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with Annie and her husband, Poe set out in late June for Richmond, Virginia, planning now to secure subscribers and contributors before embarking on a tour of the West leading to Oquawkwa. Stopping in Philadelphia, however, Poe imbibed so heavily that he was briefly incarcerated in prison, where his hallucinations involved Mrs. Clemm’s dismemberment. Publisher John Sartain rescued Poe, bought two new poems—an expanded version of “The Bells” and “Annabel Lee”—and helped to collect funds to get Poe to Richmond. Soon after reaching Virginia, he called upon Sarah Elmira Shelton and, renewing a courtship begun in 1825, proposed marriage to her. Like Mrs. Whitman, Mrs. Shelton initially demurred, and not until Poe had delivered a successful lecture (“The Poetic Principle”) and taken a sobriety pledge did she agree to marry him. Poe’s joining the Sons of Temperance marked a desperate bid to change his ways and repair his reputation. In poor health, yet sustained by Mrs. Shelton’s acceptance, he departed for New York, presumably to accompany Mrs. Clemm to Richmond for the wedding. But in Baltimore, his first stop en route, Poe imbibed excessively, and on October 3, an election day, he was discovered at a polling place “rather the worse for wear.” Transported to Washington College Hospital, he remained intermittently delirious for four days and died on October 7, 1849.

In a checkered career of barely two decades Poe produced more than sixty poems, some seventy-odd tales, one completed novel, a long prose poem of cosmological theory, and scores of essays and reviews. He introduced into poetry, criticism, and prose fiction many innovations that altered literary culture. Poe’s greatest achievement as a writer, however, transcends his technical or formal innovations. Working in the context of U.S. nation building and territorial expansion, the rise of a capitalist market economy, the decline of religious authority, the development and secularization of mass culture, and the advent of modern scientific skepticism, Poe (in the words of Sarah Helen Whitman) “came to sound the very depths of the abyss,” articulating in his tales and poems “the unrest and faithlessness of the age.” As compellingly as any writer of his time, Poe intuited the spiritual void opening in an era dominated by a secular, scientific understanding of life and death. If Kierkegaard analyzed philosophically the condition of dread that accompanied the “sickness unto death,” Poe gave memorable literary expression to modern doubt and death anxiety. His Eureka may be seen as a late, desperate effort to construct from the laws of physics—from the implacable materiality of science itself—a theory of spiritual survival. In his most stunning poetry and fiction he staged the dilemma of the desolate self, confronting its own mortality and beset by uncertainties about a spiritual afterlife.

Thanks in part to Reverend Rufus Griswold, the nemesis whom the author perversely designated as his literary executor, Poe’s posthumous reputation was originally clouded by moral condemnation. Griswold’s notorious obituary, recast as a preface to the otherwise reliable edition of Poe’s works he supervised in the 1850s, acknowledged his contemporary’s genius but also portrayed him as a morbid loner, a drunken lunatic wandering the streets muttering “curses and imprecations.” Poe’s early defenders included George Graham and N. P. Willis as well as Mrs. Whitman, who in 1860 issued Edgar Poe and His Critics, an acute estimate of his lasting significance. The publication of a multivolume edition of his works in French by Baudelaire established his fame abroad and made Poe the patron saint of the symbolist movement. Later in the nineteenth century John H. Ingram and George Wood-berry wrote pioneering biographies, and as the twentieth century began, James A. Harrison produced the first scholarly edition of Poe’s collected writings. During the twentieth century, new biographies by Arthur Hobson Quinn and more recently by Kenneth Silverman have incorporated fresh information and critical perspectives.