Edgar Allan Poe's imprint is on everything from crime fiction (the Edgars are awarded annually to the best mystery stories) to holidays (our celebration of Halloween owes more to Poe than Christmas does to Dickens) to the nickname of Baltimore's National Football League franchise. Yet Poe's image has faded in recent years into what G.K. Chesterton called "the twilight realm of the praised but unread."
Peter Ackroyd is the first writer in decades to bring Poe's life and work into sharp focus and impress urgency on an appreciation of his oeuvre. (He also profiled, among others, Chaucer, Shakespeare and Dickens.)
He rescues Poe from the layers of clichés and misinterpretations built up over generations. Poe did not invent Gothic literature; he "reinvigorated the Gothic tradition of horror and morbid sensationalism by centering it upon the human frame." Although Poe's material was unabashedly romantic in flavor, he molded and honed it with a sensibility that was undeniably classic; he was "the most calculating of authors, never to be confused with his disturbed and even psychotic narrators."
"Anxiety," though, "was his childhood bedfellow." Born in Boston in 1809 to traveling actors, Poe was orphaned at age 2 when his father abandoned the family and his mother died of consumption; he was taken in by friends of his mother. It's easy to see why "young Poe harbored a grudge against the world."
He analyzed himself better than anyone else ever could a few weeks before his death: "I do believe God gave me a spark of genius, but he quenched it in misery." It was a great deal more than a spark, perhaps a bit too much for the staid and stuffy literary establishment of his time. "It can be said with some certainty," Ackroyd concludes, "that Poe's true genius was not recognized until after his death." But then, he had no one but himself to blame.
Although considered in his own lifetime to be one of America's most important writers -- "the most controversial, and most widely discussed, literary journalist in the country," as Ackroyd describes him -- he alienated nearly every influential writer and editor in the country, thus practically ensuring himself a life of poverty and deprivation. He died in 1849 in Richmond, Va., under mysterious circumstances. ("The well is too deep," writes Ackroyd, "for the truth to be recovered.")
Never accepted by his contemporaries, he was, in what would have been his old age, lionized by Europeans such as Baudelaire and Tennyson (who thought him "the most original genius that America has produced") and later, by such diverse writers and poets as Nietzsche, Kafka, Yeats and Joyce. It's hard to believe that Poe wouldn't have considered such praise fair payment for a life quenched in misery.
Allen Barra's latest book is "Yogi Berra, Eternal Yankee," due in March from W.W. Norton.
