The Complete Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe - Edgar Allan Poe [2]
In 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, but wild drinking and gambling led to his early withdrawal and added to the tensions that already existed between him and his stepfather. In 1827 he worked intermittently at odd jobs and managed to get a small Boston firm to print his first book of poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems. The book made no impression on the literary world, and Poe resorted to joining the army. After rising to the rank of sergeant-major, he was honorably discharged in 1829, the same year that he published a second slim volume: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Once again, he escaped public notice as a poet.
In what must count as one of the more peculiar turns in his life, he was appointed as a cadet at West Point in 1830. There he found himself drowning in expenses that his obviously skeptical stepfather refused to pay. “The army does not suit a poor man,” he noted wryly in a letter. A year later he was court-martialed and expelled for unbecoming behavior. But he had by this time made such an impression on his fellow cadets by writing witty satirical poems about the Academy that they took up a collection to finance the publication of his third book of poems, published as The Poems of Edgar A. Poe in New York in 1831. (When the cadets got their copies, they were furious because it did not contain the poems they had remembered.) Not until 1845 would he publish another volume, The Raven and Other Poems—the book that finally made his name as a poet
On leaving West Point, Poe turned to prose, hoping to make a living by his pen. Book reviews, humorous anecdotes, fantasy, travel essays, and short stories poured forth, though he seemed always to be short of cash. To survive, he went to live with his favorite aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her nine-year-old daughter, Virginia, with whom he fell in love. They were married five years later—shortly before her fourteenth birthday.
Poe’s unusual marriage to his cousin and his adoration of her mother are enough to drive any Freudian critic mad with speculation. In fact, biographers have little to go on here, apart from a few letters by Poe and the testimony of his friends. By every account, the young writer was devoted to his wife and aunt, and they were similarly fond of him. Virginia’s tragic death a decade later was a dreadful, insurmountable obstacle in Poe’s emotional life. When the French poet Charles Baudelaire published a translation of the American poet’s work some years later, he dedicated the volume to Mrs. Clemm, “the woman who was always so gentle and kind to him—as you bound his wounds with your love, so he will preserve your name with his glory.”
It is clear that Virginia’s death in January 1847 had dire consequences on the emotional life of Edgar Poe, who died less than three years later. The years after Virginia were chaotic for him: he drank heavily, tried vainly to woo various matrons of society, and wrote little. In the summer of 1849 he made a sentimental journey to Richmond, where he had lived for many years with Virginia, and by chance encountered Sarah Royster, a woman he had once loved many years before. 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