The work of all the imaginative writers of the period reveals romantic influences, and it is possibly an indication of the affinity of the romantic approach to American conditions that a number of excellent writers of poetry and fiction first appeared in the 1830s and 1840s. Edgar Allan Poe, one of the most remarkable, seems almost a caricature of the romantic image of the tortured genius. Poe was born in Boston in 1809, the son of poor actors who died before he was three years old. He was raised by a wealthy Virginian, John Allan.
Few persons as neurotic as Poe have been able to produce first-rate work. In college he ran up debts of $2,500 in less than a year and had to withdraw. He won an appointment to West Point but was discharged after a few months for disobedience and “gross neglect of duty.” He was a lifelong alcoholic and an occasional taker of drugs. He married a child of thirteen.
Poe was obsessed with death. Once he attempted to poison himself; repeatedly he was down and out, even to the verge of starvation. He was haunted by melancholia and hallucinations. Yet he was an excellent magazine editor, a penetrating critic, a poet of unique if somewhat narrow talents, and a fine short
An image of Edgar Allan Poe on a cigar box. In 1845, impoverished and an alcoholic, Poe was living in the "greatest wretchedness.” His young wife was dying of tuberculosis. That same year he wrote, "The Raven,” a poem about an ill-omened bird that intrudes on a young man's grief over the death of his beloved. "Take thy beak from out my heart,” the man screams. Quoth the raven— famously—"Nevermore.”
Story writer. Although he died at age forty, he turned out a large volume of serious, highly original work.
Poe responded strongly to the lure of romanticism. His works abound with examples of wild imagination and fascination with mystery, fright, and the occult. If he did not invent the detective story, he perfected it; his tales “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter” stressed the thought processes of a clever detective in solving a mystery by reasoning from evidence.
Although dissolute in his personal life, when Poe touched pen to paper, he became a disciplined craftsman. The most fantastic passages in his works are the result of careful, reasoned selection; not a word, he believed, could be removed without damage to the whole. And despite his rejection of most of the values prized by middle-class America, Poe was widely read in his own day. His poem “The Raven” won instantaneous popularity when it was published in 1845. Had he been a little more stable, he might have made a good living with his pen—but in that case he might not have written as he did.
World History
