Do you think you know all about Edgar Allan Poe? I thought I did, too, but I did a little research and found out these 10 things that actually surprised me. How many did you know?
#1. Edgar Poe was probably named after a Shakespearean character.
He was the second child of two actors, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and David Poe, Jr., who were performing in King Lear in the year before his birth. It’s likely that the name Edgar was suggested by the play: Edgar is the name of the legitimate son of Gloucester and is generally a pretty good guy.
When Poe was less than two years old, his father deserted the family. About a year later, his mother died, and Poe was adopted by John Allan, a successful Virginia merchant. The Allan family gave him their name as a middle name, but never formally adopted him. Edgar and his foster father didn’t always get along too well.
#2. Poe’s estrangement from his foster father was as much a result of wrongdoing by Mr. Allan as it was by Edgar.
To be sure, Edgar was a willful child, and the Allans alternately spoiled and punished him. When he grew older, he and Mr. Allan frequently had falling outs over Poe’s gambling debts. The two later became seriously estranged over Poe’s disapproval of his Allan’s behavior. Although John and Francis Allan had no children together, John Allan fathered several illegitimate children over the course of his life. Poe adored his foster mother, and couldn’t bear to see her insulted this way.
#3. Poe was a military man — of sorts.
When he broke with his foster parents, Edgar moved to Boston, where he became a clerk and a newspaper writer. He couldn’t quite make a living, though, and so he enlisted in the army He used the name “Edgar A. Perry,” not wanting to get Mr. Allan involved, who was well known, even in Boston. He also claimed his age was 22. (He was 18.)
Poe enlisted for a period of five years, but after two he had grown pretty bored with his duties. He went to his commanding officer and told his story, telling the man the truth about his name and age. His CO agreed to let him out on one condition — he would have to reconcile with Mr. Allan.
Poe wrote to his foster father for several months, but the man was not sympathetic. Finally, he journeyed to see him, only to discover that his foster mother had died the previous day. (It is thought that Allan had not even told Poe that she was ill.) Allan was now in the mood to reconcile, but told Poe that he had a condition as well: he would support his attempt to be discharged only if he enrolled at West Point Military Academy.
Allan married again, and Poe enrolled at West Point. The pair quarrelled again, and this time Allan disowned him. Before long, Poe was bored with West Point, but if he wanted out, he was truly on his own. He decided to get himself court martialed.
Poe was tried for gross neglect of duty and disobedience to orders from superiors. He pled not guilty, knowing that if he was found guilty, they would have not choice but to dismiss him. It worked, and at the age of 22, Poe was through with his military duty.
#4. Edgar Allan Poe was the first well-known American to try to earn his living through writing.
Before Poe, most of the well-known authors had other means of financial support. Some relied on farming; others had jobs or had inherited enough money to be comfortable. But Poe depended entirely on his writing, and he could scarcely have chosen a worse time to do it.
All his life, Poe worked at writing, prolifically publishing poems, stories, and articles, editing numerous magazines, and becoming a well-know critic of others’ works. However, in his time, there was no international copyright law, and publishers made most of their money from cheap reprints of British books. There was a big boom in the number of magazines published, it is true, but most of them didn’t last long and none of them paid very much. Poe’s best-known work during his own lifetime was his poem “The Raven.” It made him an overnight success, but he only received $9 for it.
#5. Poe’s 13-year-old bride was the love of his life.
Her name was Virginia Eliza Poe, and she was also his cousin. He met her in 1829, in the brief period between his discharge from the army and his matriculation at West Point. During that time, he stayed with his father’s sister, Maria Poe Clemm, who took in a few boarders to eke out a precarious living. Also living in the household were Maria’s daughter, Virginia, Maria’s son Henry, Poe’s older brother William, and an invalid grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe. Elizabeth Poe had a small pension which helped keep the family afloat.
When Poe first met Virginia, she was seven years old, and Poe was courting another woman. That relationship didn’t work out, and Poe eventually came to love his little cousin. When another cousin heard that Poe was contemplating marrying Virginia, he offered to take her in and educate her, giving her an alternative to marriage at such a young age. Poe heard about it, and pleaded with Maria to let her daughter make up her own mind.
Virginia chose love, and the couple was married in 1836. Poe was 27 and Virginia was 13. According to friends, the marriage remained unconsummated for at least the first two years, and perhaps longer. The couple was, by all reports, blissfully happy, and it was a great blow to Edgar when his bride developed tuberculosis. The disease had an uneven course, with Virginia periodically rallying, and then sinking deeper into her illness. Poe was in a deep depression for much of the time.
When Virginia died at the age of 24, Poe was inconsolable. He realized, too late, that he had never had a likeness painted of her, and commissioned an artist to come in and paint her corpse. The Poes were too poor to even afford a plot, so Virginia was buried in a vault owned by their landlord.
#6. Edgar had quite a way with the ladies.
There is no doubt that Edgar was completely devoted to his bride, but that doesn’t mean that other women were immune to his charms. One of his admirers was Frances Sargent Osgood, a married woman and fellow poet. The two had a somewhat flirtatious relationship, which Virginia was aware of and actually encouraged. She believed that Osgood had a good effect on her husband: he had promised her that he would give up stimulants, and never drank when she was around.
Unfortunately, another woman, Elizabeth F. Ellet, also was interested in Poe. She was also a poet, and she had a reputation for being a trouble-maker. She was jealous of Osgood, and, after once seeing a letter from her at the Poe household, she contacted Osgood and suggested that she be more discreet.
Osgood sent two of her friends to Poe’s house to collect her letters. Poe was angry, and told Ellet that she’d better “look after her own letters.” He then bundled Ellet’s letters and sent them to her house. Despite the fact that she already had them, Ellet sent her brother, Colonel William Lummis, to demand the letters of Poe. Lummis didn’t believe that Poe didn’t have the letters, and threatened his life. Poe tried to borrow a pistol from a friend, Thomas English, to protect himself. English didn’t believe Poe either, and was skeptical that the letters even existed. Poe didn’t like being called a liar, so he and English got into a fistfight.
Naturally, with all this excitement, Poe was the talk of the town. The scandal grieved Virginia tremendously, so much so that on her deathbed she said, “Mrs. E. has been my murderer.”
#7. Poe was a man with his finger on the pulse of the public.
It is generally assumed that, because of the subject matter of his writing, Poe was a man with a twisted mind. It would be more accurate to say that he knew what the public wanted. In 19th century America, Spiritualism was a going concern. There was a tremendous interest in life beyond the grave, communication with spirits, and similarly eerie subjects. Poe managed to turn this public obsession into a literary genre.
Besides his tales of the macabre, Poe can be credited with pretty much inventing the modern detective story. Arthur Conan Doyle himself said of Poe, “Each [of Poe’s detective stories] is a root from which a whole literature has developed…Where was the detective story until Poe breathed life into it?”
Poe saw the growing interest in cryptography and capitalized on that, as well. He started by posting an invitation in a Philadelphia paper inviting submissions of ciphers, which he then solved and published. After that, he wrote an essay called “A Few Words on Secret Writing” for a magazine. Realizing how truly interested the public was in the subject, he then wrote the short story “The Gold Bug,” putting the subject of cryptography into fiction. All these endeavors were successful. In fact, the idea of putting cryptograms into newspapers and magazines today pretty much originated with Poe.
#8. No one really knows how Poe died.
What is known is that he was found wandering the streets of Baltimore, delirious, disheveled, and wearing clothes that didn’t belong to him. His whereabouts had been unknown for the previous five days. For many years it was assumed that Poe’s missing days had been a riot of drug and/or alcohol abuse, but today that interpretation has fallen into question.
Poe’s condition could have been caused by a variety of things, including diabetes, cholera, epilepsy, or lead or mercury poisoning. One fascinating theory alleges that Poe may have been the victim of cooping, a 19th century practice in which men were abducted off the street and taken to vote for a specific candidate, sometimes over and over again. In between their appearances at the polls, the men were kept in small rooms, or coops, and plied with alcohol or drugs to keep them cooperative.
Poe lingered for several days before dying in the hospital, but he never really became coherent. During his ravings, he called out the name “Reynolds” several times. Who was Reynolds? We will probably never know. One suggestion is that he was calling out the name of Jeremiah Reynolds, an explorer with whose writings Poe was familiar. Reynold’s Address on the Subject of Surveying and Exploring Expedition to the Pacific Ocean and the South Seas was a source of material for Poe’s one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket.
If that seems a bit of a stretch, a second theory fits in neatly with the cooping scenario. Henry R. Reynolds was one of the judges who oversaw elections at the Fourth Street polls.
#9. Poe wasn’t quite so bad as most people think.
If Poe’s gotten a bad reputation over the years, a lot of the blame can be laid at the feet of a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswold. One of the first pieces of writing about Poe the Man to surface after his death was an obituary written by Griswold and published under the name “Ludwig.” He ripped Poe to shreds, painting a picture of a man addicted to drugs and alcohol, roaming the streets in madness and malevolency.
If that wasn’t bad enough, he also talked himself into Poe’s aunt’s good graces, and got himself made literary executor. When he published Poe’s works he included a biography of much the same nature as the obituary. Griswold even went so far as to forge documentary evidence of some of his allegations. Since this was the first full-length biography written about Poe for many years, the allegations came to be accepted as the truth.
What motivated Griswold? Well, he and Poe had long been professional rivals, and had frequently attacked each other in print. What was more natural, Griswold may have reasoned, than to attack Poe when he couldn’t fight back? On the other hand, he may have been motivated by more personal concerns. He was a great admirer of a certain woman named Frances Sergent Osgood, even going so far as to dedicate a book to her. Mrs. Osgood, it would seem, greatly preferred Poe’s company to that of Griswold.
#10. Edgar Allan Poe was buried at Old Westminster Burying Ground in Baltimore — twice!!
Poe’s first burial was a sorry affair. There were nine people present, and the ceremony lasted only three minutes.
In 1873, 24 years after his death, Paul Hamilton Hayne, a poet and critic, visited Poe’s grave and was appalled at the condition he found it in. He published a newspaper article about it, and suggested that a more appropriate monument be provided. A Baltimore school teacher named Sara Sigourney Rice read the article and took up the cause. She began soliciting for funds, and even arranged for her elocution students to give performances to raise money. $1500 was raised, enough for a handsome monument.
Poe’s body was reburied in a location nearer the front of the church. Later, a decision was made to move Virginia’s remains to share her husband’s grave site. It was a fortunate decision, since the cemetery where Virginia was interred was being demolished, and Virginia had no relatives to claim her bones. An early Poe biographer, William Gill, arrived at the cemetery at the precise moment that the sexton held her bones in his shovel, claimed them and took them with him. He then stored them in a box under his bed and apparently forgot about them for the next ten years. Virginia was finally laid to rest with her husband on January 19, 1885.
Sources: wikipedia.org/Edgar_Allan_Poe; wikipedia.org/Virginia_Eliza_Clemm_Poe; wikipedia.org/Death_of_Edgar_Allan_Poe; http://www.trutv.com/library/crime/notorious_murders/celebrity/edgar_allan_poe/index.html; http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poedeath.htm; http://www.eapoe.org/papers/psbbooks/pb19871d.htm.