After a short time, he proposed marriage and she accepted, but soon his drinking got the better of him. He was found wandering the backstreets of Baltimore in late September 1849, and he died on October 7 in the Washington College Hospital.

At the time of his death, William Cullen Bryant, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and James Russell Lowell were among the most revered American poets, and they largely refused to acknowledge Poe as a real poet. Emerson called him “the jingle man,” refusing him a place in his prestigious anthology, The American Parnassus (1847). Lowell, at least, saw fit to mention Poe in A Fable for Critics, although he wrote about him somewhat derisively:

Here comes Poe with his Raven, like Barnaby Rudge—

Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge;

Who talks like a book of iambs and pentameters

In a way to make all men of common sense d——m meters;

Who has written some things far the best of his kind,

But somehow the heart seems squeezed out by the mind.

Even Walt Whitman, the greatest American poet of the century, dismissed him, claiming Poe ought to be regarded as “among the electric lights of literature, brilliant and dazzling, with no heat.”

It was left mostly to French readers and critics to elevate Poe to the literary pantheon: Baudelaire adored and translated him, Stephane Mallarmé called him “my great master,” and Paul Valéry considered him “profound and so insidiously learned.” André Gide described Poe as “the only impeccable master.” Eventually—some fifteen years after his death—Poe was recognized in his own country by a memorial volume edited by Sara Sigourney Rice. Bryant, John Greenleaf Whittier, Longfellow, and Oliver Wendell Holmes joined Tennyson and other Europeans to proclaim Poe’s originality and genius as a poet and storyteller. Lord Tennyson struck the most vivid note when he called Poe “the most original genius that America has produced,” one “not unworthy to stand beside Catullus, the most melodious of the Latins, and Heine, the most tuneful of the Germans.”

II.

“Tamerlane” was Poe’s first important poem, and it remains a fascinating work. The historical figure on whom the poem is based was born in Samarkand, in central Asia, in the fourteenth century. This ruthless conqueror ruled an empire extending from the Black Sea to central China, but relatively little is actually known about the historical Tamerlane. Certainly Poe knew next to nothing about him, as he admitted in his preface to that volume, and so the Tamerlane of his poem is a glorious invention. Indeed, Poe begged the reader’s pardon for making his hero “speak in the same language as a Boston gentleman of the nineteenth century.”

The poem, which shows the direct influence of Lord Byron, is typically Romantic in style, echoing popular themes of the period: the thirst for power, blighted love, and fate. In Poe’s hand the poem becomes an allegory of the poet’s own ambition and an elegy for lost love. In a telling moment, the aging conqueror admits to a Christian friar that his worldly quest for power had actually thwarted his desire to attain human love:

How was it that Ambition crept, Unseen, amid the revels there,

Till growing bold, he laughed and leapt In the tangles of Love’s very hair?

“Tamerlane” was reproduced in Poe’s second volume, two years later, along with another long poem, “Al Aaraaf.” The title refers to a state of limbo described in the Koran, which Poe identifies here with a mysterious star discovered in 1572 by the Danish astronomer Tycho Brahe. Running to 264 lines, the poem is rambling and diffuse, echoing Shelley’s Prometheus Unbound (1820) in many places. It is best read as a sequence of disconnected lyric moments, as in the following hymn to Ligeia, the goddess of harmony, where Poe’s mastery of the two-beat line is gorgeously in evidence:

Ligeia! Ligeia! My beautiful one!

Whose harshest idea Will to melody run.

O! is it thy will On the breezes to toss?

Or, capriciously still Like the lone Albatross,

Incumbent on night (As she is on the air)

To keep watch with delight On the harmony there?

The poem celebrates a place out of time where absolute beauty may be experienced directly instead of through earthly things, which are inevitably disappointing. Poe sings this perfection in some lovely lines:

Now happiest, loveliest in yon lovely Earth,
Whence sprang the “Idea of Beauty” into birth
(Falling in wreaths thro’ many a startled star,
Like woman’s hair ‘mid pearls, until, afar,
It lit on hills Achaian, and there dwelt),
She look’d into Inanity—and knelt.

The “She” mentioned above is one of the author’s mysterious intergalactic women, an astral goddess of perfect beauty; this figure will reappear, in earthly embodiments, in Poe’s later verse.

The finest poem in Poe’s second volume was surely his “Sonnet—To Science,” which in true Romantic fashion argues against rationalism of the kind that destroys the imagination:

Why preyest thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture, whose wings are dull realities?

How should he love thee? or how deem thee wise, Who wouldst not leave him in his wandering

To seek for treasure in the jewelled skies, Albeit he soared with an undaunted wing?

Hast thou not dragged Diana from her car? And driven the Hamadryad from the wood

To seek a shelter in some happier star? Hast thou not torn the Naiad from her flood,

The Emn from the green grass, and from me

The summer dream beneath the tamarind tree?

The poem, which has its obvious model in William Blake’s “Mock on, Mock on, Voltaire, Rousseau” (1803), is conventional enough in subject, but the sound is pure Poe, as in the mellifluous wonder of that last line, where the expected final iambic foot is replaced by an anapest. (That is, Poe adds an extra unstressed syllable before the last word, giving it a peculiar resonance and sway.)

Among the other treasures of Poe’s early verse are “Israfel,” “The Sleeper,” “The Valley of Unrest,” the first of two poems called “To Helen,” and “The City in the Sea.” The last (one of my favorite poems by Poe) was inspired by the History of the Jewish War by Flavius Josephus (written in the first century A.D.). Poe evokes a city much like the corrupt biblical city of Gomorrah, “a strange city lying alone / Far down within the dim West.” The poet’s vision is characteristically frenzied:

No rays from the holy heaven come down
On the long night-time of that town;
But light from out the lurid sea
Streams up the turrets silently—

The city emerges in a kind of tragic grandeur as Poe imagines a place where numerous artists once lived and worked. He describes “the Babylon-like walls” of the city “Whose wreathed friezes intertwine / The viol, the violet, and the vine.” That last line, as the English poet Swinburne noted many years later, is a small miracle of euphony.

This poem might also be read as an allegory of ambition here: the poet becomes the city, sunk beneath the lurid sea, a place where a chance of revival exists. “But lo, a stir is in the air!” the poet cries in the last stanza. Life seems to prosper in a strange way beneath this symbolic sea, and “The waves have now a redder glow,” which suggests a process of recovery, even regeneration. The poem is hardly a condemnation of the excesses of Gomorrah, as one might expect from a poem written in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, Poe seems to celebrate the decadence of the city and to identify with it.

“The Sleeper” belongs with “The Valley of Unrest” and “The City in the Sea” as a poem in which doom is evoked and cultivated. It portrays that mysterious state existing somewhere between life and death—a topic Poe would return to often in later poems. The speaker in “The Sleeper” has lost his beloved, and over her grave he prays these chilling, rather morbid, lines:

My love, she sleeps! Oh, may her sleep,
As it is lasting, so be deep!
Soft may the worms about her creep!

The first of Poe’s two poems called “To Helen” is utterly different. It opens:

Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicèan barks of yore,

That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore To his own native shore.

On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth hair, thy classic face,

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece

And the grandeur that was Rome.

The last two lines quoted above are, of course, among the most famous that Poe ever wrote. The poem itself represents a masterpiece in the elegiac love lyric mode, and it was inspired by the poet’s affection for Jane Stannard, though he changed the unpoetical “Jane” to the more melodic and mythically resonant “Helen”—a name that would mutate in later poems to “Eleanora” and “Lenore.”

Poe never actually ceased to write poetry during any period, but he did seem to focus on fiction and criticism in the late 1830s and early 1840s. The struggle to support himself and Virginia was consuming, and it was much easier to make a living by writing prose than poetry. He did, however, find time to compose some of his best poems, including “The Haunted Palace,” “Dream-Land,” and “The Raven” during these years.

“The Haunted Palace” made its first appearance in 1839, in Poe’s story “The Fall of the House of Usher.” It embodies the themes of that bizarre tale in compressed form, alluding to “evil things, in robes of sorrow.” A. E. Housman, the English poet, remarked that this poem might be considered “one of Poe’s best poems so long as we are content to swim in the sensations it evokes and only vaguely to apprehend the allegory.” Houseman refers to the fact that, in the poem, the fair palace door is meant to be Roderick Usher’s mouth, the pearl and ruby his teeth and lips, and the yellow banners his hair.