FOREWORD FOREWORD The man who wrote tales of horror unrivaled in American fiction faced extraordinary demons often of his own making A member of the so-called American Gothic move ment Edgar Allan Poe 1809 49 has been described alternately as visionary melan choly and unhinged Even by his own account he became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity Most famous for his tales of darkness and murder Poe wrote much-heralded essays that drew their inspiration from French poets whom he admired and who admired him In his more popular works he delivered what the masses wanted tales of mystery and the macabre He created the detective story genre And his poems such as Annabel Lee and especially The Raven instantly appealed to many Over time Poe’s fevered brain rendered his stories darker still Driven to succeed he raced along and fell off the knife edge of remembrance and forgetting neither of which afforded him inner peace All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream he wrote Many of Poe’s characters bedeviled by extreme anxiety seem to parallel his own exis tence Like the tormented painter Vincent van Gogh Poe was and still is considered to be a romantic artist whose life was synonymous with personal misfortune Despite a creative genius whose expression some in polite society dismissed as rank self-promotion Poe was something of a rock star of his generation popular naughty and doomed After his death intellectuals could not agree on Poe’s reputation A few of the epithets thrown at him were provincial Henry James vulgar W B Yeats and the jingle man Ralph Waldo Emerson Yet T S Eliot thought him highly gifted It is difficult to name another writer of his or any age who wore so many masks Like his life Poe’s death even today confounds his biographers His last words report edly were Lord help my poor soul Was it drink drugs heart disease rabies or suicide that stopped his genius at forty Or was he simply a victim of melancholy No one can say for certain I wish I could write as mysterious as a cat Poe once said He got his wish J Patrick Lewis United States Children’s Poet Laureate 2011 13 5
introduction He never really found his place Orphaned at two and never adopted he spent his adult life roam ing from city to city and job to job facing poverty addiction and death at every turn His efforts with a pen were mostly sneered at and dismissed Even his face with its expansive forehead and dark eyes was not one to blend into a crowd And always pursuing him were the voices that whispered in his ear telling him he was going insane Perhaps no poet endured a life so hard as that of Edgar Allan Poe His was a lonely existence of little fame and even less fortune It was my crime to have no one on Earth who cared for me or loved me he once said Still he labored on forging a most unique literary legacy under these heavy bur dens of fate He threw open doors to shadowed beauty and windows onto the soul yet it wasn’t until he took his final rest that the world at last found a place for this dark poet 6 Edgar Allan Poe as a young man
ALONE From childhood’s hour I have not been As others were I have not seen The mystery which binds me still From the torrent or the fountain From the red cliff of the mountain As others saw I could not bring My passions from a common spring From the sun that round me roll’d From the same source I have not taken In its autumn tint of gold My sorrow I could not awaken From the lightning in the sky My heart to joy at the same tone As it pass’d me flying by And all I lov’d I lov’d alone From the thunder and the storm Then in my childhood in the dawn And the cloud that took the form Of a most stormy life was drawn When the rest of Heaven was blue From ev’ry depth of good and ill Of a demon in my view From Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe 7
