Meyers - Edgar Allan Poe: his life and legacy

PRAISE FOR Edgar Allan Poe
by Jeffrey Meyers

Poe has found a biographer fully worthy of his strange and erratic genius and his no less strange and erratic life.

Francis King, author of E. M. Forster

Meyers fashions a swift and engaging plot from the chaos of Poes life, emphasizing the contradictions of his vaunting ambition and destructive behavior, his morbid charm, his fastidious passion.... [This book] delivers clear-headed coverage of the life and loves of our favorite literary riddle.

Choice

The strength of Meyers approach is that it focuses on Poes life and character, and examines his writings in historical, rather than literary, terms.... Poe, Meyers emphasizes, was a mess of complications and perversitya brilliant crank, a genteel necrophile, a plagiarist and hack who stole from his inferiors and starved while his editors grew fatand Meyers is able to show the depth of his insanity and genius by means of a clear and straightforward narrative.

Kirkus Reviews

Meyers augments his string of literary biographies with this gem on a melancholic favorite.... Readers will appreciate the authors effort to put Poes life and literature into a historical perspective and to show his influence on subsequent writers.

Library Journal

This biography, compelling and beautifully written, should interest general readers as well as students of nineteenth-century American cultural history.

American Literature

If you must choose one [Poe biography], choose Meyers. It includes much more analysis and criticism of his work and more details about Poes personal life than previous efforts. Edgar Allan Poe is excellent.

Baltimore City Paper

BOOKS BY JEFFREY MEYERS
BIOGRAPHY

A Fever at the Core: The Idealist in Politics
Married to Genius
Katherine Mansfield
The Enemy: A Biography of Wyndham Lewis
Hemingway
Manic Power: Robert Lowell and His Circle
D. H. Lawrence
Joseph Conrad
Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy
Scott Fitzgerald
Edmund Wilson
Robert Frost
Bogart: A Life in Hollywood
Gary Cooper: American Hero
Privileged Moments: Encounters with Writers
George Orwell

CRITICISM

Hemingway: Life into Art
Fiction and the Colonial Experience
The Wounded Spirit: T. E. Lawrences Seven Pillars of Wisdom
A Readers Guide to George Orwell
Painting and the Novel
Homosexuality and Literature
D. H. Lawrence and the Experience of Italy
Disease and the Novel
The Spirit of Biography

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. E. Lawrence: A Bibliography
Catalogue of the Library of the Late Siegfried Sassoon
George Orwell: An Annotated Bibliography of Criticism

EDITED COLLECTIONS

George Orwell: The Critical Heritage
Robert Lowell: Interviews and Memoirs

EDITED ORIGINAL ESSAYS

Wyndham Lewis by Roy Campbell
Wyndham Lewis: A Revaluation
D. H. Lawrence and Tradition
The Legacy of D. H. Lawrence
The Craft of Literary Biography
The Biographers Art
T. E. Lawrence: Soldier, Writer, Legend
Graham Greene: A Revaluation

JEFFREY MEYERS

First Cooper Square Press edition 2000

This Cooper Square Press paperback edition of Edgar Allan Poe is an unabridged republication of the edition published in New York in 1992. It is reprinted by arrangement with the author.

Copyright 1992 by Jeffrey Meyers

All rights reserved.
No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review.

Published by Cooper Square Press
An Imprint of the Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group
150 Fifth Avenue, Suite 911
New York, New York 10011

Distributed by National Book Network

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Meyers, Jeffrey.

Edgar Allan Poe : his life and legacy / Jeffery Meyers. 1st Cooper Square Press ed.

p. cm.

An unabridged republication of the edition published in New York in 1992 T.p. verso.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:978-0-8154-1038-6

1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849. 2. Authors, American 19th century Biography. I. Title.

PS2631.M48 2000

818.309 dc21

00-040525

TM The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992. Manufactured in the United States of America.

For Tom McGuane

In biography the truth is everything, Poe wrote, and in autobiography it is especially so. Yet he left a trail of misleading evidence behind him and tried to hide his years as a common soldier with a fantastic though circumstantial account of a trip to Greece and Russia. An obituary published two days after his death emphasized the tempestuous career of the strangest and saddest figure in American literature, and rightly said: His life has been an eventful and stormy one, and if any one shall be found to write its history, we venture to say that its simple truths will be of more thrilling interest than most romances.

Poes best works are as interesting as his life. Whenever I told people I was writing a life of Poe, they would immediately start to recite The Raven (Once upon a midnight dreary...), which they had learned in childhood and still remembered. T. S. Eliot suggested that Poes memorable poetry had filtered deeply into popular consciousness by observing: it goes throbbing in your head [and] you begin to suspect that perhaps you will never forget it. As I became absorbed in this biography and thought about why Poes imaginative works have appealed to so many readers, I discovered that many of his most weird and bizarre storiesnot only William Wilson but also Loss of Breath, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, The Fall of the House of Usher, Eleonora, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Black Cat, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, The Cask of Amontillado and Hop-Frogwere extremely autobiographical (though distorted and exaggerated) and could be illuminated by relating them to the events of his life. I also realized that though Poe died almost a century and a half ago, his life, ideas and themes seem astonishingly modern. I have, throughout the book, compared Poe to twentieth-century writersmany of whom (as the last chapter shows) were strongly influenced by him.

Since the quality of Poes poems, stories and criticismmuch of it hastily produced to fend off starvationvaries enormously, I have concentrated on his best work and ignored the rest. While exploring Poes character and narrating his life, I have tried to follow the advice he gave when reviewing Thomas Carlyles Life of Friedrich Schiller in December 1845: Biography is not merely a sketch of the poets life.... It is a gradual development of his heart and mind, of his nature as a poet and a man, that endears him more to us, while it enables us more thoroughly to comprehend him.

I am grateful to many people and institutions for help with this book. I corresponded with and interviewed Edgar Allan Poe III, Margaret Woods (a descendant of Frances Allan), Lael and William Wertenbaker (a descendant of his namesake and Poes college friend). For other assistance I thank my good friends Morris Brownell, Dr. Sheldon Cooperman, Valerie Hemingway, Francis King, Timothy Materer, Ellen Nims and Thomas Pinney. Robert Merrill and a number of Poe scholars have also been helpful: Richard Kopley, Burton Pollin, Edward Wagenknecht and Richard Wilbur.