Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) and the Mask of the Twentieth Century

By David Gosselin

BUT for the cruel aspersions upon the character and life of America’s poetic genius, EDGAR ALLAN POE, this volume would have remained unwritten. EDGAR ALLAN POE has been more misunderstood than any other poet of the recent past. While his life was beautiful and inspired, yet aspersed, his last moments had more of sublimity than those of any of his contemporaries. The author of gems so delicate as “Annabel Lee,” “The Raven,” and “Lenore,” while no less human and frail than others of his day, had a soul and heart that stamped him an offshoot of Divinity.

—A Defense of Edgar Allan Poe: Life, Character and Dying Declarations of the Poet, Dr. John J. Moran, attendant physician to Poe in his final hours.

The name Edgar Allan Poe conjures images of the macabre, murder, insanity and self-destruction, but is this the real Edgar Allan Poe? Despite countless documentaries on Poe’s life, each usually accompanied by its own “spooky” Halloween music, the sublime nature of Poe’s works is seldom presented. This essay addresses the question of Poe’s creative mind, his artistic vision, his heretofore unfinished literary project, The Stylus, and the counter-cultural currents which attempted to bury the aesthetic principles he dedicated his life to defending.

Despite commendable work by Poe’s own friends to expose the fraudulent accounts of his life circulated by Rufus W. Griswald, the slanderous image of Poe as a perennial Halloween-like figure, the cartoonish hero of all things “dark,” remains the popular culture’s favorite image of Poe. His genius as a leading intellectual and stalwart literary warrior who fought to create a high culture in the newly minted American Republic, remains largely reduced to the status of a Stephen King-like “horror” writer. It is believed that many of his fiction pieces were simply the product of his own sick mind, something renowned French writer and Poe translator Charles Baudelaire was convinced of. If the popular image is any indication, the world has yet to shed the vestiges of the false Poe mythology[1].

In this light, revisiting Poe’s works and the project of his final years should be seen as a question of historical justice – not merely a literary matter. The investigation will demonstrate Edgar Allan Poe to be one of the leading literary and intellectual figures of the newly minted republic, a figure whose dream it was of establishing a new classical culture that could preserve and nourish the intellectual fruits of the young American republic.

A Republic: Independence, Truth and Originality

“The decline of literature signals the decline of a nation.”

—Johann Wolfgang von Goethe

Living in a young nation which was still in the process of forging its identity as a sovereign nation, Poe recognized the revolution was not over: America still needed its own classical culture, as that of every great civilization. To help situate the auspicious time in which America found itself, it is worth noting a poem by the great Weimar Classical German poet Goethe:

America, You Have it Better

America, you have it better
Than our old wearied continent.
You have no decaying castles
And no stores of basalt.
Your heart is not plagued by
Tired and ancient strife,
By vain memories of time long past.
So use the present day with luck!
And when your children write poetry,
May they be skilled enough to guard
From tales of knights, robbers and wraiths.

Translation © David Gosselin

Goethe, along with his fellow German poet Friedrich Schiller – both of whom are responsible for establishing Weimar Classicism in Germany – was closely watching the great American experiment. And Poe, like the great literary figures of the past, understood that literature and art in general were the sacred fount of inspiration and creativity of a nation. From Aeschylus’ Promethean dramas performed before the Athenian citizenry, to the reading of Dante’s Comedy in the churches of Florence before the Golden Renaissance to Lincoln’s recitation of Shakespeare to his staff and generals in the midst of the Civil War, the awesome power of poetry has always been its ability to make individuals conscious of that higher creative faculty residing within them, defining a person’s identity at its most fundamental level. On this subject, another contemporary of Poe’s, the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley wrote:

''The most unfailing herald, companion, and follower of the awakening of a great people to work a beneficial change in opinion or institution, is poetry. At such periods there is an accumulation of the power of communicating and receiving intense and impassioned conceptions respecting man and nature. The person in whom this power resides, may often, as far as regards many portions of their nature, have little apparent correspondence with that spirit of good of which they are the ministers. But even whilst they deny and abjure, they are yet compelled to serve, that power which is seated on the throne of their own soul.''[2]

—A Defense of Poetry, Percy Bysshe Shelley

Poe understood the importance of having a culture capable of expressing the concept of the Beautiful and True; he knew that if a population was not in a disposition to receive beautiful and impassioned conceptions in the realms of the arts, they could never pursue them in the real world.

The Poetic Principle

That little time with lyre and rhyme
To while away—forbidden things!
My heart would feel to be a crime
Unless it trembled with the strings.

—“Romance,” Edgar Allan Poe

One of Poe’s greatest dreams was the establishment of a national literary journal which would uphold the necessary standards for creating a truly literate sovereign nation. Poe sought to establish his own publication, The Stylus. He wrote:

''How dreadful is the present condition of our Literature! To what are things heading? We want... a well-founded Monthly Journal, of sufficient ability, circulation and character, to control, and to give tone to, our Letters. It should be, externally, a specimen of high, but not too refined Taste:-I mean, it should be boldly printed, on excellent paper, in single column, and be illustrated, not merely embellished, by spirited wood designs in the style of Grandville. Its chief aims should be Independence, Truth, Originality. It should be a journal of some 120 pp. and furnished at $5. It should have nothing to do with Agents or Agencies. Such a Magazine might be made to exercise a prodigious influence, and would be a source of wealth to its proprietors.''[3]