The self-proclaimed need to “conquer or die—succeed or be disgraced” drove Poe to stretch the boundaries of literary representation. When an editor scolded him in 1835 for the disgusting particulars of an early tale, he coolly enumerated the narrative modes he meant to exploit: “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque; the fearful colored into the horrible; the witty exaggerated into the burlesque; the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” Committing himself to an extreme art sometimes approaching “the very verge of bad taste,” Poe aimed to achieve celebrity by shocking the public. “To be appreciated, you must be read,” he insisted, justifying his tactics. While magazines and gift books purveyed sentimentalized images of death, he conjured subversive scenes of dissolution, dismemberment, and decomposition; his poems and tales defined a twilight zone of primal anxiety and endless melancholy. Dismissing a charge that he emulated the German romantics, Poe hinted at the origins of his own creativity when he observed in 1840 that “terror is not of Germany, but of the soul.” He rejected the assurance of contemporary religionists, making the condition of dread—and a corollary yearning for transcendence—his trademark as a writer. But he also mocked both Gothic terror and Transcendentalism.

Poe’s paradoxical trafficking in corporeality and spirituality, in vulgarity and sublimity, in banal humor and mortal seriousness may have something to do with his wide appeal as well as his resistance to facile categorization. His compulsion to astonish or perplex led him to overturn familiar assumptions, as when his detective C. Auguste Dupin observes: “Truth is not always in a well. In fact, as regards the more important knowledge, I do believe that she is invariably superficial.” Reversing the conventional logic of surface-depth relations, Poe suggests that the deepest truths are neither remote nor esoteric but instead obscured only by their immediacy. He vaunted his skill as a cryptographer and celebrated mental analysis in “tales of ratiocination,” yet he also parodied the investigative impulse and—in his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym—caricatured scientific observation as self-delusion.

He cloaked his uncertainties about the fate of the soul in farces that travestied human mortality, representing characters who survive hangings, beheadings, and premature burials. He developed a theory of fiction in which effect trumps moral enlightenment—he called didacticism a “heresy”—and contrived nightmarish “tales of sensation.” But he also satirized literary sensationalism and devised moral fables about pride and profligacy. Poe famously declared the death of a beautiful woman to be “the most poetical topic in the world,” yet in several tales he made her demise the horrifying “soul of the plot.” His penchant for mystification, for constructing hoaxes to dupe the reading public and assert his intellectual superiority perhaps compensated for grinding poverty and social obscurity.

In an era of rampant optimism about his country’s future, Poe lampooned democracy as mob rule and refuted “human perfectibility” as well as the allied belief that civilization and progress culminated in the United States. Opposing literary nationalism, he scoffed at the tendency to overpraise “stupid” books because they were American, yet he quietly began to produce American tales himself in the 1840s. In temperament Poe embodied multiple contradictions, among which his compulsion to sabotage his own schemes for personal and professional advancement seems ultimately the most intriguing. He did not write about “the spirit of perverseness” by chance but rather struggled against its pull throughout his short, unhappy life.

 

 

Brilliantly inventive yet contrarily at odds with himself, Poe sprang from modest origins. Born in Boston in 1809, he was the son of itinerant stage performers who left him an orphan before his third birthday. His father, the sodden David Poe, had abandoned the family and presumably died in Norfolk in 1811 just as tuberculosis (or “consumption”) claimed Edgar’s mother, the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe, in Richmond. Her middle child became the ward of a dour Richmond merchant, John Allan, and his wife, Frances, while baby Rosalie came under the care of the Mackenzie family and his older brother, William Henry Leonard, went to live with grandparents in Baltimore. Significantly, although the Allans spoiled Edgar during his childhood, they declined to adopt him. As a small boy he accompanied them on vacations to White Sulphur Springs and on visits to plantations near Richmond; he probably played with slave children at Allan’s country estate on Buffalo Creek. A precocious lad, he reportedly could read a newspaper at five, although his formal schooling commenced the following year. In 1815, he sailed with the Allans to England, where after visiting relatives in Scotland, John Allan opened a London branch of the mercantile firm he owned with Charles Ellis. The boy known as “Edgar Allan” attended boarding school first with the Misses Dubourg in Chelsea and then at Reverend Bransby’s Manor House School in Stoke Newington. His studies included Latin and French, and his experiences at the latter institution inspired details of English school life in one of his later tales, “William Wilson.” In 1819 Poe spent two months in Scotland; his travel there and about the English countryside provided those glimpses of ancient castles, abbeys, country houses, and cathedrals that long after his return to America recurred in dream and memory as the Old World of his childhood.

Financial reverses in 1820 compelled John Allan’s return to Richmond, where his ward resumed the name Edgar Allan Poe in the city where Eliza Poe was buried. At Joseph H. Clarke’s academy the boy studied mathematics and geography, excelling in Latin and Greek; he also revealed a gift for verse satire, collecting his clever poems in a portfolio that he begged Allan to publish. His foster father pondered the request and consulted the schoolmaster but finally refused, wishing not to excite authorial vanity. When Clarke left in 1822, Poe entered the school of William Burke, where he was instructed in French as well as the classical languages. In adolescence, he became adventurous and mischievous, an “imperious” lad whose enthusiasm for pranks sometimes provoked Allan. Poe enjoyed sports, loved to box, and challenged schoolmates to long-jumping contests or swimming competitions.