American Masters (1985–…): Season 31, Episode 8 - Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive - full transcript
The life of noted American author and poet Edgar Allan Poe is examined in this PBS documentary.
♪♪
♪♪
- When Edgar Allan Poe
came to Baltimore,
he was famous.
He was making money
off of his lecture tours.
He had found financial backing
to establish his magazine,
which was his great dream.
He was about to marry
his childhood sweetheart.
- Who is it?
No. No, thank you.
I will be on a train
to New York.
I have no need of a room.
♪♪
- And he died.
- And who is it
that gets the opportunity
to announce to America
that Poe has died?
His sometime friend
but also literary rival,
the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold,
who wrote the very first
obituary of Poe.
- Griswold succeeded
in establishing
the modern perception of Poe
really as the same person
as one of the characters
in his stories,
as someone who is
mentally deranged,
as someone who is homicidal,
a drinking, drug-using,
womanizing scoundrel.
That's an invention of Griswold.
It's a complete fabrication.
- Who was the real
Edgar Allan Poe?
I feel like he slips further
away from me
the more I know about him.
♪♪
♪♪
- In 1843, a hard-working
magazine editor,
poet, and writer named Edgar Poe
published one of
the most popular horror stories
ever written.
- "True!
Nervous... very,
very dreadfully nervous
I had been and am,
but why will you say
that I am mad?
The disease had sharpened
my senses...
Not destroyed...
Not dulled them."
- The narrator grabs you
right in the first sentence.
He said something like, "Mad?
You think I am mad?" You know?
"People say I'm mad.
I'm not mad!"
And then he's clearly mad,
and yet he's
telling you this story
that's mad and sane
at the same time.
- The narrator creeps
into an old man's room
and murders him
while he's sleeping.
- "You should've seen
how wisely I proceeded...
With what caution...
With what foresight...
With what dissimulation
I went to work!
I was never kinder
to the old man
than during the whole week
before I killed him."
- It has the barest elements
of a shocking murder story,
and yet he turns it
into something that's universal.
- Poe's stories were often set
in nameless places,
their time left vague.
But in the 1840s,
his themes resonated
in a raw, new nation
that had yet to wrestle
with some basic flaws.
♪♪
- Poe writes about
violence and cruelty,
madness and irrationality,
existential doubt and dread.
He wanted Americans
to understand
what was strange
about their own culture.
He saw that strangeness,
the strangeness
that most people didn't see.
♪♪
- There is so much emotion
in those stories
that we sometimes misread
only for horror or for shock.
But really, what it is,
is a kind of love.
Throughout his life, he was
searching for unequivocal love.
♪♪
- Poe's mother was an actress
who lived in Boston
when she gave birth
to her second son in 1809.
- Eliza Poe was a star
of American theater,
especially American
musical theater,
especially comedy.
- She also, of course,
had a beautiful singing voice.
She was called the nightingale.
- ♪ Some tell me
I'm pretty and fair ♪
♪ Some call me haughty and shy ♪
♪ Some tell me
they'd happily be wed ♪
♪ But nobody... ♪
- In speaking of my mother,
you have touched a string
to which my heart
fully responds.
- ♪ Oh, what shall I do? ♪
♪ Nobody comes from anything ♪
- It was December of 1811,
and Eliza Poe had been abandoned
by her husband.
She was left with three children
for which she had the sole care,
and she was dying
from tuberculosis.
- With Edgar, his brother,
and his sister
about to lose their mother,
a local newspaper
printed an appeal.
- "On this night, Mrs. Poe
asks your assistance,
perhaps for the last time."
♪♪
- When Mrs. Poe finally died,
she was just 24 years old.
Edgar was just 2.
- Some accounts have him
at her death bed.
That would be
quite a shocking thing.
- I myself never knew her,
never knew the affection
of a father.
Oh, I have had many occasional
dealings with adversity,
but the want
of parental affection
has been the heaviest
of my trials.
No one was ever prouder than I
of my decent from a woman
who gave to the stage
her brief career
of genius and beauty.
They said that when she died,
the theater was deprived
of one of its chief ornaments.
♪♪
- He never really
got over her death.
The sense of his early loss
stayed with Poe constantly.
I think it appears
in many of his works.
Poe was really haunted by it
his whole life long.
♪♪
- Edgar, his brother, and sister
went to separate homes.
Edgar was taken in by
a childless Richmond couple,
John and Frances Allan.
Frances was one
of the local women
who had helped Eliza Poe
through her final illness.
- Frances Allan had been
orphaned herself,
so she could sympathize
with Edgar's plight.
She must've thought Edgar was
just a perfect little angel.
She dressed him up in little
velvet suits and cape,
and he always just worshipped
his foster mother,
Frances Allan.
He just thought
the world of her.
- But Edgar's relationship
with his foster father
would be more complicated.
- John Allan was a merchant,
so he had that kind of
bootstraps character about him,
very no-nonsense,
very business-oriented.
He was also kind
of a hard figure.
His own friends
describe him that way,
that he could be
very unforgiving.
- John Allan never
let Edgar forget
that he was not his real son,
that he was a foster son.
And so, Poe grows up feeling
like he's both in a family
but not really in a family.
- It's a very tenuous way
to live.
I think by becoming a poet,
it was a way of
establishing himself.
It was a way of becoming Poe,
because he wasn't really allowed
to become an Allan.
- We think of Poe often
as a frail character.
But, in fact, he was an athlete.
- Running, boxing, swimming...
Edgar seemed driven
to outdo his classmates.
- When he was 15 years old,
one of his fellow students
bet him
he couldn't swim down the river
a couple miles.
So, Poe took that bet,
and he ended up swimming
6 miles.
- Against the tide.
This was no small feat.
It was one way
that he was able to prove
that he was the equal
of any of his peers.
- I think it's fair to say that
Poe often
had a chip on his shoulder.
- Bright, quick-witted,
and rebellious,
Edgar deliberately
set himself apart.
He became a fan of the popular
bad-boy poet of the day.
- George Gordon... Lord Byron...
Was an English poet
who cultivated this image
of the isolated artist
at odds
with the rest of the world.
Poe consciously adopted
that Byronic pose,
even to the point of dressing
in black and, you know,
looking in the distance
at nothing in particular
and so on.
- The similarity between Poe
and Byron is quite remarkable.
They had a similarly
very difficult childhood...
Abandoned, abused.
It pervades the way
they think about the world
and the way they see the world...
Loss and fear,
two great subjects
in both of their writings.
- From childhood's hour,
I have not been as others were.
I have not seen as others saw.
I could not bring my passions
from a common spring.
From the same source,
I have not taken my sorrows.
I could not waken my heart
to joy at the same tone,
and all I've loved...
I've loved alone.
♪♪
- The woman who encouraged him
to write poetry
was the mother
of his best friend.
- When Mr. Allan
was arguing with Poe
and telling him
not to waste his time
reading this Lord Byron garbage,
she gave him that encouragement
that he needed.
- I think Poe had
a little schoolboy crush.
She must've reminded him
of his own biological mother
in certain ways.
She had that same
sort of ethereal look about her.
- Unfortunately,
mental illness took her.
We don't know the origins of it,
and then she died.
And it affected him profoundly.
- He went to her cemetery
at night
and kept a vigil at her grave.
- I can't imagine that he had
a profound love relationship
with Jane Stanard,
but he made it into something
which had emotional,
romantic, and literary potential
that could be exploited.
- "Helen, thy beauty is to me
like those Nicéan barks of yore,
that gently,
o'er a perfumed sea,
the weary,
way-worn wanderer bore
to his own native shore."
- Some years later, Poe said
that he wrote the poem
"To Helen" thinking of her.
- Thy hyacinth hair,
thy classic face,
thy Naiad airs
have brought me home
to the glory that was Greece,
and the grandeur that was Rome.
- Young Edgar was not alone
in his experiences of loss.
Early 19th-century America
had a mortality rate
more than three times
that of today.
- You could have someone who was
in apparently good health
carried away very quickly
and very tragically.
You could also have someone,
because of TB,
slowly dying away.
And childbirth was another
great cause of mortality.
♪♪
- Very elaborate cemeteries
were just becoming popular
in America at the time.
- This was a great age of
funereal sculpture and mementos.
While it sometimes seems odd
to 21st-century readers
that Poe was always
writing about death and dying,
it's not at all unusual
if you think about
what he was witnessing
in the 1820s and 1830s
when he was surrounded
by this culture of death.
- And so, being young
and dipped in folly,
I fell in love with melancholy
and used to throw
my earthly rest
and quiet all the way in jest.
I could not love
except where Death was mingling
his with Beauty's breath.
♪♪
- In 1826, John Allan agreed
to send 17-year-old Edgar
to the brand-new
University of Virginia.
It was his first step
toward the creative life
he's beginning to imagine
for himself.
- He would evince his versatile
talents by sketching
fantastic and grotesque figures
with such artistic skill,
as to leave us all in doubt
whether in afterlife
Poe would be painter or poet.
- It's the archetypal
college experience.
He's in a dorm.
It's kind of a crazy situation,
lots of fights going on,
but he's also allowed to excel
in these classes,
especially language classes.
He's also able to now
spend lots of time reading,
and, in fact, his father
started complaining,
"You're spending
all your time doing things
like reading 'Don Quixote.'
What are you doing?"
- Unfortunately, John Allan
did not pay Poe's fees.
He made a partial payment,
did not provide him with money
to buy books and equipment
so that he could actually
pursue his studies.
- Poe tries gambling
to raise some money,
but by the end
of his first semester,
he is deep in debt.
- And then he appeals to Allan,
and Allan says,
"Why the hell should I pay
your gambling debts?
You know,
why don't you come back
and do some decent work
and earn a living?"
- Hounded by creditors,
Poe is forced to withdraw
from the university
and return to the Allan mansion
in Richmond.
But his quarrels with his
foster father only get worse.
- "Sir, my determination
is at length taken,
to leave your house and endeavor
to find some place
in this wide world
where I will be treated
not as you have treated me."
♪♪
- I took lodging at a tavern,
taking with me
only the clothing on my back
and barely enough pennies
to buy bread.
- He moved to Boston
at the age of 18.
Why would he choose
to come to Boston
of all the cities
that were possible?
Maybe he remembers
that his mother,
in the one gift
that she left to him,
a watercolor of Boston Harbor,
had written on the back,
"For my little son Edgar.
May he ever love Boston,
the place where his mother
found her best
and most sympathetic friends."
- He tries working
for a newspaper for a while.
It doesn't go well.
He's nearly getting thrown out
by his landlady
because he's out of money.
He's got creditors after him,
so Poe joins the Army
because he's got to disappear
for a while.
- He actually enlists under
the name of Edgar A. Perry.
- The ironic thing is,
Poe actually turns out
to be a really good soldier.
- While stationed in Boston,
Poe gathers poems
he'd written as a teenager
into a slim collection of verse.
- It's called "Tamerlane
and Other Poems."
Probably about 50 copies
were self-published.
- He's 18 years old
when "Tamerlane" comes out.
Although this was heavily
indebted to Byron,
there's something there
that is not yet developed
but that over
the next decade, certainly,
Poe is going to shine
into perfect little gems.
- I was young and was a poet.
If deep worship of all beauty
could make me one,
I would've given the world
to embody half the ideas afloat
in my imagination.
♪♪
- While Edgar was in the Army,
his foster mother,
Frances Allan,
died after a lingering illness.
- It's said that when he returned
to Richmond
a day late for her funeral
and saw how close her grave was
to that of Jane Stanard's,
he was just devastated and just
wept right on that spot.
- With his mother resting
in an unmarked grave
at St. John's Church,
these were Poe's
three mothers growing up,
all gone by the time he is 20.
♪♪
- "Out... out are
the lights... out all!
And, over each quivering form,
the curtain, a funeral pall,
comes down
with the rush of a storm,
while the angels,
all pallid and wan,
uprising, unveiling,
affirm that the play
is the tragedy, 'Man, '
and its hero,
the Conqueror Worm."
- In the months
after Fanny Allan's death,
Edgar prevails on his
foster father one more time.
He wants John Allan to help him
get into West Point,
perhaps thinking
a military career
will provide him the luxury
to write poetry.
- But there is a whole level
of discipline involved
at West Point that Poe
was really not prepared for,
and he started to really
resent his instructors,
really resent the routine,
and started writing
this really vicious poetry,
actually,
about a lot of his instructors,
which is, if anything,
what he became known for
at West Point.
- Within a few months
of arriving,
Poe tries
to leave the military academy.
When he couldn't get
an honorable discharge,
he gets himself thrown out.
- He just broke all the rules.
He didn't turn up for drill.
He didn't turn up for class.
We're getting to the pattern of
Poe is putting a wrench
into his own wheel,
to mix a metaphor, you know.
He's screwing himself up
right away.
- Having burnt his bridges
with the military
and with his foster father,
Poe starts over once again.
At 22, the young poet
moves to the one city
where he has blood relatives.
- It was in Baltimore
that he began to cobble together
a sort of family
made up of Maria Clemm,
who is his aunt,
and Virginia Clemm,
who was his first cousin.
- Edgar moves into his Aunt
Maria Clemm's small house,
seeking roots in a family
of his own.
- He finally found
some sort of stability.
He found a household
that he could live in.
- Edgar sets out to pursue
a career in literature.
Writing was not a paying job
in 1830s America,
but Poe hadn't given up
hope of an inheritance.
- Then, his foster father,
John Allan, dies in 1834,
and the will leaves Poe nothing.
- John Allan had several
illegitimate children,
and even
the illegitimate children
were recognized in the will,
but Poe got not a penny.
That's tough.
That was the breaking point
between Poe and his memories
of being part
of the Allan family.
Although we think of him today
as Edgar Allan Poe,
in his lifetime, Poe almost
never used the middle name.
It was always Edgar Poe
or Edgar A. Poe.
♪♪
- In the space of a few years,
Poe has gone
from being the scion
of a wealthy Virginia family
to being in a hovel
and having no apparent future
in front of him.
- "Dear sir, your kind invitation
to dinner today
has wounded me to the quick.
I cannot come, and for reasons
of the most humiliating nature
in my personal appearance."
- He has this terrible ability
to write a begging
threatening letter,
where the begging doesn't work
and the threatening
doesn't work.
- "If you will be my friend
so far as to loan me $20,
I will call on you tomorrow.
Otherwise,
it will be impossible,
and I must submit to my fate."
♪♪
- In the early 1830s,
America entered
a new age of mass media.
Growing cities
and rising literacy rates
created a vast new market
of readers.
- There's a huge
literary movement going on,
the golden age of periodicals.
You have journals and magazines
cropping up all over the place.
Sort of like the blogosphere
is now, right?
- Though still a poet at heart,
Edgar realizes
the reading public
wants a different kind
of writing... the short story.
At age 24, he wins
a local fiction contest
with a strange tale
of disaster at sea.
Along with the $50 prize
come enthusiastic reviews
and a job offer.
♪♪
Poe leaves his newfound family,
Maria and young cousin Virginia,
and moves back to Richmond,
the city where
he had been disowned.
He will be the editor of
The Southern Literary Messenger,
a struggling new publication
devoted to elevating
the literature of the south.
- Thomas W. White,
the owner and publisher,
was someone who frankly
understood his limits
in the magazine world
and turned a lot of work
over to Poe.
- He'd been thinking of himself
as a writer
ever since he was a child.
But now, he's also
thinking about himself
as a professional
who works with words.
- This is the first chance
that he has
to get his foot in the door
as an editor,
as a magazinist,
as an American tastemaker.
- Poe's many responsibilities
will include
writing book reviews,
and he vows to be
a serious literary critic.
He believed it was time
his young nation produced work
every bit as sophisticated
as British literature.
- A lot of American critics
in the early 19th century
have the idea that,
in order to invent
an American literature,
we can't afford to denigrate
any American writer.
- They called it puffing,
you know.
That is just to sort of
mindlessly praise anything
that had been written
by an American.
- Poe's way of elevating
American literature
was by not cutting writers
any slack.
- "We see no reason
why Colonel Crockett
shouldn't be permitted
to expose himself
if he pleases
and to be as much laughed at
as he thinks proper."
- Poe earned the reputation and
the nickname the "Tomahawk Man."
He was antagonistic.
He was hypercritical.
- Work is especially censorable
for the frequent vulgarity
of his language.
- But the criticisms that he made
were well-deserved.
He was being
a responsible reviewer,
and most of the people
he reviewed
are deservedly forgotten today.
- It is a mere
jumble of absurdities.
- I think he did that
because he found,
"Ah, that sets me apart,"
and people loved it.
You know,
people always love dirt.
- I cannot bring myself to feel
any goadings of conscience
for undue severity.
I intend to put up with nothing
that I can put down.
- Poe was writing a kind
of literary criticism
that didn't exist in America
at the time.
He would do a line-by-line,
word-by-word
dissection of the text.
♪♪
- In addition to that,
this is where
he really starts
to write stories
that we would recognize
as Poe stories.
- Though committed to elevating
American literature,
Poe believes he can also feed
the popular appetite
for entertainment.
- And "Berenice," which runs in
the Southern Literary Messenger,
is a good example of this.
It's a pretty weird
and disturbing piece of work.
- "I slowly raised my eyes to
the countenance of the corpse.
There had been a band
around the jaws,
but, I know not how,
it was broken asunder.
The livid lips were wreathed
into a species of smile,
and, through
the enveloping gloom,
once again, there glared upon me
in too palpable reality,
the white and glistening
and ghastly teeth of Berenice."
- In a fit of madness,
the narrator pulls the teeth
from the corpse of his fiancée.
- "With a shriek,
I bounded to the table
and grasped the ebony box
that lay upon it.
It slipped out of my hands
and fell heavily
and burst into pieces,
and from it,
with a rattling sound,
there rolled out
some instruments
of dental surgery,
intermingled with many white
and glistening substances
that were scattered
to and fro about the floor."
- Poe was writing in
a well-known genre
that had been popular
for over 70 years...
The Gothic tale.
- It's dark, and it's spooky,
and it involves castles.
And it involves secrets.
But the form, really,
by the time
that Poe becomes
acquainted with it,
has utterly gone to seed.
I mean, it is actually
pretty trashy,
and that is what Poe
is both drawn to
and appalled by about it.
- He knew that if he could
make these stories thicker,
in terms of
psychological complications,
he could, perhaps,
reach multiple audiences.
- That dark romantic vision,
combined
with the repressed sexuality,
the claustrophobia,
the fear that we all have,
all of these things together,
Poe's work is very complex.
- Readers could enjoy them just
because they're spooky stories.
Readers could enjoy them
as parodies of spooky stories.
And then, readers could
enjoy them as,
essentially, poetic essays
about the spookiness of stories.
♪♪
- But Thomas White, his editor,
was a careful businessman
in the business
of publishing a magazine.
So a story like "Berenice,"
that's the sort of thing
that would make
Thomas White nervous.
- "Mr. Poe, I have enormous faith
in your literary taste
and your attainments."
- Which I trust has been
well-rewarded
in the circulation numbers.
- "But I have received complaints
about your tale 'Berenice.""
- Thomas White felt
that "Berenice" was vulgar,
was much too sensationalistic.
- Poe felt
he needed to defend this
because "Berenice" represented
exactly the kind of story
he wanted to write.
- The tale may be in bad taste,
but the history of all magazines
plainly shows that
any that have attained celebrity
were indebted to articles in
nature similar to "Berenice"...
The ludicrous heightened
into the grotesque,
the witty exaggerated
into the burlesque,
and the singular wrought out
into the strange and mystical.
You may say that
this is in bad taste,
but whether the article is
or is not in bad taste
is little to the point.
To be appreciated, Mr. White,
you must be read.
- From the start of his career,
we have, in Poe,
two kinds of writers.
We have the producer
of popular work
that he knows is going to sell.
And yet, we have
this other writer
who has literary aspirations.
He wants to be taken seriously.
♪♪
- This should be a stable time
in his life,
but he's also miserable.
And he's miserable because
he's away from Maria Clemm
and he's away
from his cousin Virginia.
- While in Richmond, Poe learns
that a wealthy cousin
in Baltimore
has offered to take Virginia in
and pay for her schooling.
- This would have taken Virginia
away from Eddie,
and he panicked.
- I was blinded with tears.
I had no wish
to live another hour.
"My dearest Auntie,
I love Virginia..."
"passionately, devotedly."
"I cannot express in words
the fervent devotion
I feel toward
my dear little cousin."
♪♪
- Part of it for Poe was that
he had finally found a family
and he wanted to stay in it
for good.
- Virginia...
my love...
think well
before you break the heart
of your cousin.
- His desperate letters
convinced Maria and Virginia
to come to Richmond
to live with him,
there, as a family.
♪♪
- She's 13 years old.
He's 27.
It's a bit of a mismatch,
but it's not one
that was unknown for that time.
- In order to be married,
they had to lie about her age,
so it was obviously something
that was disapproved of
at the time.
- I think he loved her.
I really do think he loved her.
But not in a sexual way,
not in a grown-up way.
I think Eddie looked at her
as a little sis.
I mean, that's what
he called her.
- My own sweetest sissy.
- People around town
describe Virginia
as being very cheerful
and loving and very childlike.
Even when she was starting
to get a little bit older,
she'd rush out into the street
and embrace him
when he got home from work.
And they said they were
a fairly happy family.
No matter how poor Poe was,
he made sure his wife had tutors
and music instructors.
And he loved to hear her sing
and play the piano.
And he would play the flute
along with her.
And the mother-in-law,
she would sing along.
They have little concerts
together at night
while he's writing stories about
burying your wife
in the basement
or pulling out her teeth.
So, it was a reasonably normal,
happy homelife.
- "Dear Mr. Kennedy, I know you
will be pleased to hear this.
My health is better
than for years past.
My pecuniary difficulties
have vanished.
In a word, all is right."
- You might think, "Oh!
At last, he's arrived.
This is the work
that he was meant to do.
It's the source
of steady income."
Yet he only holds the job
for 15 months.
He said he left because
he quarreled with the editor.
He said that he was
too good for the magazine.
He wanted to move on, for sure.
Poe didn't get along well
with anybody, really, for long.
- Part of Poe's problem
with his boss was an issue
that would plague him
for the rest of his life.
- Alcoholism has run
in the Poe family for 250 years,
that we can document.
My great-great grandfather,
William,
wrote to Edgar talking
about the family curse.
He could go long periods of time
without drinking,
but once he was in a situation
where alcohol was present,
it was deadly for him.
- By age 28, Poe has begun
to build a literary reputation.
He leaves Richmond to try
his hand in New York City,
but he arrives on the eve
of one of the worst
financial recessions
in American history.
After a year of struggle,
he moves on to Philadelphia.
In 1839,
Poe lands an editing job
at Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine,
an up-and-coming periodical.
Maria, Virginia,
and Edgar settle in
for what will be their longest
stay in one city.
- Life in Philadelphia
was really the picture
of middle-class domesticity.
They had a little house.
They had a little yard.
You know, I think
they had some pets.
Poe was firing on all cylinders
creatively and, also,
as a magazine editor.
- Poe joins the busy literary
circles of Philadelphia,
making friends despite
his often caustic reviews.
Inevitably, he crosses paths
with another ambitious
young literary critic.
- Poe meets a person who would
become very, very significant
in our understanding
of Poe himself,
and that's
the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold.
- Rufus Griswold was
a reviewer and anthologizer.
Like Poe, he viewed himself
as an American tastemaker.
But, unlike Poe,
Griswold had no problem
trading positive reviews
for favors.
- Griswold was a great puffer.
If you puffed Griswold,
Griswold would puff you.
Poe had this kind
of piety about it.
Like, he wouldn't puff anybody,
and he didn't expect
anybody to puff him
because he thought that
there should be real value.
♪♪
- Poe's only source of steady
income is magazine work.
While he's editing
one periodical,
he's writing for another.
- Sometimes he was the only one
on the staff of the magazine,
commissioning,
proofreading, editing,
getting the illustrations,
going to the printer,
getting the paper,
choosing the type.
You know, there's a lot
of things you have to do.
The owner would
have another job.
He'd be an actor,
he'd be something,
and he'd have a business.
He'd go away, and there's
Eddie Poe sitting there.
- Given the technology
that produced that magazine,
that is exhausting work.
- Poe would go home
from the office every evening,
have dinner,
and then, he would write.
And he would stay up, you know,
late into the night writing.
- Poe could be an extraordinarily
disciplined
and productive writer.
It seemed to come out
of late nights,
drinking a lot of coffee,
and working on a deadline.
- And sometimes, Maria Clemm
would sit beside him,
keeping him company
while he composed these stories
that were totally unlike
what he did during the day.
- In his career, Poe would
write nearly 70 stories
in a range of genres,
aiming to reach
the widest possible audience.
- A third of his short stories
are comedies.
He liked a romantic comedy.
- Only a dozen of Poe's tales
are horror stories,
but they remain
his most popular...
among them "The Fall
of the House of Usher,"
"The Pit and the Pendulum,"
"The Masque of the Red Death,"
"The Black Cat,"
"The Premature Burial."
Poe was writing
in the old-fashioned genre
of the Gothic tale,
but the terrors
he was tapping into
were very much of the moment.
- Premature burial was a real
fear in the 19th century...
because people seemed dead,
but they weren't.
- As odd, as bizarre
as that seems,
during periods of epidemics...
And there were several
during Poe's lifetime...
There were lots
of public interments
taking place very hastily
without proper
medical examination.
And there were many,
many instances
of people actually being buried
before they were dead.
- Coffin makers provided gadgets
to allow the victim
to ring an alarm on the surface.
Poe devoured
this sensational account
and would work
the horrifying idea
into several stories.
- Premature internment
is the ultimate claustrophobia.
- "The unendurable oppression
of the lungs...
The stifling fumes
of the damp earth...
The clinging
to the death garments...
The rigid embrace
of the narrow house...
The blackness
of the absolute Night...
The silence like a sea
that overwhelms...
The unseen but palpable presence
of the Conqueror Worm..."
- Poe is talking about
the subject
that makes him
so universally interesting.
Except for sex.
You can't get anything
more human
and fundamental than fear.
♪♪
- Poe developed rules
about how to construct
a powerful short story.
- First, the artist must decide,
"Of all the innumerable effects
or impressions,
what one shall I select?"
- He sees the author or the poet
as being a craftsman
who really has
to weed away anything
that doesn't go towards
that single effect.
- If the very initial sentence
does not bring out this effect,
then he has failed
in his first step.
- He had so many famous
first lines
that immediately pull you into
the setting and the character.
- "The Cask of Amontillado"...
"The thousand injuries
of Fortunato
I had borne as I best could;
but when he ventured
upon insult,
I vowed revenge."
- "The Pit and the Pendulum"...
"I was sick...
Sick unto death
with that long agony;
and when at length
they unbound me,
and I was permitted to sit,
I felt that my senses
were leaving me."
- "The Black Cat"...
"For the most wild,
yet most homely narrative
which I am about to pen,
I neither expect
nor solicit belief."
♪♪
- Poe is responding to
a new American urban culture
which is very aware of crime.
There was a lot of poverty.
There was a lot of class rivalry
and competition.
There was urban violence.
- It was a time of great
uncertainty for Americans.
There were great
financial panics.
There were poor on the streets.
There were immigrants.
What was going to happen
to this country?
Nobody knew.
- Anxious and unsettled,
the reading public
welcomed reassurance.
- There was a great popular
appetite for stories
in which problems
or complexities were resolved.
Characters would, through some
sort of happenstance or fate,
figure out their problems,
resolve their dilemmas.
Justice would be done.
- Ever aware of
the public's tastes,
Poe recognized an appetite
for a new kind of fiction.
- What Poe did is he took
that desire for rationality
and order imposed upon chaos
and created a form
that could satisfy that
in a modern way,
in a way that was plausible
to readers.
- With just three short tales,
Poe invented
a new genre of literature,
the detective story,
with a new breed of hero.
- "Residing in Paris
during the spring
and part of the summer,
I there contracted an intimacy
with
a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin."
- In C. Auguste Dupin,
Poe invents the detective
that we've been living with
ever since.
- "" The police are confounded
by the seeming absence
of motive, ' said Dupin.
In fact, the facility
with which I shall arrive
or have arrived at the solution
of this mystery
is in the direct ratio
of its apparent insolubility
in the eyes of the police."
- That really eccentric,
brilliant central figure
and the sidekick who's kind of
a stand-in for the reader...
- "I stared at the speaker
in mute astonishment."
- and a confrontation
of the suspect
at the end of it
and false leads,
all the things that we think
of as these classic aspects
of a detective story,
they all come together at once
in that
first detective story of Poe's.
- If you've never read
the Dupin stories
and you just only
have read Holmes,
then you know the character
because Holmes is
a rip-off of Dupin.
And so is
pretty much everybody else.
So is Nero Wolfe.
So is Hercule Poirot.
So is House on television.
- Poe's finally making
a name for himself,
but he's not making money.
At the time,
U.S. law provided virtually
no copyright protection.
- So, even if you had
a successful piece of writing
that was a big hit,
a bunch of other people
would run off copies of it
without paying you.
- His works could be published
in England without paying him,
and English works
by people like Dickens
could be published in America
without paying Dickens.
So, if you can
publish Dickens for free,
why should you pay Poe?
- Looking for an edge
in the marketplace,
Poe deliberately crafted
an intriguing public persona.
- I am excessively slothful
and wonderfully industrious
by fits.
Thus, if I rambled
and dreamed away whole months
and awake at last
to a sort of mania
for composition,
then I scribble all day
and read all night
so long as the disease endures.
- But, despite all his efforts,
poverty continued to stalk Poe.
- You see him working
12, 14 hours a day
as an editor
or as a hack writer.
I think it almost ruined him
as an imaginative writer.
- I've been, so far,
essentially,
a magazinist,
bearing not only willingly,
but cheerfully,
the sad poverty
that the condition
of the mere magazinist
of tales upon him in America,
where, in more than
any other region
upon the face of the globe,
to be poor is to be despised.
♪♪
- Even at his lowest moments,
Poe never lets go
of his identity as a poet.
Poetry would always
be his first love.
In 1841, he learns
that Rufus Griswold
is compiling
an authoritative collection
of American poetry.
- Griswold is coming out with
this massive anthology called
"The Poets and Poetry
of America."
So, of course, Poe is desperate
to get himself into this book.
- Griswold does publish
a few of Poe's poems.
Then, he asks Poe to return
the favor by reviewing the book.
- Poe pointed out what was good
about Griswold's anthology,
but then,
he said what was bad about it.
- Oh, he has some talents,
we allow.
But, as a critic, his judgement
is worthless,
simply because reason
and thinking
are entirely out
of Mr. Griswold's sphere.
- Griswold took great exception
to that, was highly offended,
and was an enemy of Poe
for the rest of his life.
- Poe really had a knack
for making enemies.
You really have to
give it to him.
♪♪
- Though he was often a prickly
personality outside the house,
by all accounts,
Poe was the opposite at home.
He was devoted
to his child bride,
now a young woman,
and visitors noted
that Virginia adored her Eddie.
- One afternoon or evening,
Virginia was singing,
and she seems to burst
a blood vessel.
- And she started
coughing up blood.
- It's the first signs
of tuberculosis.
- It casts a shadow over Poe
that lasted for years,
and, no matter what
his successes were,
that was a constant for him,
his worry about
his wife's health.
- My dear little wife
has been dangerously ill
a fortnight since,
while singing,
she ruptured a blood vessel,
and it was only on yesterday
that the physicians gave me
any hope of her recovery.
You might imagine
the agony I've suffered...
for you know
how devotedly I love her.
♪♪
- At age 35, Poe decides
to move his family
to New York City,
hoping to capitalize
on his growing reputation.
- "New York, Sunday morning,
April 7th... My dear Maria,
we have just this minute
done breakfast,
and I now sit down to write you
about everything."
- Edgar and Virginia go first
and report back to Maria Clemm.
- "Last night, we had the nicest
tea you ever drank,
strong and hot,
wheat bread and rye bread,
cheese, tea cakes.
No fear of starving here.
Sis is delighted.
She has coughed hardly any
and had no night sweat."
- I feel in excellent spirits
and haven't drank a drop,
so that I hope so
to get out of trouble.
The very instance I scrape
together enough money,
I will send it on.
- 1845 proves to be the year
of Edgar Allan Poe.
In January, less than a year
after arriving in New York,
he publishes the poem
that will make him
internationally famous.
- "The Raven"
is his breakthrough.
It's the literary work, the poem
that sort of puts him
on the literary map
in a way that he had
never been before.
- I would imagine that Poe
felt like he finally made it
when he was part of
Anne Charlotte Lynch's
literary events every Saturday,
because everybody
who was anybody came.
They would turn the lights down.
He had to read "The Raven,"
of course, over and over.
Everybody wanted to hear him
read "The Raven."
And he spoke in
a very dramatic voice.
It ran in his blood.
He was quite the entertainer.
- "Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered,
weak and weary,
over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore...
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
as of someone gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, ' I muttered,
'tapping at my chamber door...
Only this and nothing more. ""
♪♪
- It was a poem about
the common plight of people,
where half of all children died
before they reached maturity
and everyone understood
what it means to grieve.
- "Then, methought,
the air grew denser,
perfume from an unseen
censer swung by Seraphim,
whose foot-falls
tinkled on the tufted floor."
- The silken, sad, uncertain
rustling of each purple curtain
thrilled me.
You know, that there's
just a lusciousness
about the sonorities and so on
in a line like that
that had a great impact on me.
It really did.
- "And the Raven, never flitting,
still is sitting,
still is sitting
on the pallid bust of Pallas
just above my chamber door.
And his eyes have
all the seeming of a demon's
that is dreaming,
and the lamp-light
o'er him streaming
throws his shadow on the floor.
And my soul from out that shadow
that lies floating on the floor
shall be lifted...
Nevermore!"
- He wanted fame.
And, boy, did he get it
with "The Raven."
In fact, he couldn't even
walk down the street
without kids following behind
flapping their wings
and people calling out,
"There's the raven."
- He created a persona that
captured the minds of so many.
The way he presented himself
in portraiture,
his identification
with "The Raven,"
you don't want to say
it was a shtick,
but it's one...
It's a shtick that stuck.
- He wasn't just this grim
reaper, this man of the night.
He could be tremendously witty.
He was a kind of lady's man.
- Poe became close friends
with Frances Sargent Osgood,
a popular poet,
a member
of the same literary circles,
and a married woman.
- Virginia is at home
dying of tuberculosis.
And he's carrying on
with this other woman.
- Here, he had this
compelling woman
come into his life, Frances,
who could write love poetry.
And I think it turned his head
away from poor Virginia.
But everybody at the time
was talking about it.
It was such a scandal.
- And it's at this time that he
and Griswold crossed paths again
and not in a pleasant way,
because Griswold has well-known
affections for Osgood.
- Rufus Griswold must have
just been steaming.
Poe was stealing his dream.
Poe was doing everything
he wanted,
including taking the girl.
- His new fame allows him
to borrow money
and realize his long-held dream.
He buys a magazine.
- So, he had this great success
with "The Raven."
And he was finally
becoming known.
And then, for some
completely bizarre reason,
he decides to pick a fight
with the most-loved poet
in America at the time...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- Longfellow would become
the most prosperous,
successful, and adored writer
in America.
And, of course,
he was a professor at Harvard.
He was a Bostonian
par excellence.
- The poetical claims
of Mr. Longfellow
are vastly overrated.
Overrated.
And that the individual himself
would be little esteemed
without the accessories
of wealth and position.
- Longfellow was the person
that Poe was supposed to be
if he had stayed in college,
if he'd inherited that money
from the Allans.
And when he saw Longfellow,
he saw someone that had the life
that he should have had
but was denied.
- He accused Longfellow
of being a plagiarist.
But he also profoundly
disapproved
of the sort of writing
that Longfellow was doing.
He could see that Longfellow
was a brilliant versifier.
But he thought that Longfellow
didn't understand
what poetry was about,
that his poetry had no soul.
- But there was
a political dimension
to Poe's attacks
on Longfellow...
The slavery debate.
Poe himself never
spoke out directly
to defend or condemn slavery.
But he was a loyal son
of the south.
- It's not as if Poe
just grew up in the south
and there was slavery
in the south.
Slaves were imported
right down the street
from where Poe was living
as a teenager.
They were bought and sold.
They were imprisoned there.
Poe, inevitably, would have
seen human trafficking
on an almost daily basis.
- But above all, Poe was
a purist about literature.
For him, the greater sin
may have been that Longfellow
and other New England writers
injected politics
into their poetry.
- We despise them and defy them,
the transcendental vagabonds.
They may all go
to the devil together.
- There's something
self-destructive
in Poe's strafings
against Longfellow.
What Poe calls,
in another context,
the imp of the perverse,
that force inside of us
that compels us to our own doom.
- "We have a task before us which
must be speedily performed.
We know it will be ruinous
to make delay.
It must, it shall be
undertaken today.
And yet we put it off
until tomorrow.
Now, why?
There is no answer,
except that we feel perverse."
- As Americans,
we always want to
think of ourselves
as perfectible.
That's the American dream,
right?
But Poe sees the dark side
of the American dream.
He sees the way that we
sometimes do things wrong
almost in spite of ourselves
and almost because we know
they're wrong.
So, Poe really prefigures
our understanding
of human psychology.
- "There is no passion in nature
so demonically impatient,
as him who,
shuddering on the edge
of a precipice,
thus meditates a plunge."
- When you have Poe's history...
Unwanted, unloved,
feeling not important enough...
Perhaps that turns you
into somebody
who's a bit too careless
and reckless
because there's this pervasive,
nagging notion that you
will never be good enough.
- In just one year,
the scandalous relationship
with Frances Osgood
and Poe's attacks on Longfellow
have undone his accomplishments.
He made practically nothing
from "The Raven"
after the first printing
and was forced
to shut down his magazine.
Poe, Virginia, and Maria
escape Manhattan
for a cottage
in Fordham, New York.
- He's out in this
sort of farmland.
There's apple trees.
He's trying to tame a bird.
It should be
a very bucolic scene.
But what you have is Poe
very ill a lot of the time
but trying his hardest
to keep writing
and Virginia
just declining and declining.
- "The autumn came, and Mrs. Poe
sank rapidly in consumption."
"She lay on the straw bed,
wrapped in her
husband's greatcoat,
a large tortoiseshell cat
on her bosom,
the sufferer's
only means of warmth."
♪♪
- Virginia held on
into the winter months.
Occasional moments
of improvement
were followed
by inevitable decline.
♪♪
- It was
a never-ending oscillation
between hope and despair
which I could no longer tolerate
without loss of reason.
I became insane with long
intervals of horrible sanity.
During these fits of
absolute unconsciousness,
I drank God only knows
how much, how often.
A matter of course,
my enemies refer the insanity
to the drink
rather the drink
to the insanity.
I had, indeed, almost abandoned
all hope of a permanent cure
when I found one
in the death of my wife.
♪♪
- The impact of Virginia's death
was just devastating.
It nearly undid him altogether.
- Most of the people that Poe
loved died of consumption.
If you pay much attention
to American history,
though, most of the people
that most people loved
died of consumption
or childbirth.
It is the sad tragedy
of human existence
in a 19th-century city.
- Oh, God.
How melancholy an existence.
- Poe published very little
in 1847.
He was able to do very little.
He focused his attention
on writing "Eureka."
- In the depths of his grief,
Poe produces
his most eccentric work,
a long essay that attempts
to explain
the origins of the universe.
Some interpreters see within it
a glimpse
of 20th-century physics.
- Poe develops not only
the basic concepts
of relativity theory
but also the big bang theory.
And he expands
on why the universe
has so much empty space.
- One of the things
that's remarkable about it
is how modern it is
as a cosmology
when you consider he had nothing
to work from, really.
- What is it that induces
in the poet himself
the poetical effect?
He recognizes the...
- In 1848, he began
giving public lectures again,
began traveling again,
began socializing again.
- He wanted to remarry.
He wanted a rich wife.
He needed a rich wife.
If he had a rich wife,
he could have his own magazine.
And he would not have to be
a Grub Street hack anymore.
- This launched him on a series
of near engagements,
all of which
turned out very badly.
- While he was courting one,
he was courting another.
He was proposing to one,
he was seeing another.
- As your eyes rested appealingly
for one brief moment upon mine,
I saw that you were Helen,
my Helen.
- When you read what he said
to the women he was courting,
including falling on his knees
and hand over the heart
and four lock down
and heavy breathing
and all kinds of promises,
it seems just so over-the-top.
- She tenderly kissed me.
She fondly caressed.
And then I fell gently
to sleep on her breast.
- The women he was pursuing were
not 13-year-old tubercular girls
who were going to be
reliant on him.
These were often working poets
who had their own livelihood
to protect.
- One of them was a woman
named Sarah Helen Whitman.
They had a courtship
that had culminated,
Poe thought, in her accepting
his proposal of marriage.
When Poe learned
that Sarah Whitman
had decided not to marry him,
the wheels really came off.
He tried to commit suicide.
- I procured 2 ounces
of laudanum.
My struggles were more
than I could bear.
A friend was at hand
who aided me
and, if it can be called saving,
saved me.
- Less than a year later,
his fortunes changed
practically overnight.
- He'd found a financial backer
so he could start
his own literary magazine,
The Stylus.
- Poe set off on a journey
to raise more money.
- "My plan was to take a tour
through the principal states,
especially west and south,
lecturing as I went
to pay expenses."
Thoroughly dignified and
supremely noble than the poem.
The death, then,
of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably,
the most poetical topic
in the world.
- The last stop was Richmond,
the city he had left
more than a decade earlier.
- When Poe came back to Richmond,
he was Edgar "The Raven" Poe.
He was a household name,
and he was a celebrity
returning back to his hometown.
He visited old friends.
He made new ones.
His sister and her foster family
were still living in Richmond,
and they welcomed him
into their home.
- This poem, written solely
for the poem's sake.
- Poe renewed his friendship
with a childhood flame,
Elmira Royster Shelton,
who was now a wealthy widow.
- And he really started
courting Elmira seriously.
Elmira might have been
skeptical of Poe's motives,
but she finally agreed
to marry him.
- Poe wrote to his mother-in-law
that it would clearly be
a marriage of convenience.
- "My own darling Muddy,
I confess that my heart sinks
at the idea of this marriage.
I think, however, that it
will certainly take place,
and that immediately."
- But before Poe
and Elmira could marry,
Edgar had a trip to make.
He would travel to Philadelphia
for a brief editing job,
then on to New York
to pick up Maria Clemm
and bring her back to Richmond
for the wedding.
- "He came up to my house
on the evening
of the 26th of September
to take leave of me.
He was very sad and complained
of being quite sick.
I felt his pulse and found
he had a considerable fever
and did not think it probable
that he would be able to
start the next morning."
"I went up early the next
morning to inquire after him.
I discovered he had left
on the boat for Baltimore."
- There is an irony in the fact
that the death of Poe,
who wrote the first
detective story,
became a mystery.
♪♪
- Poe arrived by steamboat
in Baltimore
on September 28, 1849.
His plan was to immediately
board the train
for Philadelphia,
then travel on to New York.
- It seems very strange
for us to think
that a man like Edgar Allan Poe
could just vanish.
But that's exactly what happened
for about five days.
♪♪
- When he was found,
he was still in Baltimore,
semiconscious,
dressed in ill-fitting
second-hand clothes
that looked nothing like
the kind of clothes
he would have worn.
- Eventually, he's recognized
as the famous writer.
And an old friend is found
to take him to the hospital.
- He spent his last four days
delirious,
in and out of consciousness,
talking to shadows on the wall,
not making any sense.
- Four days later, Poe is dead
at the age of 40.
- Poe dies alone
without it ever being
completely clear
what exactly
he was suffering from.
- Poe's mysterious death
has prompted dozens of theories,
that he suffered from rabies
or died from a brain tumor,
or perhaps he was
an accidental victim
of warring political gangs
on the streets of Baltimore.
It's unlikely
we'll ever know the answer.
- Thank heaven the crisis,
the danger has passed.
The lingering illness
is over at last.
And the fever called living
is conquered at last.
♪♪
- Within a few days
of the author's death,
the character
assassination began.
- Poe made the mistake of dying
before his greatest
literary enemy, Rufus Griswold.
Griswold wrote
the obituary of Poe,
and, in it, he pilloried Poe.
He took him apart.
- He says,
"Edgar Allan Poe is dead.
Many will be shocked by this,
but very few people
will be grieved by it."
He says, "Poe had few
or no friends."
He was, sort of,
this miserable person.
But Poe's friends,
and he did have many friends,
rallied to his defense
and wrote
more favorable obituaries.
But, of course, the damage
is done by that point.
♪♪
- The hallowing Poe
that Griswold invented
lives on
generation after generation,
ensuring Poe's iconic place
in popular culture.
But it will always be
Poe's writing
that is his real legacy.
- I stand amid the roar
of a surf-tormented shore,
and I hold within my hand
grains of the golden sand...
How few!
Yet how they creep
through my fingers to the deep,
while I weep, while I weep.
Oh, God!
Can I not grasp them
with a tighter clasp?
Oh, God!
Can I not save one
from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
but a dream within a dream?
♪♪
♪♪
♪♪
- When Edgar Allan Poe
came to Baltimore,
he was famous.
He was making money
off of his lecture tours.
He had found financial backing
to establish his magazine,
which was his great dream.
He was about to marry
his childhood sweetheart.
- Who is it?
No. No, thank you.
I will be on a train
to New York.
I have no need of a room.
♪♪
- And he died.
- And who is it
that gets the opportunity
to announce to America
that Poe has died?
His sometime friend
but also literary rival,
the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold,
who wrote the very first
obituary of Poe.
- Griswold succeeded
in establishing
the modern perception of Poe
really as the same person
as one of the characters
in his stories,
as someone who is
mentally deranged,
as someone who is homicidal,
a drinking, drug-using,
womanizing scoundrel.
That's an invention of Griswold.
It's a complete fabrication.
- Who was the real
Edgar Allan Poe?
I feel like he slips further
away from me
the more I know about him.
♪♪
♪♪
- In 1843, a hard-working
magazine editor,
poet, and writer named Edgar Poe
published one of
the most popular horror stories
ever written.
- "True!
Nervous... very,
very dreadfully nervous
I had been and am,
but why will you say
that I am mad?
The disease had sharpened
my senses...
Not destroyed...
Not dulled them."
- The narrator grabs you
right in the first sentence.
He said something like, "Mad?
You think I am mad?" You know?
"People say I'm mad.
I'm not mad!"
And then he's clearly mad,
and yet he's
telling you this story
that's mad and sane
at the same time.
- The narrator creeps
into an old man's room
and murders him
while he's sleeping.
- "You should've seen
how wisely I proceeded...
With what caution...
With what foresight...
With what dissimulation
I went to work!
I was never kinder
to the old man
than during the whole week
before I killed him."
- It has the barest elements
of a shocking murder story,
and yet he turns it
into something that's universal.
- Poe's stories were often set
in nameless places,
their time left vague.
But in the 1840s,
his themes resonated
in a raw, new nation
that had yet to wrestle
with some basic flaws.
♪♪
- Poe writes about
violence and cruelty,
madness and irrationality,
existential doubt and dread.
He wanted Americans
to understand
what was strange
about their own culture.
He saw that strangeness,
the strangeness
that most people didn't see.
♪♪
- There is so much emotion
in those stories
that we sometimes misread
only for horror or for shock.
But really, what it is,
is a kind of love.
Throughout his life, he was
searching for unequivocal love.
♪♪
- Poe's mother was an actress
who lived in Boston
when she gave birth
to her second son in 1809.
- Eliza Poe was a star
of American theater,
especially American
musical theater,
especially comedy.
- She also, of course,
had a beautiful singing voice.
She was called the nightingale.
- ♪ Some tell me
I'm pretty and fair ♪
♪ Some call me haughty and shy ♪
♪ Some tell me
they'd happily be wed ♪
♪ But nobody... ♪
- In speaking of my mother,
you have touched a string
to which my heart
fully responds.
- ♪ Oh, what shall I do? ♪
♪ Nobody comes from anything ♪
- It was December of 1811,
and Eliza Poe had been abandoned
by her husband.
She was left with three children
for which she had the sole care,
and she was dying
from tuberculosis.
- With Edgar, his brother,
and his sister
about to lose their mother,
a local newspaper
printed an appeal.
- "On this night, Mrs. Poe
asks your assistance,
perhaps for the last time."
♪♪
- When Mrs. Poe finally died,
she was just 24 years old.
Edgar was just 2.
- Some accounts have him
at her death bed.
That would be
quite a shocking thing.
- I myself never knew her,
never knew the affection
of a father.
Oh, I have had many occasional
dealings with adversity,
but the want
of parental affection
has been the heaviest
of my trials.
No one was ever prouder than I
of my decent from a woman
who gave to the stage
her brief career
of genius and beauty.
They said that when she died,
the theater was deprived
of one of its chief ornaments.
♪♪
- He never really
got over her death.
The sense of his early loss
stayed with Poe constantly.
I think it appears
in many of his works.
Poe was really haunted by it
his whole life long.
♪♪
- Edgar, his brother, and sister
went to separate homes.
Edgar was taken in by
a childless Richmond couple,
John and Frances Allan.
Frances was one
of the local women
who had helped Eliza Poe
through her final illness.
- Frances Allan had been
orphaned herself,
so she could sympathize
with Edgar's plight.
She must've thought Edgar was
just a perfect little angel.
She dressed him up in little
velvet suits and cape,
and he always just worshipped
his foster mother,
Frances Allan.
He just thought
the world of her.
- But Edgar's relationship
with his foster father
would be more complicated.
- John Allan was a merchant,
so he had that kind of
bootstraps character about him,
very no-nonsense,
very business-oriented.
He was also kind
of a hard figure.
His own friends
describe him that way,
that he could be
very unforgiving.
- John Allan never
let Edgar forget
that he was not his real son,
that he was a foster son.
And so, Poe grows up feeling
like he's both in a family
but not really in a family.
- It's a very tenuous way
to live.
I think by becoming a poet,
it was a way of
establishing himself.
It was a way of becoming Poe,
because he wasn't really allowed
to become an Allan.
- We think of Poe often
as a frail character.
But, in fact, he was an athlete.
- Running, boxing, swimming...
Edgar seemed driven
to outdo his classmates.
- When he was 15 years old,
one of his fellow students
bet him
he couldn't swim down the river
a couple miles.
So, Poe took that bet,
and he ended up swimming
6 miles.
- Against the tide.
This was no small feat.
It was one way
that he was able to prove
that he was the equal
of any of his peers.
- I think it's fair to say that
Poe often
had a chip on his shoulder.
- Bright, quick-witted,
and rebellious,
Edgar deliberately
set himself apart.
He became a fan of the popular
bad-boy poet of the day.
- George Gordon... Lord Byron...
Was an English poet
who cultivated this image
of the isolated artist
at odds
with the rest of the world.
Poe consciously adopted
that Byronic pose,
even to the point of dressing
in black and, you know,
looking in the distance
at nothing in particular
and so on.
- The similarity between Poe
and Byron is quite remarkable.
They had a similarly
very difficult childhood...
Abandoned, abused.
It pervades the way
they think about the world
and the way they see the world...
Loss and fear,
two great subjects
in both of their writings.
- From childhood's hour,
I have not been as others were.
I have not seen as others saw.
I could not bring my passions
from a common spring.
From the same source,
I have not taken my sorrows.
I could not waken my heart
to joy at the same tone,
and all I've loved...
I've loved alone.
♪♪
- The woman who encouraged him
to write poetry
was the mother
of his best friend.
- When Mr. Allan
was arguing with Poe
and telling him
not to waste his time
reading this Lord Byron garbage,
she gave him that encouragement
that he needed.
- I think Poe had
a little schoolboy crush.
She must've reminded him
of his own biological mother
in certain ways.
She had that same
sort of ethereal look about her.
- Unfortunately,
mental illness took her.
We don't know the origins of it,
and then she died.
And it affected him profoundly.
- He went to her cemetery
at night
and kept a vigil at her grave.
- I can't imagine that he had
a profound love relationship
with Jane Stanard,
but he made it into something
which had emotional,
romantic, and literary potential
that could be exploited.
- "Helen, thy beauty is to me
like those Nicéan barks of yore,
that gently,
o'er a perfumed sea,
the weary,
way-worn wanderer bore
to his own native shore."
- Some years later, Poe said
that he wrote the poem
"To Helen" thinking of her.
- Thy hyacinth hair,
thy classic face,
thy Naiad airs
have brought me home
to the glory that was Greece,
and the grandeur that was Rome.
- Young Edgar was not alone
in his experiences of loss.
Early 19th-century America
had a mortality rate
more than three times
that of today.
- You could have someone who was
in apparently good health
carried away very quickly
and very tragically.
You could also have someone,
because of TB,
slowly dying away.
And childbirth was another
great cause of mortality.
♪♪
- Very elaborate cemeteries
were just becoming popular
in America at the time.
- This was a great age of
funereal sculpture and mementos.
While it sometimes seems odd
to 21st-century readers
that Poe was always
writing about death and dying,
it's not at all unusual
if you think about
what he was witnessing
in the 1820s and 1830s
when he was surrounded
by this culture of death.
- And so, being young
and dipped in folly,
I fell in love with melancholy
and used to throw
my earthly rest
and quiet all the way in jest.
I could not love
except where Death was mingling
his with Beauty's breath.
♪♪
- In 1826, John Allan agreed
to send 17-year-old Edgar
to the brand-new
University of Virginia.
It was his first step
toward the creative life
he's beginning to imagine
for himself.
- He would evince his versatile
talents by sketching
fantastic and grotesque figures
with such artistic skill,
as to leave us all in doubt
whether in afterlife
Poe would be painter or poet.
- It's the archetypal
college experience.
He's in a dorm.
It's kind of a crazy situation,
lots of fights going on,
but he's also allowed to excel
in these classes,
especially language classes.
He's also able to now
spend lots of time reading,
and, in fact, his father
started complaining,
"You're spending
all your time doing things
like reading 'Don Quixote.'
What are you doing?"
- Unfortunately, John Allan
did not pay Poe's fees.
He made a partial payment,
did not provide him with money
to buy books and equipment
so that he could actually
pursue his studies.
- Poe tries gambling
to raise some money,
but by the end
of his first semester,
he is deep in debt.
- And then he appeals to Allan,
and Allan says,
"Why the hell should I pay
your gambling debts?
You know,
why don't you come back
and do some decent work
and earn a living?"
- Hounded by creditors,
Poe is forced to withdraw
from the university
and return to the Allan mansion
in Richmond.
But his quarrels with his
foster father only get worse.
- "Sir, my determination
is at length taken,
to leave your house and endeavor
to find some place
in this wide world
where I will be treated
not as you have treated me."
♪♪
- I took lodging at a tavern,
taking with me
only the clothing on my back
and barely enough pennies
to buy bread.
- He moved to Boston
at the age of 18.
Why would he choose
to come to Boston
of all the cities
that were possible?
Maybe he remembers
that his mother,
in the one gift
that she left to him,
a watercolor of Boston Harbor,
had written on the back,
"For my little son Edgar.
May he ever love Boston,
the place where his mother
found her best
and most sympathetic friends."
- He tries working
for a newspaper for a while.
It doesn't go well.
He's nearly getting thrown out
by his landlady
because he's out of money.
He's got creditors after him,
so Poe joins the Army
because he's got to disappear
for a while.
- He actually enlists under
the name of Edgar A. Perry.
- The ironic thing is,
Poe actually turns out
to be a really good soldier.
- While stationed in Boston,
Poe gathers poems
he'd written as a teenager
into a slim collection of verse.
- It's called "Tamerlane
and Other Poems."
Probably about 50 copies
were self-published.
- He's 18 years old
when "Tamerlane" comes out.
Although this was heavily
indebted to Byron,
there's something there
that is not yet developed
but that over
the next decade, certainly,
Poe is going to shine
into perfect little gems.
- I was young and was a poet.
If deep worship of all beauty
could make me one,
I would've given the world
to embody half the ideas afloat
in my imagination.
♪♪
- While Edgar was in the Army,
his foster mother,
Frances Allan,
died after a lingering illness.
- It's said that when he returned
to Richmond
a day late for her funeral
and saw how close her grave was
to that of Jane Stanard's,
he was just devastated and just
wept right on that spot.
- With his mother resting
in an unmarked grave
at St. John's Church,
these were Poe's
three mothers growing up,
all gone by the time he is 20.
♪♪
- "Out... out are
the lights... out all!
And, over each quivering form,
the curtain, a funeral pall,
comes down
with the rush of a storm,
while the angels,
all pallid and wan,
uprising, unveiling,
affirm that the play
is the tragedy, 'Man, '
and its hero,
the Conqueror Worm."
- In the months
after Fanny Allan's death,
Edgar prevails on his
foster father one more time.
He wants John Allan to help him
get into West Point,
perhaps thinking
a military career
will provide him the luxury
to write poetry.
- But there is a whole level
of discipline involved
at West Point that Poe
was really not prepared for,
and he started to really
resent his instructors,
really resent the routine,
and started writing
this really vicious poetry,
actually,
about a lot of his instructors,
which is, if anything,
what he became known for
at West Point.
- Within a few months
of arriving,
Poe tries
to leave the military academy.
When he couldn't get
an honorable discharge,
he gets himself thrown out.
- He just broke all the rules.
He didn't turn up for drill.
He didn't turn up for class.
We're getting to the pattern of
Poe is putting a wrench
into his own wheel,
to mix a metaphor, you know.
He's screwing himself up
right away.
- Having burnt his bridges
with the military
and with his foster father,
Poe starts over once again.
At 22, the young poet
moves to the one city
where he has blood relatives.
- It was in Baltimore
that he began to cobble together
a sort of family
made up of Maria Clemm,
who is his aunt,
and Virginia Clemm,
who was his first cousin.
- Edgar moves into his Aunt
Maria Clemm's small house,
seeking roots in a family
of his own.
- He finally found
some sort of stability.
He found a household
that he could live in.
- Edgar sets out to pursue
a career in literature.
Writing was not a paying job
in 1830s America,
but Poe hadn't given up
hope of an inheritance.
- Then, his foster father,
John Allan, dies in 1834,
and the will leaves Poe nothing.
- John Allan had several
illegitimate children,
and even
the illegitimate children
were recognized in the will,
but Poe got not a penny.
That's tough.
That was the breaking point
between Poe and his memories
of being part
of the Allan family.
Although we think of him today
as Edgar Allan Poe,
in his lifetime, Poe almost
never used the middle name.
It was always Edgar Poe
or Edgar A. Poe.
♪♪
- In the space of a few years,
Poe has gone
from being the scion
of a wealthy Virginia family
to being in a hovel
and having no apparent future
in front of him.
- "Dear sir, your kind invitation
to dinner today
has wounded me to the quick.
I cannot come, and for reasons
of the most humiliating nature
in my personal appearance."
- He has this terrible ability
to write a begging
threatening letter,
where the begging doesn't work
and the threatening
doesn't work.
- "If you will be my friend
so far as to loan me $20,
I will call on you tomorrow.
Otherwise,
it will be impossible,
and I must submit to my fate."
♪♪
- In the early 1830s,
America entered
a new age of mass media.
Growing cities
and rising literacy rates
created a vast new market
of readers.
- There's a huge
literary movement going on,
the golden age of periodicals.
You have journals and magazines
cropping up all over the place.
Sort of like the blogosphere
is now, right?
- Though still a poet at heart,
Edgar realizes
the reading public
wants a different kind
of writing... the short story.
At age 24, he wins
a local fiction contest
with a strange tale
of disaster at sea.
Along with the $50 prize
come enthusiastic reviews
and a job offer.
♪♪
Poe leaves his newfound family,
Maria and young cousin Virginia,
and moves back to Richmond,
the city where
he had been disowned.
He will be the editor of
The Southern Literary Messenger,
a struggling new publication
devoted to elevating
the literature of the south.
- Thomas W. White,
the owner and publisher,
was someone who frankly
understood his limits
in the magazine world
and turned a lot of work
over to Poe.
- He'd been thinking of himself
as a writer
ever since he was a child.
But now, he's also
thinking about himself
as a professional
who works with words.
- This is the first chance
that he has
to get his foot in the door
as an editor,
as a magazinist,
as an American tastemaker.
- Poe's many responsibilities
will include
writing book reviews,
and he vows to be
a serious literary critic.
He believed it was time
his young nation produced work
every bit as sophisticated
as British literature.
- A lot of American critics
in the early 19th century
have the idea that,
in order to invent
an American literature,
we can't afford to denigrate
any American writer.
- They called it puffing,
you know.
That is just to sort of
mindlessly praise anything
that had been written
by an American.
- Poe's way of elevating
American literature
was by not cutting writers
any slack.
- "We see no reason
why Colonel Crockett
shouldn't be permitted
to expose himself
if he pleases
and to be as much laughed at
as he thinks proper."
- Poe earned the reputation and
the nickname the "Tomahawk Man."
He was antagonistic.
He was hypercritical.
- Work is especially censorable
for the frequent vulgarity
of his language.
- But the criticisms that he made
were well-deserved.
He was being
a responsible reviewer,
and most of the people
he reviewed
are deservedly forgotten today.
- It is a mere
jumble of absurdities.
- I think he did that
because he found,
"Ah, that sets me apart,"
and people loved it.
You know,
people always love dirt.
- I cannot bring myself to feel
any goadings of conscience
for undue severity.
I intend to put up with nothing
that I can put down.
- Poe was writing a kind
of literary criticism
that didn't exist in America
at the time.
He would do a line-by-line,
word-by-word
dissection of the text.
♪♪
- In addition to that,
this is where
he really starts
to write stories
that we would recognize
as Poe stories.
- Though committed to elevating
American literature,
Poe believes he can also feed
the popular appetite
for entertainment.
- And "Berenice," which runs in
the Southern Literary Messenger,
is a good example of this.
It's a pretty weird
and disturbing piece of work.
- "I slowly raised my eyes to
the countenance of the corpse.
There had been a band
around the jaws,
but, I know not how,
it was broken asunder.
The livid lips were wreathed
into a species of smile,
and, through
the enveloping gloom,
once again, there glared upon me
in too palpable reality,
the white and glistening
and ghastly teeth of Berenice."
- In a fit of madness,
the narrator pulls the teeth
from the corpse of his fiancée.
- "With a shriek,
I bounded to the table
and grasped the ebony box
that lay upon it.
It slipped out of my hands
and fell heavily
and burst into pieces,
and from it,
with a rattling sound,
there rolled out
some instruments
of dental surgery,
intermingled with many white
and glistening substances
that were scattered
to and fro about the floor."
- Poe was writing in
a well-known genre
that had been popular
for over 70 years...
The Gothic tale.
- It's dark, and it's spooky,
and it involves castles.
And it involves secrets.
But the form, really,
by the time
that Poe becomes
acquainted with it,
has utterly gone to seed.
I mean, it is actually
pretty trashy,
and that is what Poe
is both drawn to
and appalled by about it.
- He knew that if he could
make these stories thicker,
in terms of
psychological complications,
he could, perhaps,
reach multiple audiences.
- That dark romantic vision,
combined
with the repressed sexuality,
the claustrophobia,
the fear that we all have,
all of these things together,
Poe's work is very complex.
- Readers could enjoy them just
because they're spooky stories.
Readers could enjoy them
as parodies of spooky stories.
And then, readers could
enjoy them as,
essentially, poetic essays
about the spookiness of stories.
♪♪
- But Thomas White, his editor,
was a careful businessman
in the business
of publishing a magazine.
So a story like "Berenice,"
that's the sort of thing
that would make
Thomas White nervous.
- "Mr. Poe, I have enormous faith
in your literary taste
and your attainments."
- Which I trust has been
well-rewarded
in the circulation numbers.
- "But I have received complaints
about your tale 'Berenice.""
- Thomas White felt
that "Berenice" was vulgar,
was much too sensationalistic.
- Poe felt
he needed to defend this
because "Berenice" represented
exactly the kind of story
he wanted to write.
- The tale may be in bad taste,
but the history of all magazines
plainly shows that
any that have attained celebrity
were indebted to articles in
nature similar to "Berenice"...
The ludicrous heightened
into the grotesque,
the witty exaggerated
into the burlesque,
and the singular wrought out
into the strange and mystical.
You may say that
this is in bad taste,
but whether the article is
or is not in bad taste
is little to the point.
To be appreciated, Mr. White,
you must be read.
- From the start of his career,
we have, in Poe,
two kinds of writers.
We have the producer
of popular work
that he knows is going to sell.
And yet, we have
this other writer
who has literary aspirations.
He wants to be taken seriously.
♪♪
- This should be a stable time
in his life,
but he's also miserable.
And he's miserable because
he's away from Maria Clemm
and he's away
from his cousin Virginia.
- While in Richmond, Poe learns
that a wealthy cousin
in Baltimore
has offered to take Virginia in
and pay for her schooling.
- This would have taken Virginia
away from Eddie,
and he panicked.
- I was blinded with tears.
I had no wish
to live another hour.
"My dearest Auntie,
I love Virginia..."
"passionately, devotedly."
"I cannot express in words
the fervent devotion
I feel toward
my dear little cousin."
♪♪
- Part of it for Poe was that
he had finally found a family
and he wanted to stay in it
for good.
- Virginia...
my love...
think well
before you break the heart
of your cousin.
- His desperate letters
convinced Maria and Virginia
to come to Richmond
to live with him,
there, as a family.
♪♪
- She's 13 years old.
He's 27.
It's a bit of a mismatch,
but it's not one
that was unknown for that time.
- In order to be married,
they had to lie about her age,
so it was obviously something
that was disapproved of
at the time.
- I think he loved her.
I really do think he loved her.
But not in a sexual way,
not in a grown-up way.
I think Eddie looked at her
as a little sis.
I mean, that's what
he called her.
- My own sweetest sissy.
- People around town
describe Virginia
as being very cheerful
and loving and very childlike.
Even when she was starting
to get a little bit older,
she'd rush out into the street
and embrace him
when he got home from work.
And they said they were
a fairly happy family.
No matter how poor Poe was,
he made sure his wife had tutors
and music instructors.
And he loved to hear her sing
and play the piano.
And he would play the flute
along with her.
And the mother-in-law,
she would sing along.
They have little concerts
together at night
while he's writing stories about
burying your wife
in the basement
or pulling out her teeth.
So, it was a reasonably normal,
happy homelife.
- "Dear Mr. Kennedy, I know you
will be pleased to hear this.
My health is better
than for years past.
My pecuniary difficulties
have vanished.
In a word, all is right."
- You might think, "Oh!
At last, he's arrived.
This is the work
that he was meant to do.
It's the source
of steady income."
Yet he only holds the job
for 15 months.
He said he left because
he quarreled with the editor.
He said that he was
too good for the magazine.
He wanted to move on, for sure.
Poe didn't get along well
with anybody, really, for long.
- Part of Poe's problem
with his boss was an issue
that would plague him
for the rest of his life.
- Alcoholism has run
in the Poe family for 250 years,
that we can document.
My great-great grandfather,
William,
wrote to Edgar talking
about the family curse.
He could go long periods of time
without drinking,
but once he was in a situation
where alcohol was present,
it was deadly for him.
- By age 28, Poe has begun
to build a literary reputation.
He leaves Richmond to try
his hand in New York City,
but he arrives on the eve
of one of the worst
financial recessions
in American history.
After a year of struggle,
he moves on to Philadelphia.
In 1839,
Poe lands an editing job
at Burton's
Gentleman's Magazine,
an up-and-coming periodical.
Maria, Virginia,
and Edgar settle in
for what will be their longest
stay in one city.
- Life in Philadelphia
was really the picture
of middle-class domesticity.
They had a little house.
They had a little yard.
You know, I think
they had some pets.
Poe was firing on all cylinders
creatively and, also,
as a magazine editor.
- Poe joins the busy literary
circles of Philadelphia,
making friends despite
his often caustic reviews.
Inevitably, he crosses paths
with another ambitious
young literary critic.
- Poe meets a person who would
become very, very significant
in our understanding
of Poe himself,
and that's
the Reverend Rufus W. Griswold.
- Rufus Griswold was
a reviewer and anthologizer.
Like Poe, he viewed himself
as an American tastemaker.
But, unlike Poe,
Griswold had no problem
trading positive reviews
for favors.
- Griswold was a great puffer.
If you puffed Griswold,
Griswold would puff you.
Poe had this kind
of piety about it.
Like, he wouldn't puff anybody,
and he didn't expect
anybody to puff him
because he thought that
there should be real value.
♪♪
- Poe's only source of steady
income is magazine work.
While he's editing
one periodical,
he's writing for another.
- Sometimes he was the only one
on the staff of the magazine,
commissioning,
proofreading, editing,
getting the illustrations,
going to the printer,
getting the paper,
choosing the type.
You know, there's a lot
of things you have to do.
The owner would
have another job.
He'd be an actor,
he'd be something,
and he'd have a business.
He'd go away, and there's
Eddie Poe sitting there.
- Given the technology
that produced that magazine,
that is exhausting work.
- Poe would go home
from the office every evening,
have dinner,
and then, he would write.
And he would stay up, you know,
late into the night writing.
- Poe could be an extraordinarily
disciplined
and productive writer.
It seemed to come out
of late nights,
drinking a lot of coffee,
and working on a deadline.
- And sometimes, Maria Clemm
would sit beside him,
keeping him company
while he composed these stories
that were totally unlike
what he did during the day.
- In his career, Poe would
write nearly 70 stories
in a range of genres,
aiming to reach
the widest possible audience.
- A third of his short stories
are comedies.
He liked a romantic comedy.
- Only a dozen of Poe's tales
are horror stories,
but they remain
his most popular...
among them "The Fall
of the House of Usher,"
"The Pit and the Pendulum,"
"The Masque of the Red Death,"
"The Black Cat,"
"The Premature Burial."
Poe was writing
in the old-fashioned genre
of the Gothic tale,
but the terrors
he was tapping into
were very much of the moment.
- Premature burial was a real
fear in the 19th century...
because people seemed dead,
but they weren't.
- As odd, as bizarre
as that seems,
during periods of epidemics...
And there were several
during Poe's lifetime...
There were lots
of public interments
taking place very hastily
without proper
medical examination.
And there were many,
many instances
of people actually being buried
before they were dead.
- Coffin makers provided gadgets
to allow the victim
to ring an alarm on the surface.
Poe devoured
this sensational account
and would work
the horrifying idea
into several stories.
- Premature internment
is the ultimate claustrophobia.
- "The unendurable oppression
of the lungs...
The stifling fumes
of the damp earth...
The clinging
to the death garments...
The rigid embrace
of the narrow house...
The blackness
of the absolute Night...
The silence like a sea
that overwhelms...
The unseen but palpable presence
of the Conqueror Worm..."
- Poe is talking about
the subject
that makes him
so universally interesting.
Except for sex.
You can't get anything
more human
and fundamental than fear.
♪♪
- Poe developed rules
about how to construct
a powerful short story.
- First, the artist must decide,
"Of all the innumerable effects
or impressions,
what one shall I select?"
- He sees the author or the poet
as being a craftsman
who really has
to weed away anything
that doesn't go towards
that single effect.
- If the very initial sentence
does not bring out this effect,
then he has failed
in his first step.
- He had so many famous
first lines
that immediately pull you into
the setting and the character.
- "The Cask of Amontillado"...
"The thousand injuries
of Fortunato
I had borne as I best could;
but when he ventured
upon insult,
I vowed revenge."
- "The Pit and the Pendulum"...
"I was sick...
Sick unto death
with that long agony;
and when at length
they unbound me,
and I was permitted to sit,
I felt that my senses
were leaving me."
- "The Black Cat"...
"For the most wild,
yet most homely narrative
which I am about to pen,
I neither expect
nor solicit belief."
♪♪
- Poe is responding to
a new American urban culture
which is very aware of crime.
There was a lot of poverty.
There was a lot of class rivalry
and competition.
There was urban violence.
- It was a time of great
uncertainty for Americans.
There were great
financial panics.
There were poor on the streets.
There were immigrants.
What was going to happen
to this country?
Nobody knew.
- Anxious and unsettled,
the reading public
welcomed reassurance.
- There was a great popular
appetite for stories
in which problems
or complexities were resolved.
Characters would, through some
sort of happenstance or fate,
figure out their problems,
resolve their dilemmas.
Justice would be done.
- Ever aware of
the public's tastes,
Poe recognized an appetite
for a new kind of fiction.
- What Poe did is he took
that desire for rationality
and order imposed upon chaos
and created a form
that could satisfy that
in a modern way,
in a way that was plausible
to readers.
- With just three short tales,
Poe invented
a new genre of literature,
the detective story,
with a new breed of hero.
- "Residing in Paris
during the spring
and part of the summer,
I there contracted an intimacy
with
a Monsieur C. Auguste Dupin."
- In C. Auguste Dupin,
Poe invents the detective
that we've been living with
ever since.
- "" The police are confounded
by the seeming absence
of motive, ' said Dupin.
In fact, the facility
with which I shall arrive
or have arrived at the solution
of this mystery
is in the direct ratio
of its apparent insolubility
in the eyes of the police."
- That really eccentric,
brilliant central figure
and the sidekick who's kind of
a stand-in for the reader...
- "I stared at the speaker
in mute astonishment."
- and a confrontation
of the suspect
at the end of it
and false leads,
all the things that we think
of as these classic aspects
of a detective story,
they all come together at once
in that
first detective story of Poe's.
- If you've never read
the Dupin stories
and you just only
have read Holmes,
then you know the character
because Holmes is
a rip-off of Dupin.
And so is
pretty much everybody else.
So is Nero Wolfe.
So is Hercule Poirot.
So is House on television.
- Poe's finally making
a name for himself,
but he's not making money.
At the time,
U.S. law provided virtually
no copyright protection.
- So, even if you had
a successful piece of writing
that was a big hit,
a bunch of other people
would run off copies of it
without paying you.
- His works could be published
in England without paying him,
and English works
by people like Dickens
could be published in America
without paying Dickens.
So, if you can
publish Dickens for free,
why should you pay Poe?
- Looking for an edge
in the marketplace,
Poe deliberately crafted
an intriguing public persona.
- I am excessively slothful
and wonderfully industrious
by fits.
Thus, if I rambled
and dreamed away whole months
and awake at last
to a sort of mania
for composition,
then I scribble all day
and read all night
so long as the disease endures.
- But, despite all his efforts,
poverty continued to stalk Poe.
- You see him working
12, 14 hours a day
as an editor
or as a hack writer.
I think it almost ruined him
as an imaginative writer.
- I've been, so far,
essentially,
a magazinist,
bearing not only willingly,
but cheerfully,
the sad poverty
that the condition
of the mere magazinist
of tales upon him in America,
where, in more than
any other region
upon the face of the globe,
to be poor is to be despised.
♪♪
- Even at his lowest moments,
Poe never lets go
of his identity as a poet.
Poetry would always
be his first love.
In 1841, he learns
that Rufus Griswold
is compiling
an authoritative collection
of American poetry.
- Griswold is coming out with
this massive anthology called
"The Poets and Poetry
of America."
So, of course, Poe is desperate
to get himself into this book.
- Griswold does publish
a few of Poe's poems.
Then, he asks Poe to return
the favor by reviewing the book.
- Poe pointed out what was good
about Griswold's anthology,
but then,
he said what was bad about it.
- Oh, he has some talents,
we allow.
But, as a critic, his judgement
is worthless,
simply because reason
and thinking
are entirely out
of Mr. Griswold's sphere.
- Griswold took great exception
to that, was highly offended,
and was an enemy of Poe
for the rest of his life.
- Poe really had a knack
for making enemies.
You really have to
give it to him.
♪♪
- Though he was often a prickly
personality outside the house,
by all accounts,
Poe was the opposite at home.
He was devoted
to his child bride,
now a young woman,
and visitors noted
that Virginia adored her Eddie.
- One afternoon or evening,
Virginia was singing,
and she seems to burst
a blood vessel.
- And she started
coughing up blood.
- It's the first signs
of tuberculosis.
- It casts a shadow over Poe
that lasted for years,
and, no matter what
his successes were,
that was a constant for him,
his worry about
his wife's health.
- My dear little wife
has been dangerously ill
a fortnight since,
while singing,
she ruptured a blood vessel,
and it was only on yesterday
that the physicians gave me
any hope of her recovery.
You might imagine
the agony I've suffered...
for you know
how devotedly I love her.
♪♪
- At age 35, Poe decides
to move his family
to New York City,
hoping to capitalize
on his growing reputation.
- "New York, Sunday morning,
April 7th... My dear Maria,
we have just this minute
done breakfast,
and I now sit down to write you
about everything."
- Edgar and Virginia go first
and report back to Maria Clemm.
- "Last night, we had the nicest
tea you ever drank,
strong and hot,
wheat bread and rye bread,
cheese, tea cakes.
No fear of starving here.
Sis is delighted.
She has coughed hardly any
and had no night sweat."
- I feel in excellent spirits
and haven't drank a drop,
so that I hope so
to get out of trouble.
The very instance I scrape
together enough money,
I will send it on.
- 1845 proves to be the year
of Edgar Allan Poe.
In January, less than a year
after arriving in New York,
he publishes the poem
that will make him
internationally famous.
- "The Raven"
is his breakthrough.
It's the literary work, the poem
that sort of puts him
on the literary map
in a way that he had
never been before.
- I would imagine that Poe
felt like he finally made it
when he was part of
Anne Charlotte Lynch's
literary events every Saturday,
because everybody
who was anybody came.
They would turn the lights down.
He had to read "The Raven,"
of course, over and over.
Everybody wanted to hear him
read "The Raven."
And he spoke in
a very dramatic voice.
It ran in his blood.
He was quite the entertainer.
- "Once upon a midnight dreary,
while I pondered,
weak and weary,
over many a quaint and curious
volume of forgotten lore...
While I nodded, nearly napping,
suddenly there came a tapping,
as of someone gently rapping,
rapping at my chamber door.
'Tis some visitor, ' I muttered,
'tapping at my chamber door...
Only this and nothing more. ""
♪♪
- It was a poem about
the common plight of people,
where half of all children died
before they reached maturity
and everyone understood
what it means to grieve.
- "Then, methought,
the air grew denser,
perfume from an unseen
censer swung by Seraphim,
whose foot-falls
tinkled on the tufted floor."
- The silken, sad, uncertain
rustling of each purple curtain
thrilled me.
You know, that there's
just a lusciousness
about the sonorities and so on
in a line like that
that had a great impact on me.
It really did.
- "And the Raven, never flitting,
still is sitting,
still is sitting
on the pallid bust of Pallas
just above my chamber door.
And his eyes have
all the seeming of a demon's
that is dreaming,
and the lamp-light
o'er him streaming
throws his shadow on the floor.
And my soul from out that shadow
that lies floating on the floor
shall be lifted...
Nevermore!"
- He wanted fame.
And, boy, did he get it
with "The Raven."
In fact, he couldn't even
walk down the street
without kids following behind
flapping their wings
and people calling out,
"There's the raven."
- He created a persona that
captured the minds of so many.
The way he presented himself
in portraiture,
his identification
with "The Raven,"
you don't want to say
it was a shtick,
but it's one...
It's a shtick that stuck.
- He wasn't just this grim
reaper, this man of the night.
He could be tremendously witty.
He was a kind of lady's man.
- Poe became close friends
with Frances Sargent Osgood,
a popular poet,
a member
of the same literary circles,
and a married woman.
- Virginia is at home
dying of tuberculosis.
And he's carrying on
with this other woman.
- Here, he had this
compelling woman
come into his life, Frances,
who could write love poetry.
And I think it turned his head
away from poor Virginia.
But everybody at the time
was talking about it.
It was such a scandal.
- And it's at this time that he
and Griswold crossed paths again
and not in a pleasant way,
because Griswold has well-known
affections for Osgood.
- Rufus Griswold must have
just been steaming.
Poe was stealing his dream.
Poe was doing everything
he wanted,
including taking the girl.
- His new fame allows him
to borrow money
and realize his long-held dream.
He buys a magazine.
- So, he had this great success
with "The Raven."
And he was finally
becoming known.
And then, for some
completely bizarre reason,
he decides to pick a fight
with the most-loved poet
in America at the time...
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
- Longfellow would become
the most prosperous,
successful, and adored writer
in America.
And, of course,
he was a professor at Harvard.
He was a Bostonian
par excellence.
- The poetical claims
of Mr. Longfellow
are vastly overrated.
Overrated.
And that the individual himself
would be little esteemed
without the accessories
of wealth and position.
- Longfellow was the person
that Poe was supposed to be
if he had stayed in college,
if he'd inherited that money
from the Allans.
And when he saw Longfellow,
he saw someone that had the life
that he should have had
but was denied.
- He accused Longfellow
of being a plagiarist.
But he also profoundly
disapproved
of the sort of writing
that Longfellow was doing.
He could see that Longfellow
was a brilliant versifier.
But he thought that Longfellow
didn't understand
what poetry was about,
that his poetry had no soul.
- But there was
a political dimension
to Poe's attacks
on Longfellow...
The slavery debate.
Poe himself never
spoke out directly
to defend or condemn slavery.
But he was a loyal son
of the south.
- It's not as if Poe
just grew up in the south
and there was slavery
in the south.
Slaves were imported
right down the street
from where Poe was living
as a teenager.
They were bought and sold.
They were imprisoned there.
Poe, inevitably, would have
seen human trafficking
on an almost daily basis.
- But above all, Poe was
a purist about literature.
For him, the greater sin
may have been that Longfellow
and other New England writers
injected politics
into their poetry.
- We despise them and defy them,
the transcendental vagabonds.
They may all go
to the devil together.
- There's something
self-destructive
in Poe's strafings
against Longfellow.
What Poe calls,
in another context,
the imp of the perverse,
that force inside of us
that compels us to our own doom.
- "We have a task before us which
must be speedily performed.
We know it will be ruinous
to make delay.
It must, it shall be
undertaken today.
And yet we put it off
until tomorrow.
Now, why?
There is no answer,
except that we feel perverse."
- As Americans,
we always want to
think of ourselves
as perfectible.
That's the American dream,
right?
But Poe sees the dark side
of the American dream.
He sees the way that we
sometimes do things wrong
almost in spite of ourselves
and almost because we know
they're wrong.
So, Poe really prefigures
our understanding
of human psychology.
- "There is no passion in nature
so demonically impatient,
as him who,
shuddering on the edge
of a precipice,
thus meditates a plunge."
- When you have Poe's history...
Unwanted, unloved,
feeling not important enough...
Perhaps that turns you
into somebody
who's a bit too careless
and reckless
because there's this pervasive,
nagging notion that you
will never be good enough.
- In just one year,
the scandalous relationship
with Frances Osgood
and Poe's attacks on Longfellow
have undone his accomplishments.
He made practically nothing
from "The Raven"
after the first printing
and was forced
to shut down his magazine.
Poe, Virginia, and Maria
escape Manhattan
for a cottage
in Fordham, New York.
- He's out in this
sort of farmland.
There's apple trees.
He's trying to tame a bird.
It should be
a very bucolic scene.
But what you have is Poe
very ill a lot of the time
but trying his hardest
to keep writing
and Virginia
just declining and declining.
- "The autumn came, and Mrs. Poe
sank rapidly in consumption."
"She lay on the straw bed,
wrapped in her
husband's greatcoat,
a large tortoiseshell cat
on her bosom,
the sufferer's
only means of warmth."
♪♪
- Virginia held on
into the winter months.
Occasional moments
of improvement
were followed
by inevitable decline.
♪♪
- It was
a never-ending oscillation
between hope and despair
which I could no longer tolerate
without loss of reason.
I became insane with long
intervals of horrible sanity.
During these fits of
absolute unconsciousness,
I drank God only knows
how much, how often.
A matter of course,
my enemies refer the insanity
to the drink
rather the drink
to the insanity.
I had, indeed, almost abandoned
all hope of a permanent cure
when I found one
in the death of my wife.
♪♪
- The impact of Virginia's death
was just devastating.
It nearly undid him altogether.
- Most of the people that Poe
loved died of consumption.
If you pay much attention
to American history,
though, most of the people
that most people loved
died of consumption
or childbirth.
It is the sad tragedy
of human existence
in a 19th-century city.
- Oh, God.
How melancholy an existence.
- Poe published very little
in 1847.
He was able to do very little.
He focused his attention
on writing "Eureka."
- In the depths of his grief,
Poe produces
his most eccentric work,
a long essay that attempts
to explain
the origins of the universe.
Some interpreters see within it
a glimpse
of 20th-century physics.
- Poe develops not only
the basic concepts
of relativity theory
but also the big bang theory.
And he expands
on why the universe
has so much empty space.
- One of the things
that's remarkable about it
is how modern it is
as a cosmology
when you consider he had nothing
to work from, really.
- What is it that induces
in the poet himself
the poetical effect?
He recognizes the...
- In 1848, he began
giving public lectures again,
began traveling again,
began socializing again.
- He wanted to remarry.
He wanted a rich wife.
He needed a rich wife.
If he had a rich wife,
he could have his own magazine.
And he would not have to be
a Grub Street hack anymore.
- This launched him on a series
of near engagements,
all of which
turned out very badly.
- While he was courting one,
he was courting another.
He was proposing to one,
he was seeing another.
- As your eyes rested appealingly
for one brief moment upon mine,
I saw that you were Helen,
my Helen.
- When you read what he said
to the women he was courting,
including falling on his knees
and hand over the heart
and four lock down
and heavy breathing
and all kinds of promises,
it seems just so over-the-top.
- She tenderly kissed me.
She fondly caressed.
And then I fell gently
to sleep on her breast.
- The women he was pursuing were
not 13-year-old tubercular girls
who were going to be
reliant on him.
These were often working poets
who had their own livelihood
to protect.
- One of them was a woman
named Sarah Helen Whitman.
They had a courtship
that had culminated,
Poe thought, in her accepting
his proposal of marriage.
When Poe learned
that Sarah Whitman
had decided not to marry him,
the wheels really came off.
He tried to commit suicide.
- I procured 2 ounces
of laudanum.
My struggles were more
than I could bear.
A friend was at hand
who aided me
and, if it can be called saving,
saved me.
- Less than a year later,
his fortunes changed
practically overnight.
- He'd found a financial backer
so he could start
his own literary magazine,
The Stylus.
- Poe set off on a journey
to raise more money.
- "My plan was to take a tour
through the principal states,
especially west and south,
lecturing as I went
to pay expenses."
Thoroughly dignified and
supremely noble than the poem.
The death, then,
of a beautiful woman is,
unquestionably,
the most poetical topic
in the world.
- The last stop was Richmond,
the city he had left
more than a decade earlier.
- When Poe came back to Richmond,
he was Edgar "The Raven" Poe.
He was a household name,
and he was a celebrity
returning back to his hometown.
He visited old friends.
He made new ones.
His sister and her foster family
were still living in Richmond,
and they welcomed him
into their home.
- This poem, written solely
for the poem's sake.
- Poe renewed his friendship
with a childhood flame,
Elmira Royster Shelton,
who was now a wealthy widow.
- And he really started
courting Elmira seriously.
Elmira might have been
skeptical of Poe's motives,
but she finally agreed
to marry him.
- Poe wrote to his mother-in-law
that it would clearly be
a marriage of convenience.
- "My own darling Muddy,
I confess that my heart sinks
at the idea of this marriage.
I think, however, that it
will certainly take place,
and that immediately."
- But before Poe
and Elmira could marry,
Edgar had a trip to make.
He would travel to Philadelphia
for a brief editing job,
then on to New York
to pick up Maria Clemm
and bring her back to Richmond
for the wedding.
- "He came up to my house
on the evening
of the 26th of September
to take leave of me.
He was very sad and complained
of being quite sick.
I felt his pulse and found
he had a considerable fever
and did not think it probable
that he would be able to
start the next morning."
"I went up early the next
morning to inquire after him.
I discovered he had left
on the boat for Baltimore."
- There is an irony in the fact
that the death of Poe,
who wrote the first
detective story,
became a mystery.
♪♪
- Poe arrived by steamboat
in Baltimore
on September 28, 1849.
His plan was to immediately
board the train
for Philadelphia,
then travel on to New York.
- It seems very strange
for us to think
that a man like Edgar Allan Poe
could just vanish.
But that's exactly what happened
for about five days.
♪♪
- When he was found,
he was still in Baltimore,
semiconscious,
dressed in ill-fitting
second-hand clothes
that looked nothing like
the kind of clothes
he would have worn.
- Eventually, he's recognized
as the famous writer.
And an old friend is found
to take him to the hospital.
- He spent his last four days
delirious,
in and out of consciousness,
talking to shadows on the wall,
not making any sense.
- Four days later, Poe is dead
at the age of 40.
- Poe dies alone
without it ever being
completely clear
what exactly
he was suffering from.
- Poe's mysterious death
has prompted dozens of theories,
that he suffered from rabies
or died from a brain tumor,
or perhaps he was
an accidental victim
of warring political gangs
on the streets of Baltimore.
It's unlikely
we'll ever know the answer.
- Thank heaven the crisis,
the danger has passed.
The lingering illness
is over at last.
And the fever called living
is conquered at last.
♪♪
- Within a few days
of the author's death,
the character
assassination began.
- Poe made the mistake of dying
before his greatest
literary enemy, Rufus Griswold.
Griswold wrote
the obituary of Poe,
and, in it, he pilloried Poe.
He took him apart.
- He says,
"Edgar Allan Poe is dead.
Many will be shocked by this,
but very few people
will be grieved by it."
He says, "Poe had few
or no friends."
He was, sort of,
this miserable person.
But Poe's friends,
and he did have many friends,
rallied to his defense
and wrote
more favorable obituaries.
But, of course, the damage
is done by that point.
♪♪
- The hallowing Poe
that Griswold invented
lives on
generation after generation,
ensuring Poe's iconic place
in popular culture.
But it will always be
Poe's writing
that is his real legacy.
- I stand amid the roar
of a surf-tormented shore,
and I hold within my hand
grains of the golden sand...
How few!
Yet how they creep
through my fingers to the deep,
while I weep, while I weep.
Oh, God!
Can I not grasp them
with a tighter clasp?
Oh, God!
Can I not save one
from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
but a dream within a dream?
♪♪
♪♪