Poe
An Author Profile

Just two years later, in the first week of October, Poe too died, under strange circumstances: a week after giving a handful of well-received lectures and readings in Richmond and then leaving, ostensibly for New York, he was found in a Baltimore tavern, disheveled and delirious. An editorial acquaintance took him to Washington College Hospital; he reported that Poe was badly drunk, and dressed (very uncharacteristically) in dirty and ill-fitting clothes that did not seem to be his own. He drifted in and out of coherence, and spent some time calling out the name “Reynolds,” though no one knew whom he was speaking of; he gave no account of how he had come to be where he was or in his condition, and after a few days, he died. The cause was reported as “inflammation of the brain,” then a common euphemism for complications due to alcoholism, but some friends of Poe disputed this, and the documentation—even his death certificate—were lost. Various explanations have been proposed, including rabies from one of his pets, a depressive episode leading to suicide (which most historians find unlikely in his case), and the possibility that Poe was a victim of “cooping.”** None have gained consensus acceptance, and the horror writer’s death remains a mystery. The luckless man’s character was then promptly assassinated as well: a former acquaintance and bitter enemy, Rufus Griswold (who had already begun slandering Poe in life) not only wrote the first important obituary for him, not only wrote the first and most complete biography of Poe, but contrived to be named his literary executor! The picture he painted was of an arrogant, dubiously sane addict, which he “proved” by means of letters that were later shown to have been heavily edited—in some cases, entirely forged—on Griswold’s part.

Poe wrote one full-length, somewhat meandering novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. His poems and short stories are better-known. Several, such as “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” provide early examples of the realistic treatment of bizarre subject matter lending it a more deeply eerie quality; others, like “The Black Cat,” “The Tell-tale Heart,” and “The Imp of the Perverse” explore the strange urge to call our own terrors down upon us; others still are thoroughly dreamlike, particularly “The Masque of the Red Death” (which appears to owe something in its premise to the Decameron of Boccaccio, composed during an outbreak of the Black Death). For all their horrifying subject matter, and even despite the distance of a nineteenth-century idiom, Poe’s style remains surprisingly accessible, and his stories are in many ways their own best introduction. As they are comfortably out of copyright, we can freely recommend to our readers that they jump in this very evening, with any copy they find convenient. Happy Halloween.

*The name Ææa (originally Aiaia [Αἰαία]) is something between foreshadowing and a bad pun: the interjection ai [αἴ], which was frequently doubled, was a clipped form of the Greek cognate‡ to the English word woe, and had the same meaning.
**Detective stories in turn, through early Batman comics, became the principal source of the superhero genre, so that there is a real sense in which we have Edgar Allan Poe to thank for Michael Bay’s Transformers franchise. The reader may make of this what they choose.
†Cooping was a form of election fraud in the mid-nineteenth century: groups who wished to influence an election would abduct people and place them in a “coop,” a type of box or small room, where they would  be threatened, beaten, drugged, or otherwise forced into compliance, and then sent to vote as their captors wished, often multiple times in a series of disguises. Poe was found on the day of an election, and this would explain both his state of delirium and his puzzling clothing.
‡In linguistics, cognates are words within the native vocabulary of their respective languages that have developed from a common etymon (ancestral word). Cognates often have the same meaning, but not necessarily: e.g., the English beech, Greek phēgos [φηγός], Occitan fau, and Russian buzina [бузина́] are cognates, all descended from a proto-Indo-European etymon which meant “beech.” However, because of where beech trees do and don’t grow, the Greek and Russian terms were repurposed for other trees: the Greek word means “oak,” and the Russian, “elder.” The words are still cognates, but they are no longer translations of one another. (By contrast, the modern Russian word for “beech,” buk [бук], is not cognate with these even though it descends from the same etymon. The reason for this is that buk was borrowed into the Slavic languages from Germanic, and is thus not “native vocabulary.”)

Gabriel Blanchard knows nothing about the death of Mr. Edgar Allan Poe, and indeed was not in the country at the time. He works for CLT as the editor at large, and where he lives is not important.

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Published on 30th October, 2023.