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Edgar Allan Poe: Death
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Edgar Allan Poe is one of America’s foremost and most revered writers. Poe’s life at times seems as intense as his fiction and poetry, for good cause. Most biographers agree that Poe took much of his inspiration for his writing directly or indirectly from the events that happened to him. As Arthur Hobson Quinn put it, “nearly a hundred years after his death, he remains not only the one American, but ... the one writer in the English language, who was at once foremost in criticism, supreme in fiction, and in poetry itself destined to be immortal” (Quinn, 695).
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Elizabeth Poe's death from tuberculosis at twenty-four cast a lifelong shadow over her son. Poe's primary literary inspiration was Romanticism, and he made its themes: death, the night, art as beauty his own. For Poe, the beautiful in art became the death of a beautiful woman (the "mother-wife"), what he called "the most poetical topic in the world." Ever sensitive about his origins and determined to characterize himself as an aristocrat, Poe defended his descent "...from a woman, who although well born, hesitated not to consecrate to the drama her brief career of genius and of beauty" in THE BROADWAY JOURNAL. An excerpt from the July 19, 1845 article appears on the reverse of Elizabeth's monument.
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Poe was the first in a long series of American authors who felt a need to drink (Meyers 89). Alcohol ruined his life. He had no good jobs. He had no stable world. He had nothing to anchor him to reality, so he induced fantasies and drown fears with a bottle. Therein lies his attraction--would a stable man have been able to write such amazing tales of life, death, the fantastic, and the incredible?
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In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal, The Stylus.[45] Originally, Poe intended to call the journal The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. In the June 6, 1840 issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post, Poe bought advertising space for his prospectus: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe."[46] The journal would never be produced before Poe's death. Around this time, he attempted to secure a position with the Tyler administration, claiming he was a member of the Whig Party.[47] He hoped to be appointed to the Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert,[48] an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas.[49] Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to be sick, though Thomas believed he was drunk.[50] Though he was promised an appointment, all positions were filled by others.[51]
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"In order to demonstrate the horrid stillness of the city in the sea, Poe describes how evident it is when one small stir occurs in the form of a ripple in the sea. While some places which are entirely motionless would seem to have a peaceful and serene feel, the adjectives Poe uses to describe this city in the sea produce the adverse effect. With references to stone fixtures, melancholy waters, gravesides, and death, Poe portrays the image of a city wihout a soul. Poe could be drawing comparisons between the city and a decaying human body as both are completely motionless, silent, and lacking of a soul" (Butler 8/27/96).
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Built in 1927 (of much older materials), the Elizabeth Poe Building houses a wealth of documents, manuscripts, and first editions. Two items dominate the room physically: the staircase from the Allan house on 14th Street, and the Richard H. Park memorial sculpture honoring Poe and his actor parents. Personal items include Poe's chair (it's incredibly small, has a tin seat, and no back to speak of) from the Messenger's offices, his embroidered silk vest, and a lock of hair taken from his death bed (the dark-brown strands have turned reddish over time).
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