Edgar Allan Poe -- a Review of Facts, Books, Web Sites, Newsletters, & Blogs

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809 just 24 days before Abraham Lincoln. Poe never knew his thespian parents, Eliza and David; his mother died when he was an infant and his father abandoned him. Though Poe and Lincoln never met, Lincoln was reportedly fond of much of Poe's work and could recite by memory some of his poems.

His middle name came from his foster father John Allan, who never officially adopted Poe and would eventually disown him.

Poe was a member of the U.S. Army before he attended West Point.

Poe attended both West Point and the University of Virginia, though he never received a degree at either.

Though the exact sum is disputed, he received no more than a ten dollar payment for his poem "The Raven" when it appeared in the American Review in 1844. The poem became almost instantly a success and provided him his first real fame. Before its publication it was rejected by numerous magazines.

Abraham Lincoln, well known for his voracious reading habits, was most fond of plays and poetry while putting favorite passages to memory for recitation. He was fond of Poe's poetry, memorized "The Raven" and was able to recite it.

He married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, who died two years later of tuberculosis.

The only book he wrote that went into a second printing during his lifetime was a science book he agreed to write for another science writer, Thomas Wyatt: The Conchologist's First Book, or A System of Testaceous Malacology published in 1839, which was a zoological study on the shells of mollusks, based on Wyatt's and other conchologist's studies, and a work that was plagued with charges of pedantry, plagiarism, and copyright infringement.

Besides his work on seashells, he wrote on a spectacular range of topics and ideas within books, short stories, essays, and reviews that included a voyage to the moon, balloon flights, daguerreotypes, phrenology, mesmerism, galvanism, exploration, shipwrecks, hidden treasure, criminal detection, coded treasure maps, epidemics, murder, creativity, premature burial, and apocalyptic prophecies. [Meyers, 81]

One of his most successful stories, "The Gold Bug," sold over 300,000 copies in just a few months after its publication in a journal. Though he won a first-place, one-hundred dollar prize for the brilliant story involving the finding of buried pirate treasure through code breaking, he would never receive any other payment. He was unemployed from 1845 to his death and may have never received any more than $6,200 during his lifetime as a writer. [Meyers, 186]

He exchanged letters with several major writers but met only Charles Dickens, James Russell Lowell, and Walt Whitman.

On March 7, 1842 he had two long interviews with Dickens at the United States Hotel in Philadelphia. Poe greatly admired Dickens and Dickens admired Poe's talent describing him as a writer who took ". . . English men of letter to task in print, roundly and uncompromisingly." Dickens hoped to help Poe in finding a publisher for him in England but failed in finding one.

Though his work was often rejected by magazines, he on occasion won first-place prizes and money for his stories. He was often referred to as a literary genius during his lifetime by fellow writers. N.P. Willis, editor at the Evening Mirror where Poe was employed, wrote of Poe, ". . . one of the finest scholars, one of the most original men of genius, and one of the most industrious of the literary profession of our country . . ." and James Russell Lowell, whom Poe greatly admired, "Mr. Poe had that indescribable something which men have agreed to call genius."

Poe's work was a profound influence on numerous writers of great ability - Joyce, Conrad, R.S. Stevenson, Dostoyevsky, Rimbaud, Verne, A.C. Doyle, Auden, Borges to name a few. Vladimir Nabokov's sensational 1955 novel Lolita was originally entitled A Kingdom by the Sea, an allusion to Poe's poem "Annabel Lee." References to Poe are made throughout the novel in which the main character's obsession with a young girl is a loose recreation of Poe's bizarre marriage to his teenaged cousin. [Meyers, 302]

Usually considered the most valuable book in the world is a complete Gutenberg Bible (est. worth of 25-30 million dollars). Poe's first book of poems (Tamerlane and Other Poems with a byline of "By a Bostonian") is considered the most rare and valuable book written by an American, worth at least $200,000. There were less than 50 published in Boston when he was eighteen years old and only 12 known to exist today. Many of the poems within this volume were written when he was fourteen or fifteen years old.

Maybe his greatest desire in life was to be a head editor of a magazine. He had planned on starting the magazine The Stylus after he married his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Shelton. He died under mysterious circumstances in Baltimore shortly after proposing to Elmira.

His book, Eureka, is a scientific study he considered his masterpiece and believed would revolutionize astronomy. In this work, published in 1848 and republished in 2005 with annotation, he correctly explains "Olber's paradox," a problem that perplexed 19^th century astronomers. The paradox wonders why the sky is dark if the universe is indeed infinite and full of stars. Poe wrote that the dark parts of the sky were stars sending light that had not reached the earth.

In Eureka he writes, "Were the succession of stars endless, then the background of the sky would present us a uniform luminosity, like that displayed by the Galaxy-since there could be absolutely no point, in all that background, at which would not exist a star. The only mode, therefore, in which under such a state of affairs, we could comprehend the voids which our telescopes find in innumerable directions, would be by supposing that the distance of the invisible background [is] so immense that no ray from it has yet been able to reach us at all. . . [the idea] is by far too beautiful not to possess Truth as its essentiality." Physicist Michio Kaku noted in his book Parallel Worlds that Poe's explanation is the key to the correct answer, that in fact the universe is not infinitely old.
Michio Kaku notes that Poe was the first person to understand the essence of the "superatom" of what Poe called the Primordial Particle - the basis of the big bang theory. Poe wrote that because matter attracts matter there must have been a cosmic concentration of atoms at the beginning of time. This theory predates the first time a scientist proposed an expanding universe, Willem de Sitter's 1917, a proposal that lagged behind Poe's by seventy years.

Poe's image was placed on the cover of The Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's album and he is referred to in the lyrics of The Beatles' Magical Mystery Tour song "I am the Walrus." Many of Poe's tales were put to film during the sixties with mixed results.

Though it has been written that Poe was found asleep or dead in a Baltimore gutter in October of 1849, he was really found in a Baltimore tavern unconscious wearing a tattered palm leaf hat and ill fitting clothes that were probably not his. He died four days later in Baltimore's Washington College Hospital but the cause of his death has never been clearly established.

His mysterious death has inspired numerous serious studies on the cause in both non-fiction and fiction, viz. Midnight Dreary - The Mysterious Death of Edgar A. Poe (Walsh) and The Poe Shadow (Pearl).

Poe's death at age 40 is similar to the poet Dylan Thomas's early demise. Thomas died at age 39 in a New York hospital 104 years after Poe's death. Both poets were suicidal in nature, found unconscious under the influence of alcohol, suffered delirium tremens, fell into a coma, and died four days later. [Meyers, 255]

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Sources and Further References:

Books

Kaku, Michio. Parallel Worlds, Anchor, 2006.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy, Cooper Square, 2000.

Pearl, Matthew. The Poe Shadow, Random House, New York, 2006.

Walsh, John E. Midnight Dreary, The Mysterious Death of Edgar A. Poe, Palgrave MacMillan, New York, 2000.

Web sites, Newsletters, and Blogs

Carl Cupper's Recommendations: http://www.carlcupper.com/English/TheRaven.html

Celebrating Poe: http://celebratepoe.podbean.com/2008/03/05/8-tamerlane-eap200/

"Poe's Little Known Science Book Reprinted," http://www2.ljworld.com/news/2005/jan/22/poes_littleknown_science/

The Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial at eapoe200.blogspot.com maintained by John Wright.

Friends of Poe newsletter http://www.nps.gov/edal/upload/fall08vol5.pdf

Recommended sites from Poe Studies Association [http://www2.lv.psu.edu/PSA/]

The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum of Baltimore

Edgar Allan Poe Museum - Richmond

The Bronx County Historical Society's Poe Cottage

Checklist of Scholarship on Southern Literature

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site - Philadelphia

E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore

Heyward Ehrlich: A Poe Webliography