The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [1]
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INTRODUCTION
I.
When Edgar Allan Poe died in 1849, only forty but ravaged in body and spirit by alcohol, his standing in the world of literature was by no means high. Indeed, it would take a major effort on the part of his admirers to revive his damaged reputation in his own country. To this day, critics argue about his literary merit, although his work has earned a solid place in the hearts of readers throughout the world.
In a sense, Poe has suffered from the vast success of a few poems. I can still remember standing before my eighth grade class, over thirty years ago, reciting the whole of “The Raven.” That poem and “The Bells” were for much of the past century a staple of school curricula. Their mesmerizing rhythms have haunted generations, and may have kept them from noticing many of Poe’s finer, more original works, such as “To Helen” or “The City in the Sea.”
Of course Poe the poet stands in fierce contention with Poe the storyteller. Historians of literature often credit him with the invention of the modem short story, and no collection of great American fiction is complete without “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Pit and the Pendulum.” In these genuinely frightening tales, Poe’s feverish imagination is vividly on display, and his literary reputation spread rapidly throughout Europe in his own lifetime.
As a critic, Poe also achieved considerable fame. Working for the Southern Literary Messenger, one of several journals that he edited in his brief lifetime, Poe wrote groundbreaking essays on poetry and fiction as well as scathing reviews of contemporary writers. His most important aesthetic statement was contained in “The Poetic Principle,” where he famously argued for the importance of lyric over narrative poetry, illustrating his discussion with quotations from Tennyson, Byron, Shelley, and Longfellow. Most tellingly, he held that long poems could not be good poems, at least not all the way through. “A long poem does not exist,” he wrote, contentiously. “I maintain that the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.” Here, as elsewhere, he lobbied for unity as the defining feature of major literary works, calling it “the vital requisite of all works of Art.”
Poe’s reputation as a writer has certainly suffered from the melodramatic quality of his life, which has made him a prime target for biographers. Born in Boston in 1809, where his parents were acting in a traveling repertory company, he was soon set adrift. His father abandoned his mother before his first birthday, and his mother died when he was three. Fortunately, a prosperous merchant, John Allan, adopted him because his wife had been a friend of the deceased Mrs. Poe, although Poe later came to detest his stepfather as much as he adored his stepmother.
The Allans took young Edgar to England in 1815, and he was put into a strict English boarding school—a setting that Poe later used for “William Wilson,” his story about a double identity that Robert Louis Stevenson apparently used as a source for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Stevenson also used Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” as a model for Treasure Island.)
Back in Baltimore in his early teens, Poe developed a crush on Mrs. Jane Stannard, the young mother of a schoolmate, and her death a year after they met affected him deeply. Young Poe brooded incessantly on Mrs. Stannard, and these thoughts seemed to have morbidly shaped his imagination. In his poems he would often dwell on the early deaths of beautiful women and would specialize in melancholic laments