The event was announced by Griswold in the Tribune with this brutal bluntness:
“Edgar Allan Poe is dead. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it. He had few or no friends.” But the Southern Literary Messenger said: “Now that he is gone, the vast multitude of blockheads may breathe again.” Griswold simply elected himself mouthpiece of that host.
On Poe’s supersensitive organization stimulants told with fearful effect. Mrs. Clem said “A single cup of coffee would intoxicate him.” N. P. Willis explained the vagaries and sins of Poe by supposing him to be possessed of two antagonistic spirits, a devil and an angel, each having complete mastery of him by turns. But, says Willis, “With a single glass of wine his whole nature was reversed, the demon became uppermost and, though none of the usual signs of intoxication were visible, his will was palpably insane. He easily seemed personating only another phase of his natural character, and was accused accordingly of insulting arrogance and bad heartedness. It was a sad infirmity of physical constitution which puts it upon very nearly the ground of temporary and almost irresponsible insanity.”
That these lapses were infrequent, instead of almost continuous, we have plenty of testimony from those who were much with him as business associates and inmates of the same house. “I have never seen him otherwise than gentle, generous, well-bred and particularly refined,” is a certificate of one who was intimate in the family, which was confirmed by many witnesses of different periods and places. The poet Swinburne was probably right in declaring that Poe’s inebriety was “the effect of a terrible evil, rather than its cause.” That evil lay not alone, perhaps not chiefly, in his inherited and educated predisposition to indulgence and his morbidness of mentality; but in the character and consequences of his chiefest literary work.
It is a hard enough lot, under the best circumstances and in the best times, to live by the pen. The characteristics as well of Poe’s genius as of his times made that lot a doom for him. The rewards of authorship were on an eleemosynary scale (Poe received only $10 for “The Raven,” and $10 a week as editor-in-chief of a magazine: the North American Review then paid only $2 a page for matter); literary taste was unformed and, worst of all, the market was drugged and cheapened and the best public appreciation perverted by a silly school of writer who had arisen—similar to the “Della Crusca School” which a few years before had infested literature in England. Their lucubrations were both barren of ideas and bad in style. It was the lollipop stage of our literature. Now Poe possessed in high degree two parts which, when addressed to criticism, would most offend these callow writers, to-wit: The musical sense of language, and marvelous analytical powers. The most obvious quality of his poetic style is its rhythm. The musical ear led him to adopt refrains and euphonious syllables, like “Never more,” “Lenore,” “bells,” and to dwell on their cadence; it made a bad composition distract him as a discord does a sensitive musician. For him divine harmonies lay in the relation of words to each other, as if they had been notes.
Coupled with this, to him, uncomfortable sensitiveness to verbal sounds, was his almost superhuman power of dissecting thought—extremely uncomfortable to others, even to the best of writers. Thus gifted with a mental touch equally for the substance of language and the substance of thought which language struggles to give birth to; possessed of the power of an eager and a nipping sarcasm and an infernal courage, fortified with extensive reading and a retentive memory, Poe became a scourge to mediocrity, imitation, sham and pretense. There could not have been a more critical time for such a man to attempt a livelihood at letters; there could not have been a man better fitted to work havoc among the essayists and poetasters of the day, to compel literary reform and to bring misfortunes on himself. “He elected himself chief justice of the court of criticism and head hangman of dunces,” says Stoddard. “He hated a bad book as a misdemeanor.” Burton, proprietor of the Gentleman’s Magazine, remonstrated with Poe against the severity of some of his book reviews. “You say,” said he to Poe, “that the people love havoc; I think they love justice.” One adds, “Poe thought literary justice meant havoc with such mediocrity as then flourished.” To the cause of pure literature he thus devoted his life with example, with precept and with destructive force. He was the Wendell Phillips of American literature. He did a work that was necessary to be done in behalf of American literature. He pulled down upon his own head and theirs, the sham temple which the little scribbling Philistines had erected.
So it is not to be wondered at that “he contrived to attach to himself animosities of the most enduring kind,” as the Messenger declared. It became Poe against the whole literary world of America in a very short time—for he had unstinted praise for no one. It is doubtless due to the influence of this army of foes that he lost in succession all his editorial situations and was impoverished. There were other enemies as unscrupulous as Griswold. One of these put in successful circulation the theory that Poe, by cruelty, deliberately caused the death of his wife in order to get the inspiration for “The Raven,” and the story may still be met on its rounds, notwithstanding the fact that the poem was written two years before she died. (Amiable human nature delights in contemplation of human monsters.) She declared on her death-bed that her life had been shortened by anonymous letters slandering and threatening her husband. Perhaps it was to meet this story that he wrote that curious analysis (“The Philosophy of Composition”) of the mechanical and prosaic methods by which he constructed “The Raven.”
The critical instinct, coupled with an impulsive temperament, high ideals of perfect performance and a powerful pen, is a fatal gift to any man. The path of such a one will be strewn with the tombs of friendships which he has stabbed, many and many a time unconsciously; his life will be haunted with vain regrets for words gone past recall, carrying with them consequences he did not reckon upon, hurting those he loves, missing those he aimed at. His way leads steadily through bitter animosities, bitterer remorse and, bitterest of all, isolation from his fellows, who shall clothe him with a character foreign, antagonistic and repulsive to his better nature. If he be not possessed of an o’ermastering will, a thick skin and a healthy, cheerful temper it leads to morbidness, gloom and despair.
Poe was not of that will and temper. He was affectionate, sociable and supersensitive to coolness of manner in others. A rebuff was a stab to him, hatred a calamity. It is said his early life was clouded by the stigma put on him by his parents’ theatrical associations and his own dependence on charity; and that when a lad he wept many wild nights at the grave of a lady who had spoken kindly to him and become the confidante of his boyish sorrows and hopes. So with this nature and with his devastating pen in hand he traced that descent into the living tomb. If from its gloom he sometimes sought “respite and nepenthe” in drink it is not to be wondered at; he was often tempted to suicide. He once solemnly protested: “I have no pleasure in stimulants. It [indulgence in drink] has been in the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories—memories of wrong, and injustice and imputed dishonor—from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending gloom.”