What a tragic, miserable life Poe endured because of the cupidity of the human race. Most of his hardship was caused by the same thing that Dickens had campaigned so bitterly against both in England and America: the lack of an international copyright law, the sole protection that would guarantee an author the fruits of his labor. Those profits had always been appropriated by publishers who did not scruple to see their greatest authors starve. But copyright protection arrived only decades after Poe's death. Poe himself earned an unbelievably paltry sum from all his works -- from the world's first detective story; from the tour de force of the Raven and the rest of his poems; from all his short stories, still classics to this day; and from his novel The Fall of the House of Usher. For some of these the original publishers gave him nothing but a few free copies while publishers around the world could reprint them at will.
Edgar Allen Poe was always destitute: his famous poem Ulalume was sold so that he could buy shoes when his only pair fell apart. That was the world he inhabited, one that allowed its greatest poet -- the only genius among motley versifiers like Longfellow and Walt Whitman -- to literally beg his friends for a few dollars when he was starving, a world in which his young wife spent her final hours struggling for breath on a bed of straw for want of a mattress, wrapped in Poe's greatcoat for want of a blanket.
He moved frequently, always to a habitation poorer than the last. His existence was threadbare and demoralizing in spite of his serving as editor and chief writer for some of the leading publications of the day. Inevitably each of those underpaid positions was ended by his drunkenness or by discord fomented by the sense of grievance that ceaselessly tormented him. He alone of all the prominent writers of that day received no income from a secure position. Hawthorne was appointed consul because of his literary accomplishments and Longfellow remained a professor, but Poe, however often he applied to the government, was always passed over for a sinecure because of his alcoholism.
This vice, so overwhelming a part of his life story, had its genesis in his infancy. According to this biographer, the elderly woman who cared for the child induced him to sleep by giving him bread soaked in alcohol to suck on. He never drank for pleasure. He drank, according to an acquaintance, as though he wanted to kill something deep inside himself. One glass and he would rapidly and inevitably continue drinking without joy until he passed out.
His mother, an accomplished but ill and impoverished actress, could not care for him. His father abandoned them, and his mother died when Edgar was three. During the rest of his childhood he was indulged by a wealthy man who gave him both a home and a superior education before repudiating him in the most heartless, brutal way. Poe himself ascribed all his misery to this man who has gone down in history in the blackest hues. One tenth of that man's wealth would have spared the lifelong suffering of America's greatest writer, the only American who can be ranked with England's best.
This biography, well written and always interesting, provides a thorough understanding of Poe's life and legacy. The concluding chapters describe in detail his immense and immediate influence on French authors, especially on Baudelaire, and eventually on English and American literature. Modern thinking and sensibility, in this biographer's view, have been enormously influenced by his original, intense and macabre way of looking at the material world, at society, at life and death, and at the nebulous states in between. So profound and pervasive is his influence that we accept it unquestioningly without recognizing its origin.
Poe was an original thinker, an innovator where other writers were mere followers of what had gone before.
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Gisela Gerlach
Not only was Edgar Allen Poe was a poet, he also wrote stories.
Reviewed in Canada on October 8, 2021