POE, EDGAR ALLAN American poet and critic, cultivated the literature of mystery, and is himself, to a great extent, a mystery. His work owes much to the drift of romanticism (of which he is a late heir) towards the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a strange power of logic and a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own idiosyncrasy and an elaborate technique.
He was born in Boston, Mass., Jan. 19, 1809, and was three years old when his mother, a young English actress, the widow of an American player, died at Richmond, Va., in 1811. The well to-do childless Mrs. Allan, who adopted him, gave him motherly care and affection—reluctantly seconded by her husband. Edgar received a good education, first in England, then in a private school at Richmond, whence he went, in 1826, to the University of Virginia. Differences arose between him and his foster-father. Prevented from returning to college of ter the end of the first year, the youth ran away to Bos ton, where he enlisted in the Army. For three years he was a soldier (1827-30—the last three months in the capacity of a cadet at West Point.
His inclination led him towards writing. In spite of untoward circumstances and uncongenial surroundings, he wrote poetry, which he managed to have published in Boston (Tamerlane, 1827), in Baltimore (Al Aaraaf, 1829) and in New York (Poems, 1831). Poe set tled as a man of letters at Baltimore in 1832, and struggled with poverty, at times with actual want, upheld by his pride and his set resolution to achieve work that would count in Amer ica and in the world. He had neither family nor friends. Disap pointments in love and social slights threw a sombre cloud over his disposition. He was afflicted with a strange susceptibility to the effects of liquor, combined with an attraction towards it which he did not always resist successfully.
It was this defect (or hereditary flaw) that, in a large measure, made it impossible for him to remain literary editor, in Richmond, Philadelphia or New York, of magazines which he had raised to prosperity; that, later, discouraged J. R. Lowell from taking him as contributor to The Pioneer; that disqualified him for a clerk ship in a Government office at Washington. He made worthy efforts to abstain from stimulants after he had married Virginia Clemm (1836), but relapsed when his child-wife fell dangerously ill, in 1841, with scant hope of recovery. After the death of Vir ginia, in 1847, his morbid condition grew worse and seems to have assumed the form of a lesion of the brain with temporary crises of delirious fever. "I became insane," he wrote, "with intervals of horrible sanity." His last years were marked by fits of platonic erotomania, the objects of which were successively or at the same time women of letters, such as Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Shew (Maria Louise), Mrs. Whitman (Helen), Mrs. Lewis (Stella), and new or old friends, like Annie and Mrs. Shelton. He died after letting himself be entrapped into drinking too much liquor at Baltimore, in For 4o years he had fought, against terrible odds, to keep his genius clear and accomplish the work of a creative artist. While continuing to write verse, he began composing prose tales in 1832, and started a career of literary critic in 1835 which he was to carry on steadily in various magazines till the end. His keen and sound judgment as appraiser of contemporary literature, his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his weirdness and dramatic power as a story teller, though hardly appreciated in his lifetime, have secured him to-day a prominent place among universally known men of letters. The complex and elusive nature of his productions can best be understood When one tries to seize the relations of his personality to the working of his mind.