Brilliantly Deranged
Edgar Allan Poe, brilliant or just mad?
Most ultra-intelligent people have a lower social skill level making them appear strange and vastly different from those of us we deem as “normal”. Even during the time that Edgar Allan Poe lived was no exception as Poe was one who was viewed as “different” with a both brilliant and creative mind.
In 1826 at the age of 26, Poe entered the University of Virginia. There he stood out for reading everything that fell into his hands and being a diligent student who translated classical languages almost effortlessly. He was also known for having disturbing nightmares and problems with drinking and gambling. It was at that time that he began to deepen his study of history and literature, in addition to becoming interested in scientific disciplines such as mathematics, physics and astronomy. This seem to be the first signs of Poe’s conflicting forces fighting each internally between madness and brilliance.
WRITTEN IN THE STARS
Poe had a special interest in astronomy and later in his life he would propose a solution to Olber’s paradox.
OLBER’S PARADOX: named after the German astronomer Heinrich Olbers (1758–1840), also known as the “dark night sky paradox”, is the argument that the darkness of the night sky conflicts with the assumption of an infinite and eternal static universe.
The darkness of the night sky is one of the pieces of evidence for a dynamic universe, such as the Big Bang Model. In the hypothetical case that the universe is static, homogeneous at a large scale, and populated by an infinite number of stars, then any line of sight from Earth must end at the (very bright) surface of a star and hence the night sky should be completely illuminated and very bright. This contradicts the observed darkness and non-uniformity of the night.
However Poe proposed a different view regarding Olber’s Paradox stating that this physics problem presented the contradiction that in a static and infinite universe replete with stars — that was the description of the universe at that time — the night sky should be completely bright, with no dark regions. At a conference in the Society of Library of New York, Poe gave a lecture in which he argued that the dark spaces between stars were due to the fact that the distance to the furthest stars was so great that no rays of light from them had been able to reach the Earth yet.
Ironically, toward the end of Poe’s life he was convinced that he would be remembered more for his scientific ideas than for his literary writings. The author of The Gold-Bug devoted his last and little known work to capturing his thoughts about the universe.
WHAT’S IN A NAME?
Born as Edgar Poe in Boston, Massachusetts, it was before his third birthday that Poe lost his father and mother and was separated from his older brother and little sister. With no one to care for him he was taken into the home of the wealthy “Allan” family of Richmond, Virginia thus giving him his complete name of Edgar Allan Poe.
John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan lived in Richmond, Virginia, while Edgar’s brother and sister went to live with other families. Mr. Allan reared Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia gentleman. However, Poe dreamed of emulating his childhood hero, the British poet Lord Byron. The backs of some of Allan’s ledger sheets reveal early poetic verses scrawled in a young Poe’s handwriting and show how little interest Edgar had in the tobacco business.
Although the Allan’s would give him their name and a good education and place to live, Edgar Allan Poe never quite managed to get along with them? In fact, the friction was so strong that his foster father would eventually disinherit him. The ghosts of his lost biological family never left him and some scholars of his work see that traumatic childhood could explain his propensity toward a dark literary style.
Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination, so too has Poe himself. He is often seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. This is the Poe of legend. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name.
C’MON BROTHER MEET ME HALF-WAY
In 1826 Poe left Richmond to attend the University of Virginia, where he excelled in his classes but accumulated considerable . The debt reluctant Allan had sent Poe to college with less than a third of the funds he needed, and Poe soon took up gambling to raise money to pay his expenses. By the end of his first term Poe was so desperately poor that he burned his furniture to keep warm. Humiliated by his poverty and furious with Allan, Poe was forced to drop out of school and return to Richmond. However, matters continued to worsen. He visited the home of his fiance, Elmira Royster, only to discover that she had become engaged to another man.
‘Tell-Tale’ Heartbreak
The heartbroken Poe’s last few months in the Allan mansion were punctuated with increasing hostility toward Allan until Poe finally stormed out of the home in a quixotic quest to become a great poet and to find adventure. He accomplished the former by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen; to achieve the latter, he enlisted in the United States Army. Two years later he entered the United States Military Academy at West Point while continuing to write and publish poetry. But after only eight months at West Point Poe was thrown out.
Broke and alone, Poe turned to Baltimore (his late father’s home) and called upon relatives in the city. One of Poe’s cousins robbed him in the night but another relative, Poe’s aunt Maria Clemm, became a new mother to him and welcomed him into her home. Clemm’s daughter, Virginia, first acted as a courier to carry letters to Poe’s lady loves but soon became the object of his desire.
While Poe was in Baltimore, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, which did, however, provide for an illegitimate child whom Allan had never seen. By then Poe was living in poverty but had started publishing his short stories, one of which won a contest sponsored by the Saturday Visiter. The connections Poe established through the contest allowed him to publish more stories and to eventually gain an editorial position at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. It was at this magazine that Poe finally found his life’s work as a magazine writer.
Within a year Poe helped make the Messenger the most popular magazine in the south with his sensational stories and his scathing book reviews. Poe soon developed a reputation as a fearless critic who not only attacked an author’s work but also insulted the author and the northern literary establishment. Poe targeted some of the most famous writers in the country; one of his victims was the anthologist and editor Rufus Griswold.
At the age of twenty-seven, Poe brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to Richmond and married Virginia, who was not yet fourteen. The marriage proved a happy one but money was always tight. Dissatisfied with his low pay and lack of editorial control at the Messenger, Poe moved to New York City and to Philadelphia a year later, where he wrote for a number of different magazines. In spite of his growing fame, Poe was still barely able to make a living. For the publication of his first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, he was paid with twenty-five copies of his book. He would soon become a champion for the cause of higher wages for writers as well as for an international copyright law. To change the face of the magazine industry, he proposed starting his own journal, but he failed to find the necessary funding.
The January 1845 publication of “The Raven” made Poe a household name. He was again living in New York City and was now famous enough to draw large crowds to his lectures — he also began demanding better pay for his work. He published two books that year, and briefly lived his dream of running his own magazine when he bought out the owners of the Broadway Journal. The failure of the venture, his wife’s deteriorating health, and rumors spreading about Poe’s relationship with a married woman, drove him from the city in 1846. At this time he moved to a tiny cottage in the country. It was there, in the winter of 1847, that Virginia died of tuberculosis at the age of twenty-four. Her death devastated Poe and left him unable to write for months. His critics assumed he would soon be dead. They were right. Poe only lived another two years and spent much of that time traveling from one city to the next giving lectures and finding backers for his latest proposed magazine project to be called The Stylus.
He returned to Richmond in the summer of 1849 and reconnected with his first fiancé, Elmira Royster Shelton who was now a widow. They became engaged and intended to marry in Richmond after Poe’s return from a trip to Philadelphia and New York. However, on the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore and disappeared for five days. He was found in the bar room of a public house that was being used as a polling place for an election. The magazine editor Joseph Snodgrass sent Poe to Washington College Hospital, where Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded by strangers. Neither Poe’s mother-in-law nor his fiancée knew what had become of him until they read about it in the newspapers. Poe died on October 7, 1849 at the age of forty. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.
Days after Poe’s death, his literary rival Rufus Griswold wrote a libelous obituary of the author in a misguided attempt at revenge for some of the offensive things Poe had said and written about him. Griswold followed the obituary with a memoir in which he portrayed Poe as a drunken, womanizing madman with no morals and no friends. Griswold’s attacks were meant to cause the public to dismiss Poe and his works, but the biography had exactly the opposite effect and instead drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been during the author’s lifetime. Griswold’s distorted image of Poe created the Poe legend that lives to this day while Griswold is only remembered (if at all) as Poe’s first biographer.
Poe began his life without his biological parents and a deep love for Astronomy but known only for his literary works. His brilliant mind is often overshadowed by a “mad man” perception and fictional portrayal of his life to coincide with the darkness of his writings. No one knows if it was depression that he suffered from which caused him to drink excessively since there was no diagnosis for this condition during the time of Poe’s life. We know that he felt the emptiness of not having his biological parents and could not cope with the notion of having another family (the Allan’s) raise him. This was clear by the rift he had with his stepfather who tried to mold him into a business man and Poe wanting to go another direction.
Little is known of what happened to Edgar’s biological siblings except that they were split from each other and raised by other families. Poe’s older brother, William Henry Leonard, went to live with his grandparents in Baltimore, Maryland. He died on August 1, 1831 probably of tuberculosis. Poe’s younger sister, Rosalie, went to live with foster parents, William and Jane Scott Mackenzie, in Richmond, Virginia, and she later taught penmanship and, possibly, piano. Among the words rumored to have described her were “backward” and “dull.” Her life was lived in comfort until the US Civil War started in 1861. She died on July 21, 1874. Poe was probably never close to either of his siblings and they are never mentioned as being together when describing Edgar’s life. Most likely it wasn’t madness that killed Poe but that of a broken heart due to loneliness. All the relationships in his life were fractured in some way either by death or be estrangement. Although he will always be known for his literary brilliance he will also be known for a deep affection for science which was his true love.
