Collected Tales, Poems, and Other Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, Carl Ostrowski, Carl Ostrowski

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781350181267
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Literatur Allgemein

This collection brings together more than fifty of Edgar Allan Poe's most important stories, poems, and critical writings, which established him as one of the most distinctive voices in American Literature, in a single accessible volume. Alongside annotated texts of each work, it also includes a complete Reader's Guide to Poe's work to help readers explore the contexts, style, and reception of his writing from his own time to today. An essential resource for students and teachers of Poe, this book includes stories such as 'The Fall of the House of Usher', 'The Tell-Tale Heart', and 'The Purloined Letter' as well as his Gothic narrative poem 'The Raven' and some of his most significant critical writings.

PART I

---

Introduction

CHRONOLOGY OF EDGAR ALLAN POE’S LIFE AND TIMES

1809	Edgar Poe is born in Boston to actors David and Elizabeth Poe on January 19. He is the couple’s second son (after William Henry). Elizabeth Poe gives birth to a daughter, Rosalie, in 1810.
1811	Upon Elizabeth Poe’s death, the young Edgar Poe is taken in (but not formally adopted) by Richmond, Virginia tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances.
1815	Allan moves the family to Great Britain in pursuit of improved business prospects.
1818	Poe is educated at a school run by the Reverend John Bransby at Stoke Newington, near London. Poe would later use his memories of this school in writing “William Wilson.”
1820	The Allans return to Richmond. In an agreement known as the Missouri Compromise, Missouri is added to the union as a slave state and Maine as a free state, preserving the balance of power between free and slave states in the United States Senate. A geographical boundary line is established between free and slave states. Washington Irving’s The Sketchbook of Geoffrey Crayon, Gent. completes serial publication in New York.
1823	President James Monroe announces United States opposition to further European colonialist interference in the New World, a position later codified as the Monroe Doctrine.
1826	Poe enrolls at the University of Virginia. He excels at French and Latin, but leaves the university after less than a year. Allan refuses to honor gambling debts Poe had accumulated and generally balks at financing Poe’s education at the levels expected for a member of the Southern gentry. James Fenimore Cooper publishes The Last of the Mohicans.
1827	After a break with foster father John Allan, Poe moves to Boston, where he publishes his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. He joins the U.S. Army under the name Edgar A. Perry. In November, his company moves to Fort Moultrie, on Sullivan’s Island, South Carolina. Sullivan’s Island is later employed as the setting for his story “The Gold-Bug.” The first U.S. railroad is chartered.
1828	Andrew Jackson, renowned as an Indian fighter and the hero of the Battle of New Orleans (during the War of 1812), is elected to the first of two presidential terms.
1829	Poe’s foster mother Frances (Fanny) Allan dies in Richmond. Poe is discharged from the U.S. Army. He publishes a second book of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, in Baltimore.
1830	Poe is admitted to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point, New York, where he excels in French and mathematics. John Allan remarries. The Indian Removal Act is passed with President Jackson’s support, beginning the process of the forced removal of Native Americans from their homelands in the Southeast.
1831	Supported in part by a subscription list made up of fellow cadets, Poe publishes Poems: Second Edition in New York. Poe is discharged from the U.S. Military Academy and moves to Baltimore, where he lives with paternal aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia, among others. John Allan’s second wife gives birth, effectively putting to rest Poe’s hopes of receiving a significant inheritance. Nat Turner leads a violent rebellion of slaves in Southampton County, Virginia, causing nationwide panic and outrage. The Confessions of Nat Turner, a pamphlet published in Baltimore, sells tens of thousands of copies. William Lloyd Garrison founds his antislavery newspaper The Liberator in Boston, leading to new visibility for the abolitionist movement.
1832	The Philadelphia Saturday Courier publishes a story Poe had submitted to a prize contest, “Metzengerstein.” German physician Johann Spurzheim arrives in the United States for a lecture tour and popularizes the pseudo-science known as phrenology.
1833	Poe wins a prize contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter on the strength of several tales he submits, including “Ms. Found in a Bottle,” which the newspaper publishes. Slavery is abolished in the British Empire.
1834	Poe befriends novelist John Pendleton Kennedy. John Allan dies in Richmond and leaves nothing to Poe.
1835	Recommended by Kennedy to publisher Thomas W. White, Poe submits tales to White’s magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger, published in Richmond. White publishes early Poe tales and eventually hires him as editor.
1836	Poe marries Virginia Clemm; she is thirteen and he is twenty-seven. Ralph Waldo Emerson publishes the essay “Nature,” founding the American Transcendentalist movement. Frenchman Charles Boyen begins lecturing and publishing in New England on the subject of mesmerism, inspiring growing public interest over the next several years.
1837	Poe publishes early installments of his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym in the Southern Literary Messenger. Poe and the Messenger part ways. He moves with Maria Clemm (nicknamed Muddy) and Virginia to New York City, which is soon plunged with the rest of the country into an economic depression known as the Panic of 1837. Nathaniel Hawthorne publishes the first edition of Twice-Told Tales.
1838	Poe publishes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym with Harper & Brothers. He moves with Virginia and Muddy to Philadelphia.
1839	A science textbook, The Conchologist’s First Book, is published under Poe’s name in Philadelphia. Poe assumes editorial duties with William E. Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, contributing reviews, poems, and tales. Publishers Lea and Blanchard of Philadelphia bring out the two-volume collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Henry Wadsworth Longfellow publishes Voices of the Night.
1840	Burton and Poe have a falling out, and Poe leaves the Gentleman’s Magazine. The Washingtonian Temperance Society is founded in Baltimore, part of a growing national movement devoted to abstention from alcohol.
1841	Poe joins the staff of Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine. (George R. Graham had purchased the subscription list of the defunct Gentleman’s Magazine from Burton.)
1842	Virginia experiences the first serious symptoms of the tuberculosis that will eventually claim her. Poe leaves the staff of Graham’s.
1843	Poe submits “The Gold-Bug” to a prize contest sponsored by Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper and wins the $100 prize. The story is widely reprinted.
1844	Poe and his family leave Philadelphia for New York. Poe joins the staff of the New York Mirror. Samuel Morse sends the message “What Hath God Wrought” on a telegraph line between Washington, D.C. and Baltimore.
1845	“The Raven” appears in January and becomes an immediate international sensation. James Russell Lowell’s biographical-critical article is published in the “Our Contributors” series in Graham’s, further raising Poe’s literary profile. Poe joins the staff of the Broadway Journal and commences a series of attacks on beloved poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, accusing the poet of plagiarism. Wiley and Putnam publish two volumes by Poe in their prestigious Library of American Books series, Tales and The Raven and Other Poems. Poe accepts an invitation to deliver an original poem before the Boston Lyceum; the reading and its aftermath compromise Poe’s standing in the literary world. Poe takes over proprietorship of the Broadway Journal.
1846	The Broadway Journal ceases publication. Poe is involved in an embarrassing personal scandal that leads to a fistfight with writer Thomas Dunn English. English questions Poe’s sanity and morality in the New York Mirror. Late in the year, notices appear in newspapers soliciting help on Poe’s behalf; the family is in poor financial straits and Virginia’s health is in decline.
1847	Virginia dies on January 30, plunging Poe into depression. Poe wins a libel suit against English and the Mirror.
1848	Poe publishes his cosmological treatise Eureka. Sarah Helen Whitman, a widow from Providence, Rhode Island, consents to Poe’s marriage proposal, provided he give up drinking. In the face of resistance from Whitman’s mother and friends, however, and amid rumors of Poe’s continued intemperance, the relationship ends. A pioneering women’s rights convention is held in Seneca Falls, New York. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ends the U.S.–Mexican War, giving the United States vast new swaths of territory in the West. Gold is discovered in Coloma, California, leading to the Gold Rush.
1849	Poe continues to publish poems and stories; he also lectures on poetry. He renews acquaintance with a romantic interest from his teenage years in Richmond, the now-widowed Elmira Royster Shelton. He joins the Sons of Temperance in Richmond, pledging to give up drinking. On October 3, he is discovered semi-conscious in the streets of Baltimore and taken to a hospital. He dies on October 7, forty years old. The precise cause of his death remains unknown. On October 9, Rufus Griswold publishes a mean-spirited obituary in the New-York Daily Tribune that paints Poe as brilliant but also arrogant, resentful, mentally unstable, and friendless. Griswold talks Maria Clemm into appointing him Poe’s literary executor.
1850	Griswold publishes an edition of Poe’s works; he alters the text of certain letters by Poe to discredit Poe’s character. The forgeries are not discovered until almost a century later by biographer Arthur Hobson Quinn.

ROMANTICISM AND THE GOTHIC

As the timeline above indicates, Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, began his professional writing career in the 1830s, and died in 1849. Traditional literary-historical periodization therefore places him firmly within the Romantic era of American literature, which dates from the 1820s through the onset of the Civil War, in 1861. As practiced by an international cohort of Western writers from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries, Romantic literature characteristically values the mental faculties of imagination and emotion over reason, while embracing a subjective, spontaneous, organic (rather than rule-bound or classicist) approach to art. Romantic writers spiritualize the human relationship with nature, and Romantic literature typically valorizes the claims of the individual in opposition to those of a society seen as corrupt or repressive. A certain strain of British Romanticism also licensed the emergence of radical political energies, and various American Romantic-era writers, such as Margaret Fuller, Lydia Maria Child, and Henry David Thoreau, built political activism into their vision of the writer’s vocation.

In light of these literary and political values, Poe seems to fit uneasily within the Romantic tradition. Poe took a keen interest in science and technology, which were conventionally regarded as antithetical to the realm of imagination. Far from being a source of spiritual redemption, the natural world in Poe’s fiction usually offers humanity sites of peril and gloom. Poe engaged deeply with the ideas of certain rationalist, Enlightenment-era precursors against whose writings many Romantics tended to take an oppositional stance, including seventeenth-century philosopher John Locke and eighteenth-century Scottish common sense philosophers/rhetoricians.¹ Far from endorsing individual political liberation, Poe possessed a generally conservative temperament and distrusted average ...