.. What is The Mystery of.. The Washington Post and.. Edgar Allen Poe.. article copy-and-pasted from.. the official website of "The Washington Post".. article written by Louis Bayard..

967.2K Followers Edgar Allan Poe’s life was a mess. But his work was in his command. Story by Louis Bayard • 5mo • 5 min read Edgar Allan Poe’s life was a mess. But his work was in his command. Edgar Allan Poe’s life was a mess. But his work was in his command. © Library of Congress To borrow a current idiom, Edgar Allan Poe was a lot. Which means, almost syllogistically, that any biography of him — even one as thoughtful and compassionate as Richard Kopley’s “Edgar Allan Poe” — has to be a lot, too. A long and not always edifying tale of success and setback, temperance and bacchanals, playing out across the Atlantic seaboard and end-stopped by a death no less tragic for being in the cards. It’s exhausting stuff, and the only reason to strap ourselves in once more is the chance to see a genius being born. Sun Protection Products - Products From Multiple Brands - Deals On Lotions, Mists & More Ad Sun Protection Products - Products From Multiple Brands - Deals On Lotions, Mists & More amazon.ca call to action icon more A good thing it happened, too, because if anybody desperately needed to be a genius, it was Poe. Born to indigent actors and orphaned at 2 years old, he was brought into the home of John Allan, a proud Richmond merchant. From the start, Poe’s foster father called the arrangement “an experiment,” which meant that young Edgar was never formally adopted and lived in plain view of Allan’s disapproval. By the time Poe had withdrawn from the University of Virginia and been court-martialed out of West Point, the experiment was over. Edgar Allan Poe’s life was a mess. But his work was in his command. Edgar Allan Poe’s life was a mess. But his work was in his command. © University of Virginia Press Lacking any other option, he embarked on the then-novel career path of becoming a working writer — in an economic infrastructure that didn’t have much use for the idea (and still doesn’t). To the first editor who would listen to him, Poe declared: “I am young — not yet twenty — am a poet — if deep worship of all beauty can make me one — and wish to be so in the more common meaning of the word. I would give the world to embody one half the ideas afloat in my imagination.” Journal by journal, he managed to carve out a fugitive living as poet, critic and short-story writer. Along the way, he found the family he’d been looking for: a doting aunt and a young cousin, Virginia, whom, according to then-common practice, Poe married when she was 13. The marriage wasn’t immediately consummated, but they remained deeply devoted to each other until her death at the age of 24. Shop montreal patches - Amazon.ca Official Site - Huge Selection and Top Brands Ad Shop montreal patches - Amazon.ca Official Site - Huge Selection and Top Brands amazon.ca call to action icon more By then, Poe had become a real, if controversial, figure in the literary hierarchy with tales of grotesquerie like “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “William Wilson” and “The Masque of the Red Death.” “Poe follows in nobody’s track,” one admirer wrote. “His imagination seems to have a domain of its own to revel in.” From that ferment, “The Raven” emerged like a hit tune, immediately entering the zeitgeist and leaving Poe not just famous but, judging by the reactions he produced in susceptible lady readers, a straight-up sex symbol. Yet his fortunes never materially improved. In the words of one editor, he was “unstable as water,” a gambler and serial debtor and inveterate drunk who fell off every wagon and was fired from every job and antagonized as many people as he befriended. In the wake of his wife’s death, he embarked on a chain of doomed platonic alliances and finished his days violently delirious in a Baltimore medical college. So few mourners showed up at his funeral that the minister dispensed with a eulogy. The Mystical Witch Statue is Taking Ontario by Storm Ad The Mystical Witch Statue is Taking Ontario by Storm IIIPU call to action icon more Poe’s last major biographer, Kenneth Silverman, told much the same story with, I would argue, a bit more grace. Kopley, by contrast, can lapse into staidness: “Before Poe left Boston, an important event took place in Virginia.” “At Fort Moultrie, Poe would continue his army career, as well as his writing.” And by adhering so strictly to chronology, Kopley opens the door to discontinuities, awkward transitions and numbing repetition. To his credit, though, he’s a good sight fonder of his exasperating subject than Silverman was, and he does a fine job of recasting Poe’s alcoholism not as a moral problem but a medical one — “a terror equal to some of the terrors in his fiction.” Kopley also benefits from the privately held letters of Flora Lapham Mack, stepdaughter to Poe’s closest friend, who proffers such startling visions as Poe kicking up his heels in a Richmond parlor: “He would come with a sort of running leap in to the parlor & landing on the toes of his right foot twirl rapidly around for a moment & then he would dance most gracefully & rhythmetically an intricate a[nd] Spanish fandango.” Where Kopley really excels is in connecting the life back to the work. I always knew, for instance, that “The Cask of Amontillado” was a revenge fantasy against one of Poe’s literary rivals, but it had never occurred to me that “The Tell-Tale Heart” was a revenge fantasy against John Allan. Nor did I grasp how heavily Poe’s dead brother and mother figure in Poe’s lone novel, “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym” (a superb book that remains shockingly underread). Richard Kopley. Richard Kopley. © David Shopper Kopley teases out the underground symmetries in works as varied as “The Gold-Bug,” “Ulalume” and “The Purloined Letter,” and he even makes a compelling case for “Eureka,” an excursion in cosmological prose poetry that I join many of Poe’s contemporaries in finding indigestible. But there’s no disputing Kopley’s central argument: “As out of control as Poe’s life could sometimes be, his literary work was utterly in control.” That may explain why, despite all evidence to the contrary, I find Poe’s example not cautionary but inspirational. Through all his binges and bankruptcies, through every setback and depressive spell, he kept making art because he knew that’s where the best of him lay. And so, a death-obsessed writer brought new life to Gothic horror. A lover of ciphers created, out of whole cloth, the detective story. A restless innovator planted some of the first seeds of science fiction and left behind easily a dozen poems that haunt us like revenants. An anatomist peered into our most private terrors and came back with the consoling news that everyone else is broken, too. I call that 40 years well spent. Louis Bayard, a Book World contributing writer, is the author of “The Wildes” and “The Pale Blue Eye.” Edgar Allan Poe A Critical Biography By Richard Kopley. University of Virginia. 704 pp. $49.95 Sponsored The Washington Post Visit The Washington Post ‘Linsanity’ out: Jeremy Lin, first Asian American NBA champion, retires Six noteworthy books for September Five things that will define the final month of the MLB season Sponsored S