Fluent Essays

Request in the picture 1. First published in the August 1843 United States Saturday Post, a Philadelphia weekly, and reprinted here from Tales (1845). 2. Odd (French). suspected!— they knew!— they were making a mockery of my horror!— this I thought, and this I think. But anything better than this agony! Anything was more tolerable than this derision! I could bear those hypocritical smiles no longer! I felt that I must scream or die!— and now— again!—hark! louder! louder! louder! louder!— “Villains!” I shrieked, “dissemble no more! I admit the deed!— tear up the planks!— here, here!— it is the beating of his hideous heart!” 1843 The Black Cat1 For the most wild, yet most homely narrative which I am about to pen, I nei- ther expect nor solicit belief. Mad indeed would I be to expect it, in a case where my very senses reject their own evidence. Yet, mad am I not— and very surely do I not dream. But to- morrow I die, and to- day I would unburthen my soul. My immediate purpose is to place before the world, plainly, succinctly, and without comment, a series of mere house hold events. In their conse- quences, these events have terriSed— have tortured— have destroyed me. Yet I will not attempt to expound them. To me, they have presented little but Horror— to many they will seem less terrible than barroques.2 Hereafter, per- haps, some intellect may be found which will reduce my phantasm to the commonplace—some intellect more calm, more logical, and far less excitable than my own, which will perceive, in the circumstances I detail with awe, nothing more than an ordinary succession of very natural causes and effects. From my infancy I was noted for the docility and humanity of my disposi- tion. My tenderness of heart was even so conspicuous as to make me the jest of my companions. I was especially fond of animals, and was indulged by my parents with a great variety of pets. With these I spent most of my time, and never was so happy as when feeding and caressing them. This peculiar- ity of character grew with my growth, and, in my manhood, I derived from it one of my principal sources of plea sure. To those who have cherished an affection for a faithful and sagacious dog, I need hardly be at the trouble of explaining the nature or the intensity of the gratiScation thus derivable. There is something in the unselSsh and self- sacriScing love of a brute, which goes directly to the heart of him who has had frequent occasion to test the paltry friendship and gossamer Sdelity of mere Man. I married early, and was happy to Snd in my wife a disposition not uncon- genial with my own. Observing my partiality for domestic pets, she lost no opportunity of procuring those of the most agreeable kind. We had birds, gold- Ssh, a Sne dog, rabbits, a small monkey, and a cat. This latter was a remarkably large and beautiful animal, entirely black, and sagacious to an astonishing degree. In speaking of his intelligence, my wife, who at heart was not a little tinctured with superstition, made frequent 6 7 0 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E 3. In Roman mythology, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. allusion to the ancient pop u lar notion, which regarded all black cats as witches in disguise. Not that she was ever serious upon this point— and I  mention the matter at all for no better reason than that it happens, just now, to be remembered. Pluto3—this was the cat’s name— was my favorite pet and playmate. I alone fed him, and he attended me wherever I went about the house. It was even with difSculty that I could prevent him from following me through the streets. Our friendship lasted, in this manner, for several years, during which my general temperament and character— through the instrumentality of the Fiend Intemperance— had (I blush to confess it) experienced a radical alter- ation for the worse. I grew, day by day, more moody, more irritable, more regardless of the feelings of others. I suffered myself to use intemperate lan- guage to my wife. At length, I even offered her personal violence. My pets, of course, were made to feel the change in my disposition. I not only neglected, but ill- used them. For Pluto, however, I still retained sufScient regard to restrain me from maltreating him, as I made no scruple of maltreating the rabbits, the monkey, or even the dog, when by accident, or through affection, they came in my way. But my disease grew upon me— for what disease is like Alcohol!— and at length even Pluto, who was now becoming old, and conse- quently somewhat peevish— even Pluto began to experience the effects of my ill temper. One night, returning home, much intoxicated, from one of my haunts about town, I fancied that the cat avoided my presence. I seized him; when, in his fright at my violence, he in^icted a slight wound upon my hand with his teeth. The fury of a demon instantly possessed me. I knew myself no longer. My original soul seemed, at once, to take its ^ight from my body; and a more than Sendish malevolence, gin- nurtured, thrilled every Sbre of my frame. I took from my waistcoat- pocket a pen- knife, opened it, grasped the poor beast by the throat, and deliberately cut one of its eyes from the socket! I blush, I burn, I shudder, while I pen the damnable atrocity. When reason returned with the morning— when I had slept off the fumes of the night’s debauch— I experienced a sentiment half of horror, half of remorse, for the crime of which I had been guilty; but it was, at best, a feeble and equivocal feeling, and the soul remained untouched. I again plunged into excess, and soon drowned in wine all memory of the deed. In the meantime the cat slowly recovered. The socket of the lost eye pre- sented, it is true, a frightful appearance, but he no longer appeared to suffer any pain. He went about the house as usual, but, as might be expected, ^ed in extreme terror at my approach. I had so much of my old heart left, as to be at Srst grieved by this evident dislike on the part of a creature which had once so loved me. But this feeling soon gave place to irritation. And then came, as if to my Snal and irrevocable overthrow, the spirit of Perverse- ness. Of this spirit philosophy takes no account. Yet I am not more sure that my soul lives, than I am that perverseness is one of the primitive impulses of the human heart— one of the indivisible primary faculties, or sentiments, which give direction to the character of Man. Who has not, a hundred times, T H E B L A C K C A T | 6 7 1 4. Low relief (French); the slight projection from a ^at sculptural background. found himself committing a vile or a silly action, for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Have we not a perpetual inclination, in the teeth of our best judgment, to violate that which is Law, merely because we understand it to be such? This spirit of perverseness, I say, came to my Snal overthrow. It was this unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself— to offer violence to its own nature— to do wrong for the wrong’s sake only— that urged me to continue and Snally to consummate the injury I had in^icted upon the unoffending brute. One morning, in cool blood, I slipped a noose about its neck and hung it to the limb of a tree;— hung it with the tears streaming from my eyes, and with the bitterest remorse at my heart;— hung it because I knew that it had loved me, and because I felt it had given me no reason of offence;— hung it because I knew that in so doing I was commit- ting a sin— a deadly sin that would so jeopardize my immortal soul as to place it— if such a thing were possible— even beyond the reach of the inS- nite mercy of the Most Merciful and Most Terrible God. On the night of the day on which this cruel deed was done, I was aroused from sleep by the cry of Sre. The curtains of my bed were in ^ames. The whole house was blazing. It was with great difSculty that my wife, a ser- vant, and myself, made our escape from the con^agration. The destruction was complete. My entire worldly wealth was swallowed up, and I resigned myself thenceforward to despair. I am above the weakness of seeking to establish a sequence of cause and effect, between the disaster and the atrocity. But I am detailing a chain of facts— and wish not to leave even a possible link imperfect. On the day suc- ceeding the Sre, I visited the ruins. The walls, with one exception, had fallen in. This exception was found in a compartment wall, not very thick, which stood about the middle of the house, and against which had rested the head of my bed. The plastering had here, in great mea sure, resisted the action of the Sre— a fact which I attributed to its having been recently spread. About this wall a dense crowd were collected, and many persons seemed to be examining a par tic u lar portion of it with very minute and eager attention. The words “strange!” “singular!” and other similar expressions, excited my curiosity. I approached and saw, as if graven in bas relief 4 upon the white surface, the Sgure of a gigantic cat. The impression was given with an accu- racy truly marvellous. There was a rope about the animal’s neck. When I Srst beheld this apparition— for I could scarcely regard it as less— my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length re^ection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of Sre, this garden had been immediately Slled by the crowd— by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had prob- ably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly- spread plaster; the lime of which, with the ^ames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it. Although I thus readily accounted to my reason, if not altogether to my conscience, for the startling fact just detailed, it did not the less fail to 6 7 2 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E 5. Large casks. make a deep impression upon my fancy. For months I could not rid myself of the phantasm of the cat; and, during this period, there came back into my spirit a half- sentiment that seemed, but was not, remorse. I went so far as to regret the loss of the animal, and to look about me, among the vile haunts which I now habitually frequented, for another pet of the same spe- cies, and of somewhat similar appearance, with which to supply its place. One night as I sat, half stupiSed, in a den of more than infamy, my atten- tion was suddenly drawn to some black object, reposing upon the head of one of the im mense hogsheads5 of Gin, or of Rum, which constituted the chief furniture of the apartment. I had been looking steadily at the top of this hogshead for some minutes, and what now caused me surprise was the fact that I had not sooner perceived the object thereupon. I approached it, and touched it with my hand. It was a black cat— a very large one— fully as large as Pluto, and closely resembling him in every respect but one. Pluto had not a white hair upon any portion of his body; but this cat had a large, although indeSnite splotch of white, covering nearly the whole region of the breast. Upon my touching him, he immediately arose, purred loudly, rubbed against my hand, and appeared delighted with my notice. This, then, was the very creature of which I was in search. I at once offered to purchase it of the landlord; but this person made no claim to it— knew nothing of it— had never seen it before. I continued my caresses, and, when I prepared to go home, the animal evinced a disposition to accompany me. I permitted it to do so; occasionally stooping and patting it as I proceeded. When it reached the house it domes- ticated itself at once, and became immediately a great favorite with my wife. For my own part, I soon found a dislike to it arising within me. This was just the reverse of what I had anticipated; but— I know not how or why it was— its evident fondness for myself rather disgusted and annoyed. By slow degrees, these feelings of disgust and annoyance rose into the bitterness of hatred. I avoided the creature; a certain sense of shame, and the remembrance of my former deed of cruelty, preventing me from physically abusing it. I did not, for some weeks, strike, or otherwise violently ill use it; but gradually— very grad- ually— I came to look upon it with unutterable loathing, and to ^ee silently from its odious presence, as from the breath of a pestilence. What added, no doubt, to my hatred of the beast, was the discovery, on the morning after I brought it home, that, like Pluto, it also had been deprived of one of its eyes. This circumstance, however, only endeared it to my wife, who, as I have already said, possessed, in a high degree, that humanity of feeling which had once been my distinguishing trait, and the source of many of my simplest and purest pleasures. With my aversion to this cat, however, its partiality for myself seemed to increase. It followed my footsteps with a pertinacity which it would be dif- Scult to make the reader comprehend. Whenever I sat, it would crouch beneath my chair, or spring upon my knees, covering me with its loathsome caresses. If I arose to walk it would get between my feet and thus nearly throw me down, or, fastening its long and sharp claws in my dress, clamber, in this manner, to my breast. At such times, although I longed to destroy it T H E B L A C K C A T | 6 7 3 6. Illusions. with a blow, I was yet withheld from so doing, partly by a memory of my former crime, but chie^y— let me confess it at once— by absolute dread of the beast. This dread was not exactly a dread of physical evil— and yet I should be at a loss how otherwise to deSne it. I am almost ashamed to own— yes, even in this felon’s cell, I am almost ashamed to own— that the terror and horror with which the animal inspired me, had been heightened by one of the mer- est chimæras6 it would be possible to conceive. My wife had called my atten- tion, more than once, to the character of the mark of white hair, of which I have spoken, and which constituted the sole visible difference between the strange beast and the one I had destroyed. The reader will remember that this mark, although large, had been originally very indeSnite; but, by slow degrees— degrees nearly imperceptible, and which for a long time my Rea- son struggled to reject as fanciful— it had, at length, assumed a rigorous distinctness of outline. It was now the repre sen ta tion of an object that I shudder to name— and for this, above all, I loathed, and dreaded, and would have rid myself of the monster had I dared— it was now, I say, the image of a hideous— of a ghastly thing— of the Gallows!— oh, mournful and terrible engine of Horror and of Crime— of Agony and of Death! And now was I indeed wretched beyond the wretchedness of mere Human- ity. And a brute beast— whose fellow I had contemptuously destroyed—a brute beast to work out for me— for me a man, fashioned in the image of the High God— so much of insufferable wo! Alas! neither by day nor by night knew I the blessing of Rest any more! During the former the creature left me no moment alone; and, in the latter, I started, hourly, from dreams of unutterable fear, to Snd the hot breath of the thing upon my face, and its vast weight— an incarnate Night- Mare that I had no power to shake off— incumbent eternally upon my heart! Beneath the pressure of torments such as these, the feeble remnant of the good within me succumbed. Evil thoughts became my sole intimates— the darkest and most evil of thoughts. The moodiness of my usual temper increased to hatred of all things and of all mankind; while, from the sud- den, frequent, and ungovernable outbursts of a fury to which I now blindly abandoned myself, my uncomplaining wife, alas! was the most usual and the most patient of sufferers. One day she accompanied me, upon some house hold errand, into the cel- lar of the old building which our poverty compelled us to inhabit. The cat followed me down the steep stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong, exas- perated me to madness. Uplifting an axe, and forgetting, in my wrath, the childish dread which had hitherto stayed my hand, I aimed a blow at the animal which, of course, would have proved instantly fatal had it descended as I wished. But this blow was arrested by the hand of my wife. Goaded, by the interference, into a rage more than demoniacal, I withdrew my arm from her grasp and buried the axe in her brain. She fell dead upon the spot, without a groan. This hideous murder accomplished, I set myself forthwith, and with entire deliberation, to the task of concealing the body. I knew that I could not 6 7 4 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E remove it from the house, either by day or by night, without the risk of being observed by the neighbors. Many projects entered my mind. At one period I thought of cutting the corpse into minute fragments, and destroying them by Sre. At another, I resolved to dig a grave for it in the ̂ oor of the cellar. Again, I deliberated about casting it in the well in the yard— about packing it in a box, as if merchandize, with the usual arrangements, and so getting a porter to take it from the house. Finally I hit upon what I considered a far better expedient than either of these. I determined to wall it up in the cellar— as the monks of the middle ages are recorded to have walled up their victims. For a purpose such as this the cellar was well adapted. Its walls were loosely constructed, and had lately been plastered throughout with a rough plaster, which the dampness of the atmosphere had prevented from harden- ing. Moreover, in one of the walls was a projection, caused by a false chim- ney, or Sreplace, that had been Slled up, and made to resemble the rest of the cellar. I made no doubt that I could readily displace the bricks at this point, insert the corpse, and wall the whole up as before, so that no eye could detect any thing suspicious. And in this calculation I was not deceived. By means of a crow- bar I easily dislodged the bricks, and, having carefully deposited the body against the inner wall, I propped it in that position, while, with little trouble, I re- laid the whole structure as it originally stood. Having procured mortar, sand, and hair, with every possible precaution, I prepared a plaster which could not be distinguished from the old, and with this I very carefully went over the new brick- work. When I had Snished, I felt satisSed that all was right. The wall did not present the slightest appearance of having been disturbed. The rubbish on the ^oor was picked up with the minutest care. I looked around triumphantly, and said to myself—“Here at least, then, my labor has not been in vain.” My next step was to look for the beast which had been the cause of so much wretchedness; for I had, at length, Srmly resolved to put it to death. Had I been able to meet with it, at the moment, there could have been no doubt of its fate; but it appeared that the crafty animal had been alarmed at the violence of my previous anger, and forebore to present itself in my pres- ent mood. It is impossible to describe, or to imagine, the deep, the blissful sense of relief which the absence of the detested creature occasioned in my bosom. It did not make its appearance during the night— and thus for one night at least, since its introduction into the house, I soundly and tranquilly slept; aye, slept even with the burden of murder upon my soul! The second and the third day passed, and still my tormentor came not. Once again I breathed as a freeman. The monster, in terror, had ^ed the premises forever! I should behold it no more! My happiness was supreme! The guilt of my dark deed disturbed me but little. Some few inquiries had been made, but these had been readily answered. Even a search had been instituted— but of course nothing was to be discovered. I looked upon my future felicity as secured. Upon the fourth day of the assassination, a party of the police came, very unexpectedly, into the house, and proceeded again to make rigorous inves- tigation of the premises. Secure, however, in the inscrutability of my place of concealment, I felt no embarrassment what ever. The ofScers bade me accompany them in their search. They left no nook or corner unexplored. T H E B L A C K C A T | 6 7 5 1. The text is that of the Srst publication in The Gift, a Philadelphia annual dated 1845 but for sale late in 1844. Historians of detective Sction usually cite Poe’s three stories about C. Auguste Dupin as the Srst of the genre. This is the third Dupin story, the others being “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) and “The Mystery of Marie Rôget” (1842). 2. Tobacco pipe. 3. Actually the fourth ^oor (because the French do not count the Srst, the rez- de- chaussée). At length, for the third or fourth time, they descended into the cellar. I quiv- ered not in a muscle. My heart beat calmly as that of one who slumbers in innocence. I walked the cellar from end to end. I folded my arms upon my bosom, and roamed easily to and fro. The police were thoroughly satisSed and prepared to depart. The glee at my heart was too strong to be restrained. I burned to say if but one word, by way of triumph, and to render doubly sure their assurance of my guiltlessness. “Gentlemen,” I said at last, as the party ascended the steps, “I delight to have allayed your suspicions. I wish you all health, and a little more cour- tesy. By the bye, gentlemen, this— this is a very well constructed house.” [In the rabid desire to say something easily, I scarcely knew what I uttered at all.]—“I may say an excellently well constructed house. These walls— are you going, gentlemen?— these walls are solidly put together;” and here, through the mere phrenzy of bravado, I rapped heavily, with a cane which I held in my hand, upon that very portion of the brick- work behind which stood the corpse of the wife of my bosom. But may God shield and deliver me from the fangs of the Arch- Fiend! No sooner had the reverberation of my blows sunk into silence, than I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!— by a cry, at Srst muf^ed and broken, like the sobbing of a child, and then quickly swelling into one long, loud, and continuous scream, utterly anomalous and inhuman— a howl— a wailing shriek, half of horror and half of triumph, such as might have arisen only out of hell, conjointly from the throats of the damned in their agony and of the demons that exult in the damnation. Of my own thoughts it is folly to speak. Swooning, I staggered to the oppo- site wall. For one instant the party upon the stairs remained motionless, through extremity of terror and of awe. In the next, a dozen stout arms were toiling at the wall. It fell bodily. The corpse, already greatly decayed and clot- ted with gore, stood erect before the eyes of the spectators. Upon its head, with red extended mouth and solitary eye of Sre, sat the hideous beast whose craft had seduced me into murder, and whose informing voice had consigned me to the hangman. I had walled the monster up within the tomb! 1843, 1845 The Purloined Letter1 At Paris, just after dark one gusty eve ning in the autumn of 18—, I was enjoying the twofold luxury of meditation and a meerschaum,2 in company with my friend C. Auguste Dupin, in his little back library, or book- closet, au troisième,3 No. 33, Rue Dunôt, Faubourg St. Germain. For one hour at least we had maintained a profound silence; while each, to any casual observer, might have seemed intently and exclusively occupied with the 6 7 6 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E EDGAR ALL AN POE 1809–1849 The facts of Poe’s life, the most melodramatic of any of the major American writ-ers of his generation, have been hard to determine; lurid legends about him circulated even before he died, some spread by Poe himself. Two days after Poe’s death his supposed friend Rufus Griswold, a prominent anthologizer of American literature to whom Poe had entrusted his literary papers, began a campaign of character assassination, writing a vicious obituary and rewriting Poe’s correspon- dence so as to alienate the public as well as his friends. Griswold’s false claims and forgeries, unexposed for many years, signiScantly shaped Poe’s reputation for de cades. Yet biographers now possess much reliable information about Poe’s life. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, was a prominent actress, touring the Eastern Seaboard in a profes- sion that was then considered disreputable. In 1806, as a teenage widow, she married David Poe Jr., another actor. Edgar, the couple’s second of three children, was born in Boston on January 19, 1809; a year later, David Poe deserted the family. In Decem- ber 1811, Elizabeth Poe died at twenty- four while performing in Richmond, Virginia; the evidence suggests that her husband died soon afterward at the age of twenty- seven. The disruptions of Poe’s Srst two years were followed by years of security after John Allan, a young Richmond tobacco merchant, and his wife, Frances, took him in; his siblings (William Henry, born 1807, and Rosalie, born 1810) were sent to dif- ferent foster parents. The Allans, who were childless, renamed the boy Edgar Allan and raised him as their son, but they never adopted him legally. Poe accompanied the family to En gland in 1815, where he attended good schools until the collapse of the London tobacco market forced the Allans back to Richmond in 1820. In 1824 Allan’s Srm failed and hostilities developed between Poe and his foster father. Allan lost interest in supporting Poe Snancially; even after inheriting all the property of a wealthy bachelor uncle, including several slave plantations, he provided only mini- mal funds to Poe for studying at the University of Virginia in 1826. Poe was a good student and wrote poetry on the side, but he ran into debt and began to drink. He gambled to pay his debts, instead losing as much as $2,000 (around $30,000 in cur- rent value). Allan refused to honor the debt, and Poe had to leave the university before his Srst year was completed. In March 1827, after another quarrel between the two, Allan ordered Poe out of the house. The eighteen- year- old outcast Poe went Srst to Baltimore, and then moved north to his birthplace, where he paid for the printing of Tamerlane and Other Poems, “By a Bostonian,” in 1827. Even before its publication, “Edgar A. Perry” (he had changed his name to avoid creditors) had joined the army. Released from the army with the rank of sergeant major, Poe now sought Allan’s in^uence to help him get into the military academy at West Point. While waiting for the appointment, Poe condensed Tamerlane, revised other poems, and added new ones to make up a second volume, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, published in Baltimore in December 1829. In a short but favorable review, the in^uential New En gland critic John Neal declared that Poe could become “ foremost in the rank of real poets.” Admitted to West Point in June 1830, Poe quickly became known for his convivial- ity and skills in mathematics and French. Despite renewed con^ict with Allan, he believed himself the heir to Allan’s great fortune. But his expectations were dashed when Allan, less than two years after the death of Frances Allan, married the thirty- 6 0 4 E D G A R A L L A N P O E | 6 0 5 Edgar Allan Poe. Daguerreotype, 1848. year- old Louisa Patterson in October 1830 and had a son in 1831 (in fact when Allan died in 1834, Poe was not mentioned in the will). The dis- illusioned Poe began to miss classes and roll calls and, as he anticipated, was expelled from school. Support- ive friends among the cadets col- lected funds to publish his Poems, which appeared in May 1831. In this third book of his poetry Poe revised some earlier poems and for the Srst time included versions of both “To Helen” and “Israfel.” Poe’s mature career— from his twenty- Srst year to his death in his fortieth year— was spent in four lit- erary centers: Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. The Baltimore years—mid- 1831 to late 1835— were marked by hard work and comparative sobriety. Poe lived in poverty among his once- prosperous relatives, including his aunt Maria Poe Clemm and her daughter, Virginia. Poe’s Srst story, “Metzengerstein,” was published anonymously in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier, in January 1832; other stories appeared in the same paper through- out the year. Over the next two years, Poe placed stories and poems in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter. In January 1834 he made a signiScant breakthrough, publishing his tale “The Visionary” in Godey’s Lady’s Book, a pop u lar Philadelphia monthly edited by Sarah J. Hale, for many years the nation’s most prominent woman of letters. The writer and editor John P. Kennedy, who had read Poe’s submissions to the Saturday Visiter, introduced the increasingly well- known Poe to Thomas W. White, publisher of the new Richmond- based Southern Literary Messenger. In August 1835, Poe became White’s editorial assistant, moving back to Richmond where, for the next seventeen months, he played a signiScant role in the operations of the journal. Not only his stories and poems but also his often slashing reviews appeared in the Messenger, gaining him a reputation as the “Tomahawk Man,” as White called him. Relations between Poe and White deteriorated when Poe resumed drinking. Returning to Baltimore brie^y, Poe secretly married Virginia Clemm, and later publicly wed the thirteen- year- old Virginia in a May 1836 ceremony in Richmond. Hoping to make the Southern Literary Messenger a nationally esteemed publica- tion, Poe had to negotiate between the proslavery views of white Virginians and the growing opposition to such views in the North. As a result, though the journal did occasionally print proslavery pieces (including an anonymous defense of slavery in a review of April 1836 that was long attributed to Poe but was almost certainly not written by him), it usually adopted a middle- of- the- road position linking slavery to states’ rights rather than God’s will. In Poe’s writings overall, slavery and race remain highly problematical. Like many white writers of the time, Poe sometimes resorted to racial ste reo types, and he sometimes conveyed his fears of the possibili- ties of black violence. For the most part, however, the perverse killers of his tales are white men. Critics continue to debate Poe’s views on slavery and race. Although he spent years in the South and even held hopes for inheriting the property of a slaveholder, the fact is that his relative silence on the po liti cal debate on slavery makes him notably different from most southern intellectuals of the time— William Gilmore Simms, Nathaniel Beverly Tucker, and many others— who went on record with their proslavery views. White Sred Poe early in 1837, citing Poe’s drinking, his demands for a higher sal- ary, and his regular clashes with White about the day- to- day operations of the jour- nal. Poe then moved, with his aunt (now his mother- in- law as well) and his wife, to New York City, where Mrs. Clemm ran a boarding house to support them all. In Richmond he had written a short novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of which White had run two installments in the Messenger early in 1837. Harper’s pub- lished it in July 1838, but it earned him little money. (It is now regarded as one of Poe’s major works.) In 1838 Poe moved to Philadelphia, where, despite extreme pov- erty, he continued writing. In May 1839 he got his Srst steady job in more than two years, as co- editor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine. There, in a job that paid him a small salary, he published book reviews and stories, including “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.” Late in 1839, the Philadelphia Srm of Lea and Blanchard published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, a collection of the twenty- Sve stories Poe had written to that date. The mostly good reviews did not lead to good sales; the country was in the midst of an economic depression. By the late 1830s, Poe was at the height of his powers as a writer of tales, though his personal and professional life continued to be unstable. William Burton Sred him for drinking in May 1840 but recommended him to George Graham, who had bought out Burton’s and created a new magazine called Graham’s. Throughout 1841, Poe was with Graham’s as a co- editor, courting subscribers by writing articles on cryptography— the art and science of code breaking. He also published “The Mur- ders in the Rue Morgue,” the Srst of what he termed his “tales of ratiocination” fea- turing detective August Dupin, a tale that many critics regard as the earliest example of detective Sction. In January 1842, Virginia Poe, not yet twenty, began hemorrhag- ing from her lungs while singing; she lived as a tubercular invalid only Sve more years. Poe continued reviewing for Graham’s, but he resigned from the magazine in May 1842 after a dispute with Graham. His hope of his own journal— to be called the Stylus— was never realized. In April 1844, Poe again moved his family to New York City, working as an editor on the New York Eve ning Mirror. Poe’s most successful year was 1845. The February issue of Graham’s contained an essay by James Russell Lowell declaring Poe a man of “genius”; and Poe’s most pop u lar work, “The Raven,” appeared in the February Amer- ican Review after advance publication in the New York Eve ning Mirror. One new liter- ary acquaintance, the in^uential editor Evert A. Duyckinck, selected a dozen of Poe’s stories for a collection brought out by Wiley & Putnam in June and arranged for the same Srm to publish The Raven and Other Poems in November. Poe lectured on the poets of America and became a principal reviewer for a new weekly, the Broadway Journal, which also reprinted most of Poe’s stories and poems. Still hoping to have his own magazine, in which he could be free of editorial interference, he purchased the Broadway Journal only to see it fail in January 1846. While the tempo of Poe’s life speeded up, with ever more literary feuds and drink- ing bouts, he maintained an undiminished commitment to his writing. During 1847, the year that Virginia died from tuberculosis, Poe was seriously ill himself. In 1848 he published Eureka, a philosophical prose work that presented God as the force behind all matter, and all matter as seeking a return to oneness. (See the excerpt in the section on “Science and Technology in the Pre–Civil War Nation.”) He also published “Ulalume,” a poem inspired by his grief at the loss of Virginia. In 1848 he fell in love with the poet Sarah Helen Whitman, who refused his initial pro- posal, then agreed to a December 1848 marriage, and Snally broke off the relation- ship. In his Snal year, during a two- month stay in Richmond, Poe joined a temperance 6 0 6 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E society and got engaged to Elmira Royster Shelton, a widow whom he had known in his childhood. On a subsequent trip to Baltimore, Poe was found senseless near a polling place on Election Day (October 3). Taken to a hospital, he died on October 7, 1849, “of congestion of the brain.” His poem “Annabel Lee” was published posthu- mously later that year. Much of Poe’s collected writings consists of his criticism, representing his abid- ing ambition to become a powerful critic and in^uence the course of American lit- erary history. Just as he had modeled his poems and Srst tales on British examples (or British imitations of the German), he took his critical concepts from treatises on aesthetics by late- eighteenth- century Scottish Common Sense phi los o phers, who emphasized the aesthetic importance of moral sympathy. Later, he modiSed his approach with borrowings from A. W. Schlegel, Coleridge, and other Romantics, who emphasized the importance of intuitively conceived notions of the beautiful. But despite modulations in his theories, Poe’s critical principles were consistent: he thought poetry should appeal only to the sense of beauty; informational poetry, poetry of ideas, or any sort of didactic poetry was, in his view, illegitimate. Holding that true poetic emotion was a vague sensory state inspired by the work of art itself, he set himself against realistic details in poetry, although the prose tale, with truth as one object, could proSt from the discreet use of speciScs. He believed that poems and tales should be short enough to be read in one sitting; otherwise the unity of effect would be dissipated. In his most famous artistic treatise, “The Philosophy of Composition,” Poe makes clear that, unlike Emerson, he remains skeptical of the possibilities of transcendental vision untethered by the material realities of body and aesthetic form. In crucial ways, then, Poe split with Emerson and other Transcenden- talists in arguing that the vision that comes to the artist and reader is inextricably linked to the formal qualities of the work of art itself. Poe’s reputation today rests not on his criticism, however, but on his poetry and tales. He has had im mense in^uence on poets and prose writers both in the United States and abroad; among those who have followed his lead are such modernists as T. S. Eliot and William Faulkner. The tales have proven hard to classify— are they burlesque exaggerations of pop u lar forms of Sction, or serious attempts to contribute to or alter those forms, or both of these at the same time? Poe’s own comments delib- erately obscured his intentions. Responding to a query from his literary admirer John P. Kennedy in 1836, who labeled his work “seriotragicomic,” he said that most of his tales “were intended for half banter, half satire— although I might not have fully acknowledged this to be their aim even to myself.” At the core of this and others of Poe’s comments on his Sction is the pragmatism of a professional writer who recog- nized the advent of a mass market and wanted to succeed in it. He worked hard at structuring his tales of aristocratic madmen, self- tormented murderers, neurasthenic necrophiliacs, and other deviant types so as to produce, as he wrote in “The Philoso- phy of Composition,” the greatest possible effect on his readers. Poe, more than most, understood his audience— its distractedness, its fascination with the new and short- lived, its anomie and confusion— and sought ways to gain its attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophi- cal, cultural, psychological, and scientiSc issues: the place of irrationality, violence, and repression in human consciousness and social institutions; the alienation and dislocations attending demo cratic mass culture and the modernizing forces of the time; the tug and pull of the material and corporeal; the absolutely terrifying dimen- sions of one’s own mind; and new ideas about technology and the physical universe. Seriously as he took the writing of his tales, Poe always put his highest stock in poetry, which he called a “passion” and not merely a “purpose.” As he remarked in “The Philosophy of Composition,” poetry, even more than Sction, provides the possi- bility of taking the reader out of body, in effect out of time, through “that intense and pure elevation of soul” which can come with “the contemplation of the beautiful.” In E D G A R A L L A N P O E | 6 0 7 6 0 8 | E D G A R A L L A N P O E 1. The text is from The Raven and Other Poems (1845). The sonnet was initially printed as an untitled prefatory poem to Poe’s 1829 volume Al Aaraaf: Poe added the title to an 1843 reprinting. 2. True, Stting. 3. Roman goddess of the moon (imaged as a chariot or car that she drives through the sky). 4. Wood nymph in Greek and Roman mythology, often thought of as living within a tree and per- ishing with it. 5. Nymph living in brooks or fountains. 1. The text is that of 1845, with two errors of indentation corrected. The poem was Srst pub- lished in 1831, where, among other differences, lines 9 and 10 read: “To the beauty of fair Greece, / And the grandeur of old Rome.” The title invokes Helen of Troy, according to Greek myth the beau- tiful daughter of Zeus and the cause of the Trojan War. 2. Victorious ships (from the Greek nike). 3. Luxurious, curling. 4. Nymphlike, fairylike. a life that was often a tangled mess, the pursuit of the beautiful in works of art moti- vated Poe’s writing to the very end. Sonnet—To Science1 Science! meet2 daughter of old Time thou art Who alterest all things with thy peering eyes! Why prey’st thou thus upon the poet’s heart, Vulture! whose wings are dull realities! How should he love thee— or how deem thee wise 5 Who woulds’t not leave him, in his wandering, To seek for trea sure in the jewell’d skies Albeit, he soar with an undaunted wing? Hast thou not dragg’d Diana3 from her car, And driv’n the Hamadryad4 from the wood 10 To seek a shelter in some happier star? The gentle Naiad5 from her fountain- ̂ ood? The elSn from the green grass? and from me The summer dream beneath the shrubbery? 1829, 1845 To Helen1 Helen, thy beauty is to me Like those Nicéan barks2 of yore, That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way- worn wanderer bore To his own native shore. 5 On desperate seas long wont to roam, Thy hyacinth3 hair, thy classic face, Thy Naiad4 airs have brought me home To the glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome. 10 Lo! in yon brilliant window- niche How statue- like I see thee stand, The agate lamp within thy hand!