Edgar Allan Poe

choi

Meghan Cox Gurdon, The Soul Within the Shadow; Never in doubt of his own abilities, Edgar Allan Poe pursued extremes in literature and in life. Wall Street Journal, Mar 22, 2025, at page C*
https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture ... the-shadow-d88650fb
(book review on Richard Kopley, Edgar Allan Poe; A life. University of Virginia Press, Mar 18, 2025)

Note:
(a) "In 1841, with the locked-room mystery 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue,' Poe invented the genre of detective fiction. Four years later he introduced into poetry the indelible phrase 'Quoth the Raven "Nevermore." ' * * * Even people who aren't big readers have heard of 'The Pit and the Pendulum,' 'The Fall of the House of Usher' and 'The Tell-Tale Heart.' "
(i)
(A) The Murders in the Rue Morgue
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Murders_in_the_Rue_Morgue
("As the first fictional detective, Poe's [C Auguste] Dupin displays many traits which became literary conventions in subsequent fictional detectives, including Sherlock Holmes * * * Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris")
(B) The English noun morgue was borrowed from French, where the noun feminine has the same meaning.
(ii) English dictionary:
* quoth: "(archaic or literary, now defective) simple past of quethe; said  
Usage notes: • Quoth is considered a defective verb because it is now the only recognizable form of the verb quethe, all other forms of which are obsolete.  • Quoth almost always comes before the subject, usually in the form 'quoth he/she.' "
https://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/quoth

The verb quoth rhymes with oath.
(iii) The Pit and the Pendulum
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Pit_and_the_Pendulum
("find himself in a totally dark room [which has] a pit")
(iv) The Fall of the House of Usher
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Fall_of_the_House_of_Usher
("The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving at the house of his childhood friend, Roderick Usher")
(v) The Tell-Tale Heart
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tell-Tale_Heart
("Terrified by the violent beating of the heart and convinced that the officers are aware of not only the heartbeat but also the narrator's guilt, the narrator breaks down and confesses")

(b) "Mr Kopley, a professor emeritus of English at Penn State DuBois * * * Mr. Kopley begins by introducing David and Eliza Poe, ill-starred Virginia theater people who die young (he of drink, she of tuberculosis), leaving their toddler son, Edgar, and his two siblings to be raised by others. In Edgar's boyhood his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, take him to Great Britain, where they have business interests. Frances dotes on the boy; John is never very keen (eventually he and his foster son have a complete falling-out)."
(i) Pennsylvania State University
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pennsylvania_State_University
(1855- ; main campus is located in Borough of State College (population 42k; about 45-mile air distance northwest of capital Harrisburg); table: Other campuses  among others, City of DuBois (100 miles northeast of Pittsburgh; 2020 census 7,510: both from en.wikipedia.org for "DuBois, Pennsylvania")
(ii)
(A) Edgar Allan Poe
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Edgar_Allan_Poe
( "(né Edgar Poe) * * * Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts [in] 1809, the second child of American actor David Poe Jr and English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. * * * [paternal] grandfather, David Poe, had emigrated from County Cavan, Ireland, around 1750.[7]   His father abandoned the family in 1810,[8] and his mother died a year later from pulmonary tuberculosis. Poe was then taken into the home of John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia, who dealt in a variety of goods, including cloth, wheat, tombstones, tobacco, and slaves.[9] The Allans served as a foster family and gave him the name 'Edgar Allan Poe,'[10] although they never formally adopted him. * * * Poe moved to Richmond with the Allans in 1820. * * * he registered at the University of Virginia in February 1826 to study ancient and modern languages.[17][18] The university was in its infancy [having been founded in 1819], established on the ideals of its founder, Thomas Jefferson. * * * Poe gave up on the university after a year")

The Allans gave him the middle name Allan.
(B) The English surname Poe "carries the meaning of peacock."  Dictionary of American Family Names, by Oxford University Press.   Compare English surname Doe meaning female deer.

(c) This is all I need to know about Poe, and I did not read the WSJ review further down.
-----------------------------------WSJ
In the annals of American literary culture, few have left as bold a mark as Edgar Allan Poe. In 1841, with the locked-room mystery “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” Poe invented the genre of detective fiction. Four years later he introduced into poetry the indelible phrase “Quoth the Raven ‘Nevermore.’” In his macabre short stories, victims are chained, set aflame, buried alive, strapped to torture tables. Where in popular culture you find madness, obsession, disease or decay, you will find the fingerprints of Poe (1809-49). Even people who aren’t big readers have heard of “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

It is well that a writer of such canonical importance should have a definitive biography, and Richard Kopley certainly seems the man to write it. With “Edgar Allan Poe: A Life” Mr. Kopley, a professor emeritus of English at Penn State DuBois and a Poe specialist, brings to bear deep expertise and scholarship. For this massive work, he draws on biographies and histories as well as archival letters (some from his personal collection) and hitherto-unknown recollections handed down through the family of Poe’s best friend.

But what do we mean when we call a work “definitive”? Or when, as one of this book’s cover blurbs has it, a volume is said to be “magisterial”? At best, it means that a book is the last word: that it has treated of a subject with such authority that all subsequent books must acknowledge it. At worst, in one of the book world’s dirty little open secrets, it means a tome so stuffed with data that it is better as a reference than as something to be read for pleasure. Mr. Kopley intends this biography to be “accessible to all.” Alas, while “Edgar Allan Poe” will no doubt assist those in academia, the armchair Poe enthusiast is likely to find it tough going.

The general reader runs into trouble right away. Mr. Kopley begins by introducing David and Eliza Poe, ill-starred Virginia theater people who die young (he of drink, she of tuberculosis), leaving their toddler son, Edgar, and his two siblings to be raised by others. In Edgar’s boyhood his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, take him to Great Britain, where they have business interests. Frances dotes on the boy; John is never very keen (eventually he and his foster son have a complete falling-out). That much is easy enough to follow.

The problem is that Mr. Kopley sacrifices readability for thoroughness. The early chapters of “Edgar Allan Poe” are especially daunting, for they are bestrewn with snippets of correspondence and theater reviews, parenthetical asides and street addresses. We are told of letters sent but never received; of colds caught and recovered from; of fluctuations in the price of tobacco (in which John Allan trades); of a great array of people whose relations to one another are tricky to keep straight. It is not that the details are uninteresting, but they make for fantastically choppy prose.

Poe believed in his own genius, Mr. Kopley argues—and who would dispute it? As a boy he excelled in the classics; as a young man he was a talented draftsman; as a somewhat older man—he never got very old, for he died at 40—he published original works of fiction and poetry at an astounding rate. Poe was a turbulent soul: ardent and moody, thoughtful but grievously volatile.

Mr. Kopley retails a painful incident during Poe’s brief time as a student at the University of Virginia, when he read a long, amusing story he’d written to some of his pals. In a “spirit of jest,” we read in an extended quotation from a friend of a friend who was there, the boys “spoke lightly of its merits and jokingly told him that his hero’s name, Gaffy, occurred too often.” Their mockery so hurt and enraged Poe that he threw his manuscript into the fire.

Poe had many women in his life. As a boy, he was enamored of Jane Stith Stanard, the mother of a friend, who became his confidante before dying when he was 15. Later, penniless after breaking with his foster father, Poe resided with his aunt, who had an 8-year-old daughter named Virginia. Poe became the girl’s tutor and, when she was 13 and he 27, her husband. Edgar and Virginia lived happily through her five-year decline and death from tuberculosis at 24. Poe himself by then had but two years to live.

Mr. Kopley endeavors to link Poe’s life to his work, to show how in his writing he ventilated private pain (and sometimes animus) while at the same time reaching for consolation. His poems “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume,” for example, all brim with grief for women loved and lost.

Poe’s fatal flaw was his inability to handle drink.  He was not one to savor a glass, we read, but one who knocked back booze hard and fast without much pleasure, putting himself in a state of collapsing intoxication to the point of poisoned delirium. Repeatedly he swore off alcohol, yet repeatedly he succumbed. Accounts vary (and much remains unknown) as to Poe’s whereabouts shortly before his death in Baltimore in October 1849, but liquor seems to have been at the core of it. A final spree left him stupefied, shabby and bloated. He was taken from tavern to hospital. “For years, Poe had integrated his life into his work—perhaps now, at the end, Poe was integrating his work in his life,” Mr. Kopley writes of the man’s final moments. “Having reached toward the edge throughout his writing, he was finally there.”

Mrs. Gurdon, a Journal contributor, is the author of “The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction.”