Initially, I thought I’d begin this post with a brief summary of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, who lived and died within the first half of the nineteenth century. But then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory and I don’t know how anyone could write a summary of that life. It’s too much - the desperate, orphaned childhood, the love-hate relationship with his foster father, the loss after loss after loss, the doomed army stint, the gambling and ‘damnable propensity to drink’, the marrying a child cousin, the mysterious, disturbing end. (His last words, at the age of forty: ‘God help my poor soul’.) The only thing that burns through all the strange, unaccountable things that happened to him and the strange, unaccountable things that he did is a kind of dogged devotion to literature. The grim poverty he endured, so he could write his poems and stories. The way as a (sharp) reviewer, he alienated himself from the literati of his time by calling out Longfellow for being a bit rubbish.
Poe's coffin
Poe's coffin
Poe's coffin
Initially, I thought I’d begin this post with a brief summary of the life of Edgar Allan Poe, who lived and died within the first half of the nineteenth century. But then I went to Wikipedia to refresh my memory and I don’t know how anyone could write a summary of that life. It’s too much - the desperate, orphaned childhood, the love-hate relationship with his foster father, the loss after loss after loss, the doomed army stint, the gambling and ‘damnable propensity to drink’, the marrying a child cousin, the mysterious, disturbing end. (His last words, at the age of forty: ‘God help my poor soul’.) The only thing that burns through all the strange, unaccountable things that happened to him and the strange, unaccountable things that he did is a kind of dogged devotion to literature. The grim poverty he endured, so he could write his poems and stories. The way as a (sharp) reviewer, he alienated himself from the literati of his time by calling out Longfellow for being a bit rubbish.