ‘taking him seriously’ has meant in the past. Early admirers celebrated the very unsociability that troubled everyone else. To authors as different as D. H. Lawrence, Algernon Swinburne, Fyodor Dostoevsky, Edward Arlington Robinson, Vladimir Nabokov, and Sergei Rachmaninov, Poe’s failed life proved his refined sensibilities. Walt Whitman pictured him as a visionary lost in the stormy chaos of mid-century culture:

On the deck [of a foundering ship] was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying all the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems—themselves all lurid dreams.1

In the second half of the century, French symbolist poets like Charles Baudelaire, Stéphane Mallarmé, and (later) Paul Valéry expanded Whitman’s image of an American Cassandra to view Poe more globally as the poete maudit, the cursed truth-teller unwelcome wherever commercialism and bourgeois morality reigned. Such high aesthetic praise added considerably to Poe’s reputation. Even the sceptical William Butler Yeats could not dismiss a poet admired by Baudelaire. Yet his sponsors may have done Poe a disservice, promising depths and subtleties that his works could not deliver.