Introduction
Edgar Allan Poe is celebrated for tense, heart-pounding stories and poems such as The Raven and The Tell-Tale Heart. He is considered a master of horror who turned short stories and poetry into art forms, and Poe’s stories of obsession, paranoia, fantasy, and death have inspired such literary giants as Vladimir Nabokov, Ray Bradbury, and Jules Verne.
Often overlooked, however, is the story of Poe’s life: the heartbreak, financial struggles, success, mysterious death, and of course his military career. Yes, Edgar Allan Poe, despite his creative nature was once a part of the military trainees. This part of Poe’s life casts light on his actual identity; helping us to understand what inspired the man whom many consider America’s most influential writer (Dougherty, 2003).
Main body
Poe was born in Boston in 1809 but abandoned by his father and orphaned at two when his mother died. John and Frances Allan of Virginia took Poe in. Between the ages of six and 11, he lived in England and attended boarding school, where he was unpopular and teased for being an un-adopted stepson.
In 1826, he enrolled at the University of Virginia, where he shone academically but incurred gambling debts. At 18, Poe moved to Boston and published his first volume of poems. Unable to support himself, Poe joined the army. He achieved the rank of sergeant-major after only 17 months and was accepted into the West Point military academy.
At this time, Poe’s foster mother died, and his foster father disowned him. Tired of West Point’s rigors and in a rebellious act of self-sabotage, Poe sought to be court-martialed, ending his military career. At the age of 22, he faced a life of struggle and poverty.
Indeed, WestPoint Academy’s most famous dropout was a chronic class-cutter named Edgar Allan Poe, whose “wayward and capricious temper made him at times utterly oblivious or indifferent to the ordinary routine of roll-calls, drills, and guard duties,” a classmate remembered. Poe did not accept hazing with good cheer, as any reader of “The Cask of Amontillado” might guess, and so he was expelled after half a year.
Yet Superintendent Sylvanus Thayer played a role in the cultivation of this proud eccentric’s genius. He encouraged Poe to solicit subscriptions of 75 cents from his fellow cadets to pay for the publication of his poems. His classmates, who had enjoyed Poe’s scabrous and scandalous verse upon stern or detested professors, kicked in, and the poet dedicated the volume to the “United States Corps of Cadets.” To the Corps’ disgust, however, Poe’s printed poetry had nothing whatever to do with them or West Point.
In 1831, Poe moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt and her daughter, Virginia, and he began his professional writing career. A few years later, his prospects brightened. He worked in Richmond as an editor, critic, and contributor for a series of journals, all of which thrived. He married Virginia–then just 13 years old–and they moved to New York City. Two years later, the couple moved to Philadelphia. There, Poe spent his most productive years. One of his homes was a small brick house now a national historic site.
In 1840, he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, whose sales were surprisingly poor. Many critics, whom Poe alienated in his criticism of them, refused to review it. Poe invented the modern detective story with The Murders in the Rue Morgue, before returning to New York, where he wrote The Raven. The success of the ominous poem gave Poe a steady income and cemented his legacy.
Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. Watching her wither was, in Poe’s words, “a horrible, never-ending oscillation between hope and despair” that caused him to abuse alcohol. Poe returned to Richmond in 1849, then left to visit Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, however, he stopped in Baltimore. In October, he was found lying half-conscious in the street and taken to a hospital, delirious. Poe died on October 7 of “acute congestion of the brain.”
Historians say that Poe’s literature and criticism were ahead of his time and that his more than 70 pieces of fiction display an impressive range of genres that he helped forge, including murder mysteries, science fiction, and treasure mysteries with built-in clues.
Few of Poe’s readers have already recognized that aside from its scientific significance, his unified cosmic theory was based on his spiritual insight. They content themselves, however, with this deduction. An interesting subject of inquiry and nonetheless important is the material background of this so-called spiritual insight. Early in and throughout his life, Poe’s acquaintance with the deaths of beloved ones had left a deep impression on his spirituality, his view of life, and his works. Many of his short stories dealt with death in different forms, of decay and annihilation. This morbid preoccupation cannot be rightly construed to be just the offshoot of an insane mind, as unfairly portrayed by Rufus Griswold in his biographical memoir of Poe. Poe’s interest in death springs owns the experience. His mother, stepmother, and his young wife Virginia all died of tuberculosis. Their deaths surely and painfully compelled Poe to probe into what awaits all of us. Poe simply cannot accept that the conclusion of this drama called existence in the stage called cosmos is nothingness (Kauffman, 1999).
The fear of death in many of Poe’s writings is double to a greater fear, the loss of individuality. The fear of death, the fear of the maelstrom is the fear of nonexistence. It should be noted that during the time of Poe, society was largely mercantile and industrialization is in full swing. This capitalistic economy brings with it the ideologies of competition and individual achievements. There was an implicit exhortation for each individual to stand out and make a mark in the world. There lies therefore the fear, the horror of being reduced to nonentity. Poe’s idea of fear becomes more and more poignant as societies develop one which values individualism and personal recognition (Canby, 1931).
One of the factors, the main one in fact, why Poe’s cosmology was ignored, if not downrightly, rejected was the fact that he has generously infused in it elements of metaphysics and spirituality. He is buffeted by oppositions from both sides of the fence: the religious accuse him of heresy and pantheism while the men of science of his time consider his cosmology imaginative at best.
Poe postulated a theory of the universe that supposedly explains everything that was, and is and those that have not yet come to pass. In Poe’s theory, the material cannot be dissociated from the metaphysical. Its method is not confined to the prescription of hard science but also includes intuition and feelings. The supposedly scientific underpinning of Poe’s works, his cosmology, can not be detached from his metaphysical and spiritual philosophy. In turn, this philosophy or weltanschauung is but the result of his immediate material reality (Campbell, 1933).
Conclusion
Poe will probably always be best known, however, for his thrilling tales of terror, or “arabesques,” as he called them, which showcased his extraordinary imagination. As written in National Park Service literature, “Poe stands as one of the great innovators in American literature… an original, creative force.” But in the eyes of military officials, he remains one of the most intriguing men who dared to enter West Point and had the courage to drop out as brought by his own principles and beliefs.
References
Cabiaire, Celestin P., 1927 The Influence of Edgar Allan Poe in France. New York.
Campbell, Killis. 1933.The Mind of Poe and Other Studies. Cambridge.
Canby, Henry Seidel. 1931. “Edgar Allan Poe,” Classic Americans. New York.
Dougherty, Ryan 2003. Once upon a midnight dreary: Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site in Philadelphia tells the dark story of one of American literature’s greatest innovators and masters of horror. National Parks and Conservation Association.
Kauffman, Bill 1999. Of Poe and Lee and other West Points.(military education of author Edgar Allan Poe and General Robert E. Lee). American Enterprise Institute for Public Policy Research.