Short, Unhappy Life

THE LETTERS OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (664 pp.) -Edited by John Ward Ostrom -Harvard Unitversity ($10)

Poe's tragedy is one that haunts the imagination no matter how much or how little is known of his life. Hervey Allen's Israfel cleared up most of the legendary mysteries of his career without making the poet himself any less strange, or unearthly a character. This handsome two-volume edition of Poe's letters, the work of John Ward Ostrom (associate professor of English at Wittenberg College), is essential to every serious student of Poe's career; but on the basis of this collection alone the reader might well form a picture of America's greatest lyric poet as a hardworking, businesslike, irritable literary politician.

Misfortunes. Poe's story is not greatly changed by such new information as the full text of his letters provides; it merely seems more miserable. The child of actors, he lost his mother before he was three years old, and was taken into the household of John Allan, a Scot by birth, who inherited a considerable fortune--Poe estimated it at $750,000.

Poe left the University of Virginia in disgrace after Allan refused to pay his school bills and gambling debts of reportedly $2,500. He published his first poems, joined the Army under an assumed name, served two years, and in 1830 was appointed to West Point. Much older than his fellow cadets, and a hardened veteran, he spent seven months at the Point, then engineered his own court-martial and dismissal (for trivial offenses).

Tradition has it that he was unpopular with the other cadets, though they raised by subscription enough money to publish a book of his poems after he left. At 27, Poe was a moderately successful magazine editor in Baltimore, married to his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm.

She became an invalid at 19 and died at 24. Until his death at 40, Poe's life had an appalling consistency of trouble--brief periods of success followed by long years of misery, quarrels with one after another of his backers, tigerlike leaps on his fellow poets for plagiarism, mud-slinging campaigns with rival editors. He drank, and at times took opium, stopped drinking whenever his work went well. Yet in each serious battle his enemies raked up the old stories, and in these letters Poe is constantly admitting his guilt and explaining that he has reformed.

Exasperated Man. The.first letter in the book is a cool request to the governor of Virginia (written when Poe was 15) asking that the Richmond Junior Volunteers, in which he was a lieutenant, be allowed to keep their arms. It sets the tone for the book. Poe's letters were brisk and businesslike--requests for books to review, offers to sell stories, proposals to start new literary magazines, attempts to wangle copy from contributors like Longfellow, Hawthorne, or James Russell Lowell. When Poe became editor of Graham's Magazine it had 5,000 subscribers. When he left, 15 months later, its circulation was nearly 40,000. (His $800 a year salary remained the same.)

Intellectuals are apt to consider themselves somewhat more intelligent and sensitive than most people, and in Poe's case, the root of the trouble seems to have been that he was. He grandly offered to solve any cipher that his readers sent him. People sent him dishonest ciphers--i.e., those which a correspondent could not have readily deciphered even with the key. Poe solved them anyway. His critical essays, that seemed so ill-tempered to his contemporaries, now seem merely honest and forthright. In general, posterity has agreed with him.

Unfocused Talents. He scarcely seems a poet in any of his letters. He does not give the impression of a frustrated literary man compelled to be a soldier, an editor, a writer of textbooks. He seems rather a man of massive and unfocused gifts, a soldier and editor restlessly writing poetry to find an outlet for the river of ideas that flowed through him. Even the famous letters to Mrs. Sarah Whitman, with their italics and exclamation points and their second-act curtain speeches, do not seem the love letters of a poet: they are rather the letters of a practical man acting the way he thinks a poet is expected to act. They are neither tragic nor funny; they are too miserable to be tragicomic.

In each of his roles--soldier, cadet, editor, or unhappy lover--there is no escaping the apparent fact that Poe was a genius, with a mind so quick and extraordinary that, even had he not had a fierce temper and a weakness for drink, his mental superiority to the people around him would probably have made him just as miserable.

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