EDGAR ALLAN POE
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the two American poets regarded
with greatest respect by authors and critics in England and on the
Continent. To Whitman respect is paid because he is so essentially
American in his subject matter and point of view, it is yielded to
Poe because his subject matter is so universal--located out of space
and out of time--and because he was such a master craftsman in his
art. Whitman was intensely national and local, looking on life,
however broadly he may have seen it, always from his American vantage
point. Poe was utterly detached in his creative writing, deriving his
maturer tales and poems neither from past nor present, neither from
books nor life, but evolving them out of his perfervid imagination
and casting the best of them into incomparable form. Poe is therefore
sometimes said to have been in no way related to the course of American
literature; but this judgment mistakenly overlooks his unhappily varied
career as a magazine contributor and editor. He has a larger place in
the history of periodicals than any other American man of letters. His
connection with at least four is the most distinguished fact that can
now be adduced in their favor; and his frustrated ambition to found
and conduct a monthly in "the cause of a Pure Taste" was a dream for a
thing which his country sorely needed.
Poe was born in Boston, January 19, 1809. His parents were actors--his
father a somewhat colorless professionalized amateur, his mother
brought up as the daughter of an actress and moderately successful in
light and charming rôles. By 1811 the future poet, a brother two years
older, and a sister a year younger were orphans. Each was adopted into
a different home--Edgar into that of Mr. John Allan, a well-to-do
Richmond merchant, to whom he owed, more permanently than any other
gift, his middle name. The boy was given the generous attention of an
only child. From 1815 to 1820, while his foster father's business held
him in residence across the Atlantic, he was in English schools. Then
for five years he was in a Richmond academy, and during 1825 apparently
studied under private tutors. Up to the time of his admission to the
University of Virginia he was handsome, charming, active-minded, and
perhaps somewhat "spoiled." Although only seventeen he had passed
through a love affair culminating in an engagement, which was very
naturally broken by the father of the other contracting party.
With his year at the university Poe entered on the unfortunate
succession of eccentricities that blighted all the rest of his
tumultuous career and hastened him to an early and tragic death. He
did everything intensely, though he was methodical and industrious;
but his method was not equal to his intensity, and from time to time,
with increasing frequency, unreasoned or foolish or mad impulses
carried him off his balance and into all sorts of trouble. Thus, at
the university he stood well in his classes, but he drank to excess
(and he was so constituted that a very little was too much) and he
played cards recklessly and very badly, so that at the year's end his
"debts of honor" amounted to over two thousand dollars. Thus again,
after a creditable year and a half in the army he had earned the office
of sergeant major and had secured honorable discharge and admission
to West Point, but in this coveted academy he neglected his duties
and courted the dismissal which came to him within six months. Thus
in one editorial position after another he met his obligations well
and brilliantly until he came to the inevitable breaking point with
his less talented employers. And thus, finally, in the succession of
love affairs which preceded and followed his married life the violence
of his feelings made him irresponsible and intolerable. Again and
again just at the times when he most needed full control of himself he
became intoxicated; yet he was not an habitual drinker, and in the long
intervals between his lapses he doubtless deserved from many another
the famous testimony of Nathaniel Parker Willis:
With the highest admiration for his genius, and a willingness to
let it atone for more than ordinary irregularity, we were led by
common report to expect a very capricious attention to his duties,
and occasionally a scene of violence and difficulty. Time went on,
however, and he was invariably punctual and industrious. With his
pale, beautiful and intellectual face, as a reminder of what genius
was in him, it was impossible, of course, not to treat him with
deferential courtesy, and, to our occasional request that he would
not probe too deep in a criticism, or that he would erase a passage
colored too highly with his resentments against society and mankind,
he readily and courteously assented--far more yielding than most men,
we thought, on points so excusably sensitive.
Willis, however, was more considerate and far more intelligent than
others, giving Poe no new ground for the "resentments against society
and mankind" which he cherished against all too many with whom he
had differed. On the whole he was a victim not of friends or foes
or "circumstances over which he had no control" but of the erratic
temperament with which fate had endowed him. He was like Byron and
Shelley in his youthful enjoyment of privilege and good fortune, in his
violent rejection of conventional ease and comfort, in his unhappy life
and his early death. It is impossible to conceive that any devisable
set of conditions would in the end have served Poe better. He was one
of the very few who have been truly burdened with "the eccentricities
of genius."
The first milestone in his literary career was in 1827. Mr. Allan's
refusal to honor his gambling debts resulted in withdrawal from the
university and the first clear-cut break with his patron. Shortly after
appeared "Tamerlane and Other Poems. By a Bostonian. Boston: Calvin F.
S. Thomas ... Printer, 1827, pp. 40." It was a little book in which
the passion and the pathos of his whole life were foreshadowed in the
early couplet,
Know thou the secret of a spirit
Bowed from its wild pride into shame.
"Tamerlane," the title poem, was a Byronic effusion without either
structure or a rational theme, but with a kind of fire glowing through
in occasional gleams of poetry and flashes of power. It was the sort
of thing that had already been done by the youthful Drake in "Leon"
and that Timrod was to attempt in "A Vision of Poesy," but though all
three were boyishly imitative, Poe's was the most genuine as a piece of
self-revelation. This volume was followed by "Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and
Minor Poems" in 1829, shortly before his admission to West Point, and
by the "Poems" of 1831 just after his dismissal, each largely inclusive
of what had appeared before, with omissions, changes, and some new
poems but no distinctively new promise.
Then for a while he settled in Richmond, receiving an allowance from
Mr. Allan, with whom he had experienced two estrangements and two
reconciliations. In 1832 five of his prose tales were printed in
the _Philadelphia Saturday Courier_. The fruits of his unwearying
devotion to authorship began to mature in 1833, when he was awarded
a hundred-dollar prize for a short story in the Baltimore _Saturday
Visiter_, and when the first prize for a poem in the same competition
was withheld from him only because of his success with the "MS. Found
in a Bottle." From then on his literary activities were interwoven with
the development of American journalism. His poems, tales, and critical
articles appeared in no less than forty-seven American periodicals,
from dailies to annuals, and he served in the editorial offices of five.
First of these was the _Southern Literary Messenger_, with which he was
connected in Richmond, Virginia, from July, 1835, till January, 1837.
This monthly had already printed some fifteen poems and stories by Poe,
and during his editorship included eleven more; but in that year and a
half he discovered and developed his powers as a critic--powers which,
though of secondary value, had more to do with advancing his reputation
and building up the _Messenger_ circulation than his creative verse
and prose. He was writing in a period when abject deference to English
superiority was giving way to a spirit of provincial puffery. In April,
1836, he wrote:
We are becoming boisterous and arrogant in the pride of a too
speedily assumed literary freedom. We throw off with the most
presumptuous and unmeaning hauteur _all_ deference whatever to
foreign opinion ... we get up a hue and cry about the necessity
of encouraging native writers of merit--we blindly fancy that we
can accomplish this by indiscriminate puffing of good, bad, and
indifferent, without taking the trouble to consider, that what
we choose to denominate encouragement is thus, by its general
application, precisely the reverse. In a word, so far from being
ashamed of the many disgraceful literary failures to which our own
inordinate vanities and misapplied patriotism have lately given
birth, and so far from deeply lamenting that these daily puerilities
are of home manufacture, we adhere pertinaciously to our original
blindly conceived idea, and thus often find ourselves involved in
the gross paradox of liking a stupid book the better because, sure
enough, its stupidity is American.
The fresh honesty of this point of view was doubtless reënforced by the
local gratification which Poe afforded a body of Southern readers in
laying low the New York Knickerbockers and worrying the complacent New
Englanders. At all events, the circulation of the _Messenger_ rose from
seven hundred to five thousand during his editorship.
After his break with the proprietor, which came suddenly and
unaccountably, there was a lapse of a year and a half before he took
up his duties with _Burton's Gentleman's Magazine_, continuing in a
perfunctory way for about a year (July, 1839-June, 1840) when, with
much bitter feeling, the connection was severed. In the following
April _Burton's_ was bought out and combined with Graham's feeble
monthly, _The Casket_, as _Graham's Magazine_, and Poe gave over his
own design to found the _Penn Magazine_ to join forces with a new
employer. In the year that ensued he wrote and published several
analytical tales and continued his aggressive criticism, while the
magazine, under good management, ran its circulation up from eight to
forty thousand. Then suddenly, in May, 1842, he was a free lance once
more, facing this time two years of duress before he secured another
salaried position, now with the _Evening Mirror_ and the tactful
Willis, as a "mechanical paragraphist." The months of quiet routine
with this combination daily-weekly were marked by one overshadowing
event, the burst of applause with which "The Raven" was greeted. It was
the literary sensation of the day, it was supplemented by the chance
publication in the same month of a tale in _Godey's_ and a biographical
sketch in _Graham's_, and it was reprinted in scores of papers. Such
general approval, dear to the heart of any artist, seems for the moment
to have lifted Poe out of his usual saturnine mood. "I send you an
early number of the _B. Journal_," he wrote to his friend F. W. Thomas,
"containing my 'Raven.' It was copied by Briggs, my associate, before I
joined the paper. The 'Raven' has had a great 'run' ...--but I wrote it
for the express purpose of running--just as I did the 'Gold Bug,' you
know. The bird has beat the bug, though, all hollow."
The reference to his new associate records another editorial shift.
Poe's position on the _Mirror_ had been too frankly subordinate to last
long, and with the best of good feelings he changed to an associate
editorship of the _Broadway Journal_ in February, 1845. With the next
October he had realized his long-cherished ambition by obtaining
full control; yet before the year was out, for lack of money and of
business capacity, his house of cards had fallen and the _Journal_ was
a thing of the past. One more magazine contribution of major importance
remained for him. This was the publication in _Godey's_, from May to
October, 1846, of "The Literati," a series of comments on thirty-eight
New York authors, done in his then well-known critical manner. His
story-writing was nearly over; "The Cask of Amontillado" was the only
important one of the last half dozen, but of the twelve poems later
than the "Raven," four--"Ulalume," "To Helen," "Annabel Lee," and "The
Bells"--are among his best known.
The personal side of Poe's life after his last breach with Mr. Allan,
in 1834, is largely clouded by poverty and bitterness and a relaxing
grip on his own powers. His marriage to his cousin, Virginia Clemm, in
1836 was unqualifiedly happy only until the undermining of her health,
three years later, and from then on was the cause of a shattering
succession of hopes and fears ending with her death in 1847. His
relations to most other men and women were complicated by his erratic,
jealous, and too often abusive behavior. Only those friendships endured
which were built on the magnanimous tolerance or the insuperable
amiability of his friends and associates. His nature, which was
self-centered and excitable to begin with, became perverted by mishaps
of his own making until the characterization of his latest colleague
was wholly justified. Said C. F. Briggs to James Russell Lowell:
He cannot conceive of anybody's doing anything, except for his own
personal advantage; and he says, with perfect sincerity, and entire
unconsciousness of the exposition which it makes of his own mind and
heart, that he looks upon all reformers as madmen; and it is for this
reason that he is so great an egoist.... Therefore, he attributes all
the favor which Longfellow, yourself, or anybody else receives from
the world as an evidence of the ignorance of the world, and the lack
of that favor in himself he attributes to the world's malignity.
Under the accumulating distresses of his last two years the decline
of will-power and self-control terminated with his tragic death in
Baltimore in 1849. The gossip which pursued him all his life has
continued relentlessly, even to the point of coloring the prejudices
of his biographers,--commonly classified as "malignants" and
"amiables,"--but only such facts and reports have been mentioned here
as have some legitimate bearing on his habits of mind as an author.
Poe was first a writer of poems, then of prose tales, and then
of analytical criticisms, and one may take a cue from his famous
discussion of the "Raven" by considering them in reverse order. His
theory of art can be derived from the seventy-odd articles on his
contemporaries which he printed and reprinted, from the days of the
_Southern Literary Messenger_ to those of _Godey's_, and from the
summarized essays which he formulated in the three latest years. "The
Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic Principle" are equally well
illustrated by his own poems and his comments on the poems of others.
He accepts the division of the world of mind into Intellect, which
concerns itself with Truth; Taste, which informs us of the Beautiful;
and the Moral Sense, which is regardful of Duty. He defines poetry
of words as "The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is
Taste. With the Intellect or with the Conscience it has only collateral
relations. Unless incidentally, it has no concern whatever either
with Duty or with Truth." In the moods aroused by the contemplation
of beauty man's soul is elevated most nearly to the level of God;
and the privilege of Poetry--one refrains from using such a word as
"function"--is to achieve an elevation of soul which springs from
thought, feeling, and will, but which is above them all.
For the composition of poetry, thus limited in its province, he
developed a fairly rigid formula, a Procrustes bed on which he laid
out his several contemporaries. Poems, he said, should be brief; they
should start with the adoption of a novel and vivid effect; they should
be pitched in a tone of sadness; they should avail themselves of
fitting refrains; they should be presented, in point of setting, within
a circumscribed space; and always they should be scrupulously regardful
of conventional poetic rhythms. These artistic canons are largely
observed in his poems and severely insisted on in his criticisms. He
was immensely interested in detail effects, and hardly less so in
the isolated details themselves. All the fallacious and inconsistent
metaphors of Drake's "Culprit Fay," for example, by which the reader
is distracted, he assembled into a final indictment of that hasty
poem; and in the works of Elizabeth Barrett, of whom he was one of the
earliest champions, he discussed diction, syntax, prosody, and lines of
distinguished merit in the minutest detail. Seldom in these critiques
does he rise to the task of expounding principles, and more seldom
still does he discuss any principles of life. Always it is the cameo,
the gold filigree, the miniature on ivory under the microscope.
It is not unfair to apply his own method to him, with reference, for
instance, to poetic passages he most admired, by quoting a few of his
quotations. From Anna Cora Mowatt:
Thine orbs are lustrous with a light
Which ne'er illumes the eye
Till heaven is bursting on the sight
And earth is fleeting by.
From Fitz-Greene Halleck:
They were born of a race of funeral flowers
That garlanded in long-gone hours,
A Templar's knightly tomb.
From Bayard Taylor:
In the red desert moulders Babylon
And the wild serpent's hiss
Echoes in Petra's palaces of stone
And waste Persepolis.
From William Wallace:
The very dead astir within their coffined deeps.
From Estelle Anna Lewis:
Ætna's lava tears--
Ruins and wrecks and nameless sepulchres.
And from Bryant the concluding familiar lines of "Thanatopsis." These
are the natural selections of the mind which evolved "The Masque of the
Red Death" and "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Fall of the House of
Usher." His readiness to indulge in a "pleasurable melancholy" led him
to delight chiefly in the mortuary beauties of his fellow-poets.
At times, to be sure, he responded to the beauties of entire
compositions. "Thanatopsis," "To a Waterfowl," "June," all appealed
to him for the "elevation of soul" on which he laid critical stress,
and so did poems hither and yon by others than Bryant. But for the
most part even those productions which stirred or pleased him resulted
in detailed technical comments on defects of unity or structure or
style, and for the most part what he commended was not so much ideas
as poetic concepts. He could lose himself in the chromatic tints from
one facet of a diamond to the extent of quite forgetting the stone in
its entirety. Hence it was that Poe was a poet in the limited sense of
one who is highly and consciously skilled in the achievement of poetic
effects, but by his own definition of poetry wholly uninspired toward
the presentation of poetic truth. If the creative gift is "to see life
steadily and to see it whole," Poe was as far from fulfilling the
equation as mortal could be--as far, let us say, as William Blake was.
This is not to say that Poe failed to appreciate or to write the kind
of poetry in which he believed. It is an estimate of his own sense
of values rather than for the moment of his performance. A letter to
Lowell written in 1844 presents the negative background against which
his theory and practice are thrown into relief.
I really perceive that vanity about which most men merely prate,--the
vanity of the human or temporal life. I live continually in a reverie
of the future. I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that
human exertion will have no appreciable effect on humanity.... I
cannot agree to lose sight of man the individual in man the mass.--I
have no belief in spirituality. I think the word a _mere_ word....
You speak of "an estimate of my life,"--and, from what I have already
said, you will see that I have none to give. I have been too deeply
conscious of the mutability and evanescence of temporal things to
give any continuous effort to anything--to be consistent in anything.
My life has been _whim_--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a
scorn of all things present, in an earnest desire for the future.
An estimate of his own plays and poems can be fairly made only in the
light of this thing that he set out to do, a fairness of treatment, by
the way, which he often withheld from the objects of his criticism.
Not to paraphrase Poe's minute analysis of "The Raven," we may select
the "Ulalume" of a year or two later as a production which satisfies
the formula of "The Philosophy of Composition" and which is richer in
meaning and in self-revelation than any other. In length and tone and
subject and treatment it is according to rule. In ninety-four lines of
increasing tension the ballad of the bereaved lover is told. The effect
toward which it moves is the shocked moment of discovery that grief
for the lost love is not yet "pleasurable," but on this anniversary
night is still a source of poignant bitterness. It is built around a
series of unheeded warnings--as "The Cask of Amontillado" is--which
fall with accumulated weight when the lover's cry explains at last
the mistrusts and agonies and scruples of the pacified Psyche. The
effect is intensified by use of the whole ominous first stanza in a
complex of refrains throughout the rest of the ballad. The employment
of onomatopoeia, or "sound-sense" words, is more subtle and more
effective than in "The Bells" or "The Raven"; and the event occurs in
the usual circumscribed space--the cypress-lined alley which is blocked
by the door of the tomb.
These, however, are the mere externals of the poem; the amount of
discussion to which it has been subjected shows that, as a poem
of any depth should, it contains more than meets the eye. It is a
bit of life history, for it refers to Poe's own bereavement, but
it is, furthermore, a piece of analysis with a general as well
as a personal application. The "I" of the ballad is one half of a
divided personality, what, for want of a better term, may be called
the masculine element. He is self-confident, blundering, slow to
perceive, perfectly brave, in his blindness to any cause for fear.
Psyche, the soul, is the complementary, or feminine, element in human
nature--intuitive, timid, eager for the reassurance that loquacious
male stupidity can afford her. They are the elements incarnate in
Macbeth and Lady Macbeth in the early half of the play, and the
story in "Ulalume" is parallel to the story of Macbeth up to the
time of the murder. Yet, and here is the defect in Poe, true as the
analysis may be, in Poe's hands it becomes nothing more than that.
It is like a stage setting by Gordon Craig or Leon Bakst--very
somber, very suggestive, very artistic, but so complete an artifice
that it could never be mistaken for anything but an analogy to
life. It is, in a word, the product of one whose "life has been
_whim_--impulse--passion--a longing for solitude--a scorn of all things
present."
Poe's briefer lyrics are written to a simpler formula, modified from
that for the narratives. The resemblance is mainly to be found in the
scrupulous care and nicety of measure, in the adjustment of diction to
content, and in the heightened dream tone prevailing in them. As they
are not attached to any scenic background, the appeals to the mind's
eye are unencumbered by any obligations to continuity. Poe's technique
in some of the best is quite in the manner of the twentieth-century
imagists, and no less effective than in the best of these poets at
their best. The earlier of the two poems entitled "To Helen" is quite
matchless in its beauty of sound and of suggestion, but it is utterly
vulnerable before the kind of searching analysis to which he subjected
the verse of the luckless contemporary who stirred his critical
disapproval. One has not the slightest objective conception of what
"those Nicéan barks" may have been nor why the beauty which attracts
a wanderer homeward should be likened to a ship which bears him to
his native shore. The two fine lines from Byron in the second stanza
reverberate splendidly in their new setting, but again they seem to
have small likeness to the beauty of Helen. And the last pair of lovely
lines are altogether beyond understanding. Read in the dream mood,
however, which is utterly unreasonable but utterly unexacting, "To
Helen" is as captivating as the sound of a distant melody.
Poe's tales are of two very different sorts: those that are in the
likeness of his poetry and those that were done in the analytical
spirit of his criticism. "Ligeia" is an example of the poet's work,
and, indeed, includes, as some others do, one of his own lyrics, "The
Conqueror Worm." This is cast in the misty mid-region between life and
death, with none of the pleasures of the one except as foils to the
reduplicated horrors of the other. In all the laws of construction it
is one with "The Raven" and "Ulalume," as it is also in general effect.
Like the poems, too, these narratives contain no human interest, unless
this is derived from the consciousness that the "I" narrator is made
in the image of Poe and hence is partly his spokesman,--a claim on the
attention to which the stories, if considered as works of art, have no
title. Once again these tales and poems are of the same family in the
degree to which they subordinate any kind of event to the dominant mood
and in the painstaking use of every accessory that will contribute to a
sense of shivery horror.
Perhaps, to indulge in the type of classification that is after the
manner of Poe, a connecting group should be mentioned between the two
extreme types. This includes the kind of story that substitutes the
horrors of crime and its consequences for the horrors of death, giving
over any elevation of soul for the thrill derived from the malignance
of fear or hatred. They deal with crime as quite distinct from sin,
and when they involve conscience at all, introduce the conscience
that doth make cowards of us, rather than the voice of guidance or
correction. Of this sort are "The Imp of the Perverse"--less a tale
than an essaylet with an illustrative anecdote--and "The Black Cat"
and "The Cask of Amontillado." In some ways this story of cold-blooded
vengeance comes nearer than any other of Poe's tales to completely
representing its author's artistic designs. In the matter of its
contrivance it is cut on the pattern of "The Raven." One can apply "The
Philosophy of Composition" by replacing each allusion to the poem with
a parallel from the story. Montresor, the avenger, is an incarnate
devil; Fortunato, the victim, is a piece of walking vanity not worth
bothering to destroy. The slow murder is conceived during "the supreme
madness of the carnival season," is pursued in a tone of grim mockery,
and concluded with ironic laughter and the jingling of the fool's-cap
bells. And finally, to free the tale from any least relation to life,
the assassination does "trammel up the consequence, and catch with his
surcease, success."
The stories that show the mind of the critic--and the greatest of them
come in his later career--are in different fashions riddle-solutions,
the most famous being "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery
of Marie Roget," "The Gold Bug," and "The Purloined Letter," pioneers
in the field of the detective story. In the elaboration of these Poe
combined his gift as a narrator with the powers which appeared equally
in deciphering codes, discrediting Maelzel's chess player, dealing
with the complications of "Three Sundays in a Week," or foreseeing the
outcome of "Barnaby Rudge" from the opening chapter. Still, as in the
earlier types, they are composed of the things that life is made of,
but themselves are uninformed with the breath of life. It has been
well said by a recent critic that the detective story is in a way a
concession to the moral sense of the reading public, following the
paths of the older romance of roguery, but pursuing the wrongdoer to
the prison or the gallows instead of sharing in his defiance of the
social order. But this concession is one in which Poe had no hand. For
him detection is an end in itself; he is like the sportsman who is
stirred by the zest of the hunt and shoots to kill, but at the day's
end, with fine disregard, hands over his bag to the gamekeeper. It
should be said as a last word in the classification of Poe's stories
that the best work in the threescore and ten can be found in one fourth
of that number, that the remainder are in varying degrees overburdened
by exposition, and that the least successful, unredeemed by technical
excellence and unanimated by any vital meaning, trail off into "sound
and fury, signifying nothing."
As a contemporary figure, to summarize, Poe was a vigorous agent in the
upbuilding of the American magazine, a stimulator of honest critical
judgment, a writer of a few poems and a few tales of the finest but
the most attenuated art. At his lowest he is a purveyor of thrills
to readers of literary inexperience, people with just a shade more
maturity than the habitual matinée-goer; and at the other end of the
scale he serves as a stimulant to the decadents who are weary of actual
life and real romance, whose minds are furnished like the apartment in
"The Assignation," in the embellishment of which "the evident design
had been to dazzle and astound." At his highest, however, he has
exerted an extraordinary influence not only on those who have fallen
completely into his ways but on several prose writers of distinction
who have bettered their instructions. Wilkie Collins, Conan Doyle,
Stevenson, Chesterton, are only the beginning of a list, and in only
one language, who have taken up the detective story where Poe laid it
down. Wells and Jules Verne have developed the scientific wonder-tales.
Bierce, Stevenson, Kipling, Hardy, have written stories of horror
and fantasy; and the touch of his art is suggested by many who have
absorbed something from it without becoming disciples or imitators of
it or refiners upon it.
BOOK LIST
=_Individual Author_=
EDGAR ALLAN POE. Works. Virginia edition. J. A. Harrison, editor.
1902. 17 vols. Another edition. E. C. Stedman and G. E. Woodberry,
editors, 1894-1895. 10 vols. Best single-volume editions are:
J. H. Whitty, editor, 1911, and Killis Campbell, editor, 1917.
Poe's chief works appeared originally in book form as follows:
Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor
Poems, 1829; Poems, 1831; Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838;
The Conchologist's First Book, 1839; Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque, 1839; The Raven, and Other Poems, 1845; Tales, 1845;
Eureka: a Prose Poem, 1848; The Literati, 1850.
=Bibliography=
The best is by Killis Campbell in the Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. II, pp. 452-468. See also Vol. X, Stedman-Woodberry
edition, and Vol. XVI, J. A. Harrison edition.
=Biography and Criticism=
The standard life of Poe is by George E. Woodberry. 1884.
BASKERVILL, W. M. Southern Writers.
BEAUDELAIRE, CHARLES. Edgar Poe, sa vie et ses oevres. 1856.
BROWNELL, W. C. American Prose Masters. 1909.
CAMPBELL, KILLIS. Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge History of American
Literature, Vol. II, Bk. II, chap. xiv.
CAMPBELL, KILLIS. Introduction to Edition of Poems. 1917.
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TOPICS AND PROBLEMS
Read "The Purloined Letter" and compare it as a detective story with
any one of Conan Doyle's detections of theft.
Read the introductions of ten or twelve stories for Poe's method of
establishing the dominant mood.
Apply the formula presented in "The Philosophy of Composition" to
"Annabel Lee" and to any of Poe's best-known prose tales.
No intelligent estimate of Poe can be reached without reading his two
analytical essays, "The Philosophy of Composition" and "The Poetic
Principle."
Compare the "I" in Poe with the "I" in Whitman. Read "William
Wilson" and "The Man in the Crowd," which are felt to have more of
autobiography in them than any others.
For the influence of Byron on Poe and on various other impressionable
Americans see the index to this volume, and note the variety of ways in
which it was recorded.
Light will be thrown on Poe's relationship to the periodicals through
a reading of passages on the magazines with which he was connected in
"The Magazine in America," by Algernon Tassin. See also the volume
called "The Southern Literary Messenger," by B. B. Minor.