19 January: Boreham on Edgar Allan Poe

The Trail of a Meteor
We mark today the birthday of one to whom it is very difficult to do justice. Edgar Allan Poe, who passed away at the age of forty, represents in his own person the most pathetically forlorn figure in the annals of literature. His sudden and untimely death was like the vanishing from the sky of a brilliant meteor that, momentarily blinding us by its dazzling brilliance, leaves us groping and bewildered in the stygian darkness that, on its disappearance seems a thousand times blacker than before.

His life story fastens upon our minds the conviction that if, at the most plastic and formative stage of his career, Edgar Allan Poe had been given a dog's chance, he would have taken his place with Dante, Shakespeare, and Milton. For sheer downright genius he has no rival. What other poet displays such audacity of imagination, such an uncanny faculty for setting his moods to music, such unerring appreciation of the melody and sweetness of words? He is a magician, skilled in producing from the most ordinary phrases the most extraordinary effects. Yet he is far more than a mere juggler with the vocabulary. His monotones throb with passion, a passion born of the secret anguish of his own heartbreak. His philosophy is so pyrotechnically illumined by the ardent flame of his vivid fancy, that it is almost camouflaged, and only those who read the stanzas a second time, examining them closely, detect the unsuspected presence of a profound philosophy cunningly concealed within the lilting lines.

The Tragedy Of A Spoiled Child
The enchanted mentality of Edgar Allan Poe was capable of the most daring flights. He allowed no barriers of time or space to limit the range of his fantastic excursions; of impossibilities and improbabilities he knew nothing. He wandered at will through immensities and infinities that never did and never could exist; he was a citizen of ghostly realms that he himself created; and he discovered the art of reducing to graceful and tuneful song the celestial, gorgeous, and terrible visions to which he lent his adventurous intellect. He stands as one of the most pitiable and melancholy personages in the entire republic of letters. His genius is weird, wild, fantastic, almost ghoulish. The man himself, it has been said, was half a seraph, half a tramp. Oscillating between the gutter and the skies, he finished, unhappily, in the gutter. With his brilliant brain stupefied by the fumes of opium and drenched in every form of alcohol, Poe staggered through an impetuous and wayward life to a premature and horrible death. As his epitaph affirms, he was glorious in inspiration, unhappy in life, wretched in death, but in his fame immortal.

The child of an Irish actor and an English actress, he was left fatherless, motherless, and totally destitute at the age of three. A Scottish merchant who had settled in Baltimore pitied him, adopted him, petted and pampered him, and then, taking a sudden dislike to him, cast him penniless upon a world for whose struggles he was hopelessly unprepared. Faced by life's sordid realities, the youth was at his wits' end. His literary gifts brought him a fitful and precarious subsistence; but most of his scanty earnings were squandered, as soon as they were pocketed, at the nearest pothouse. Marrying at the age of twenty-six a frail young girl of thirteen, she became, for the brief period of eleven years, the light of his eyes and the stay of his life. But when, at twenty-four, she slipped into her grave, he was left with nothing to restrain the passions that so quickly slew him. A year after his young wife's death, he attempted suicide. A year later he was raving in the horrors of delirium tremens. A few months later still, he visited Baltimore at election time. Some unprincipled partisans made him stupidly drunk and got him to vote at every polling booth in the city. At night they hurried off to hear the result of the poll, leaving him senseless on the kerbside. Some hours later he was picked up and taken to hospital. There, four days afterwards, he died.

Music Rising From The Mire
His friends mourned the loss of a dashing young man-about-town, of handsome figure, striking appearance, pleasing personality, and resistless charm. And, for awhile, the world let it go at that. It is sometimes argued that his excesses and extravagances have been exaggerated. This may be so; but there is incontestible evidence that he drank copiously, gambled heavily, used drugs extensively and behaved generally like one who, spoiled in childhood, had never acquired the arts of self-discipline and self-control. If, however, he sinned, he also suffered; the iron pierced his soul. He called in vain upon The Raven, of which he sang his best known song, to take its beak from out his heart and its shadow from his floor.

His work, like his career, is disfigured by grave faults. Yet one feels that it is lit by the flame of genuine inspiration. Lafcadio Hearn regarded The Bells as the most sonorous, if not actually the most musical, poem in the entire range of 19th century literature. Alike in prose and in poetry, Mr. W. T. Stead saluted Poe as America's most brilliant product. His clear eyes saw what others failed to see; his sensitive ear heard what others failed to see; his sensitive ear heard what others could not catch. He lived and died Mr. Stead declares, as intensely as only such a highly-wrought, psychic, artistic, temperament could, scourged by the triple cord of disease, poverty, and death. "But," he adds, "out of the bitter pain and frenzy, Poe wrought his poems and his tales as the oyster fashions his pearl—out of the grit which frets the delicate membrane, within its shell." The poet's case has never been more felicitously stated. The poignant life story of Edgar Allan Poe is sadly smudged; yet, in all the circumstances, the wonder is, not that the ugly blots are there, but that the soiled pages contain so much that is not only excellent but immortal.

F W Boreham

Image: Edgar Allan Poe