EDGAR ALLAN POE

I

Edgar Allan Poe proves an interesting study from the point of view of psychoanalysis. He has been analysed by pathologists and psychologists, but there remains much to be said about the work of this baffling genius. I can take up only a few phases of the pathetic life and great work of Poe.

One question that has interested critics is, what was the source of those mysterious ladies in his stories, the Ligeias, the Morellas, the Eleonoras? What made him so preoccupied with the subject of the death of beautiful women long before his own wife died? All this brings us to a little emphasised chapter in Poe's life, the history of one of his love affairs before he married Virginia Clemm. Its influence on his work has hardly ever been noted by critics, and yet the effect was of great importance.

Poe lost his parents when he was an infant, and he was adopted by Mr. Allan. He loved the mother of a friend of his, Mrs. Stannard, and when she died (he was 15 at the time), he was inconsolable. But the history of this boyish love is not fully known to us. As a boy of sixteen he loved Sarah Elmira Royster, whom he again met later in life and to whom he became engaged shortly before his death. At about the age of twenty or thereafter he loved his cousin, Miss Elizabeth Herring, and wrote several poems to her.

The real clue to Poe's life and work is furnished in an article, "Poe's Mary," that appeared in Harper's Magazine for March, 1889, by Augustus Van Cleef. It reports a conversation with a woman who was Poe's sweetheart and who rejected him. Her name is now known to us as Mary Devereaux. The main facts of the article have not been questioned by his biographers. The substance of the interview is this: Mary Devereaux met Poe through a flirtation. Her memory did not serve her as to the date, which she put in 1835. But since Poe was betrothed to Virginia that year, and had been betrothed to her for some time, the date was probably 1832, as the author of the article surmises, though Killis Campbell believes the year was 1831. Mary returned the poet's love, and he called on her almost every evening for a year. She jilted him, and Poe horsewhipped a relation of hers as being responsible for his loss. He wrote for a Baltimore paper a poem of six or eight verses expressing his indignant sentiments. This passion continued with Poe, buried in his unconscious, even after he married Virginia Clemm. The day before Virginia died, in 1847, Mary was at the Poe household, and Virginia said to her: "Be a friend to Eddie, and don't forsake him; he always loved you—didn't you, Eddie?"

There is an account in the article of a scene that occurred in the spring of 1842. Poe tried at the time to see Mary, who was then a married woman, at her home in Jersey City. He reproached her and shouted that she did not love her husband, and he tried to force her to corroborate his words. He had been inquiring for her, and made up his mind he would see her even "if he had to go to hell" to do it. When he saw her, he was somewhat soothed, and she sang to him his favourite song, "Come Rest in This Bosom." She had sung this for him in the early days, and also at a visit she paid him in Philadelphia not long before his Jersey City visit. After this episode at her home the poet was found in the woods wandering about like one crazy.

Mary Devereaux scoffed at the idea that the poet's child wife was the great passion of his life. It was always known, in spite of Poe's tenderness for Virginia, that he never found intellectual companionship in her. Poe married Virginia in May, 1836, when he was 27 and she 14 years old. He was living in 1833 with the Clemms in Baltimore, and had taken out a marriage license on September 22, 1835, but Virginia was then too young for marriage.

The relation of Mary to his work will soon appear. I wish to show first that the splendid love poem, To One in Paradise, appearing in the tale The Assignation, was, with the story, inspired by Mary. Visionary, the original title of The Assignation, appeared with the poem in January, 1834, in Godey's Lady's Book, and hence was written in 1833, or before. It was among the tales submitted in the prize contest that year in which Poe was successful with one of his stories. When Poe later obtained employment on The Southern Literary Messenger, he reprinted here some of his tales; this tale was reprinted in July, 1835. The clue comes now. In the same number of the Messenger there is a poem entitled To Mary, by Poe, beginning, "Mary amid the cares—the woes," which in sentiments and ideas is but another version of To One in Paradise in the Visionary. This poem To Mary appears in Poe's poetical works under the title To F——. He reprinted this poem, which was originally written to his love Mary, in Graham's Magazine for March, 1842, and changed the first line and called the poem no longer To Mary, but To One Departed, very suggestive of the To One in Paradise. Poe, who would make a poem written to one lady serve, by a few changes in its text, for another later woman friend, gave this poem its present title, To F——, when he reprinted it in the 1845 Broadway Journal in honour of the poet Frances S. Osgood, whom he met that year.[H]

If we compare To One in Paradise with To F—— there will be no doubt that they were inspired by the same person and written at the same time, 1833, when the affair with Mary was over. In both poems references are made to his sweetheart being an isle in the sea and covered with flowers over which the sun smiles. In each poem mention is made of the desolate condition of the poet who derives happiness from living in dreams connected with her. To F—— is not as perfect as the other, but the idea underlying each poem is the same. The sonnet To Zante also has the same imagery, and was written, no doubt, at the same time to Mary.

To One in Paradise is supposed to be written by the lover in the story Assignation, in which it appears. It will be recalled that the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite in that tale had written the poem in a volume of Politian's tragedy, a page of which was blotted with tears. Poe is that lover and Marchesa Aphrodite is Mary. But we know also that Poe is the author of the poem Scenes from Politian, which was written about the time he loved Mary. It was published in the Southern Literary Messenger in December, 1835. In these scenes Poe identified himself with Politian, who loves Lalage and asks her to fly to America. "Wilt thou fly to that Paradise?" he asks her. The reference to Politian in Assignation is then significant, and the tears on the leaf of the play shed by the lover of Marchesa Aphrodite, the dreamer, were Poe's own for his lost Mary. The poet looked upon her as dead to him, and hence in a later version of the poem to her, To F——, he changes the title to To One Departed; when he wrote To One in Paradise he looked upon her as dead. Mary was, by the way, a name that haunted him, and in his Marginalia he advances his belief in the correct theory that Byron's only real love affair was with Mary Chaworth.

I am not so dogmatic as to maintain that in writing the Assignation and the three poems I mentioned, and the Politian scenes, his other earlier loves did not unconsciously make themselves felt. Killis Campbell thinks To One in Paradise and the sonnet To Zante were written to Miss Royster. Poe may also have been thinking of the mother of his friend who died, in the poem To One in Paradise. But it is most likely that his love for Mary chiefly inspired these poems. They were certainly not written to Virginia, for in 1833 she was only 11 years old.

The poem to Mary Devereaux, supposed to have been written for a Baltimore paper, may, as Woodberry surmises, be the To F—— poem, although it is not so severe as Mary said the poem he wrote against her was. Either her memory failed her as to the alleged severity of the poem, or the poem has not been discovered. A poem by Poe was only recently unearthed by Prof. J. C. French, of Johns Hopkins University, and printed in the Dial for January 31, 1918. It was called Serenade, and was published in the Baltimore Visiter, April 20, 1833. The girl addressed is given a fictitious name, Adeline. Whether she is Mary or not I cannot venture to say with certainty, but most likely she is. It was published when the affair was probably over, and may have been written at the height of his love a year previously. Here are some lines from it:

The lover in Assignation, in which To One in Paradise appeared then is Poe, and his dreamy character is in accordance with all the other self portrayals we have of the poet. The description of the Marchesa, no doubt, was inspired by Mary.

I think that the tale of Ligeia, which Poe considered his best story, was unconsciously inspired by Mary, and it hence calls for a new interpretation. It was published in September, 1838, two years after he married Virginia; but the poet's memories still hearken back to Mary. She is the dead Ligeia, and his wife, Virginia, is the Lady Rowena, whom the narrator married after Ligeia died. The story of Ligeia was suggested by a dream. The poem The Conqueror Worm did not originally appear in the body of the tale. The narrator's memory, we will recall, flew back to the dead Ligeia; he called her name in dreams; ever after Rowena was dead he had a thousand memories of Ligeia. The emphasis throughout the tale on the love for the departed Ligeia which will not die shows the real love the poet felt for Mary, about whom he was thinking. The narrator imagines that the dead Ligeia put a poison into the cup of his second wife, Lady Rowena, and that thus the latter dies. He then sinks into visions of Ligeia. He imagines that the corpse of his wife becomes alive, and as he looks at it, it is transformed into "my lost love" Ligeia. In other words, the dead love still lives and will not die; it is not forgotten, and haunts the poet, just as love for Mary haunted him. The quotation from Glanvil that man does not yield to death, applies as well to dead love.

In this tale we see then the unconscious influence which an earlier love held on Poe. It is a tale of dead love as much as of death.

Mary enters into another famous tale where her presence was never suspected, in Eleonora. It has been thought that Eleonora was the poet's wife, Virginia, but the tale of the "Valley of Many Colored Grass" refers to the happy days when he courted Mary, and the sad change when Eleonora died, that took place in the Valley, describes the poet's grief when Mary jilted him. The story appeared in 1841 in The Gift for 1842. Whether it was written before Virginia burst a blood vessel, in 1841, as is likely, or afterwards, matters not. For in the tale, which was certainly written six years before Virginia died, the narrator thinks of a second marriage after the death of Eleonora, and Poe was surely not thinking of a second marriage in 1841. We recall in the tale that the narrator had vowed never to love or marry again after he lost Eleonora, but he does—he marries Ermengrade, who is really Virginia, since Eleonora is Mary. The narrator believes he hears the voice of Eleonora forgiving him for his marriage. The poet tells us then in this tale that in spite of his great love for Mary he was able after her rejecting him, still to care for and marry some one else.

The strongest passion of his youth was Mary and not Miss Royster. When he became engaged later in life to Miss Royster it was due to worldly reasons, and he once broke the engagement. I believe that the fact that Poe and his wife were cousins and that she burst a blood-vessel gave rise to the theory that Eleonora, who is a cousin of the narrator, was Virginia.

Another earlier tale of the period of Assignation and submitted in the prize contest at Baltimore, and hence written by 1833, is Morella. In Morella, Mary is still present in the person of the first Morella, whom the narrator marries and who dies; again we have a symbol of Mary's dead love. Morella leaves him a daughter also called Morella, and this may be a description of the paternal feeling Poe entertained at the time for Virginia, who was then 11 years old. In the tale the second Morella also dies.

The sadistic story, Berenice, of the same period, also has memories of Mary.

These stories with fanciful names like Ligeia, Eleonora, Morella, Berenice and the tale Assignation were given us by the poet from the depths of his unconscious; love repressions starting from the death of his own mother in infancy, the loss of his foster mother, Mr. Allan's first wife, the grief at the death of his friend's mother, the quarrel with Mr. Allan's second wife, the love affairs with Miss Royster, and Miss Herring, but especially the rejection by Mary entered into the influences, which made up not only the poems and tales previously mentioned, but much of his later work. He was neurotic because he lost his mother in infancy and had many love disappointments. The only tale where he gives an account of the love emotions is in The Spectacles, written before or about 1844, and here he drew on his experiences, probably chiefly from memories of Mary.

Now comes a question that has always puzzled his critics: Why was the poet so occupied with the subject of death of fair ladies or of depicting a man bereaved by the death of his love. Many replies have been made, but not altogether satisfactorily. The most common answer is that he was so occupied with the subject because he lost his own wife, Virginia. Some uninformed critics are of the belief that poems like The Raven and The Sleeper, tales like Eleonora and Ligeia, were written after his wife died. As a matter of fact these, with the exception of The Raven and possibly Eleonora, were written even before Virginia burst a blood-vessel. There is evidence to make us believe that Ulaume, which is taken to refer to the death of his wife, was at least commenced before Mrs. Poe's death, in January, 1847; Annabel Lee was, however, written after that date. Nearly all of Poe's short stories, too, had been published by that time. He was occupied with the subject of death long before he married; he mourns the death of women in Lenore, Tamerlane, and The Sleeper, all written before he was twenty-two years old. His first tales, Assignation, Ligeia, Morella, deal with the subject of women's deaths. So those who believe that he may have imagined Virginia dead after she burst a blood-vessel, and hence wrote as if she had died, are not right. For all the stories of this nature with the doubtful exception of Eleonora were written before she burst a blood-vessel. The Raven and The Conqueror Worm, two poems occupied with death, were written before her death but after her hemorrhage.

Poe tells us in his Philosophy of Composition,—an unconvincing account of the origin of The Raven,—that he regards the death of a beautiful maiden the most poetical and melancholy topic. But there were factors that made him think so, and these were the deaths of women he loved and the rejections by girls with whom he was infatuated. He lost his mother when he was three years old. Mrs. Lannard, who is said to have inspired To Helen, and who was "the first pure ideal love of my soul" (Poe) died when he was fifteen. (She is also said to have inspired The Sleeper.) He lost Mrs. Allan, his foster mother, to whom he was greatly attached, when he was twenty. He had also lost three sweethearts by the time he was twenty-three. These he looked upon as departed or gone from him. In the Bridal Ballad, written probably on the occasion of the marriage of Miss Royster, he refers to himself as a dead lover. The poems To F——, To One in Paradise, and To Zante, as I showed, were most likely written to Mary, though he may have had the others in mind, who either died or were gone from him. All this shows the strong infantile influences on Poe in damming up of his libido. He was, therefore, occupied with the subject of death not because of Virginia's illness or death, but because he lost, before he was twenty-three, six girls or women. His interest in the subject made him hope death could be conquered or stayed, and hence we have Ligeia and The Facts in the Case of Valdemar. There is a philosophic treatment of death in The Colloquy of Monos and Una.

II

Tales of burial alive, such as The Casque of Amontillado, The Black Cat, etc., are also characteristic of Poe.

What is the significance of Poe's interest in the subject of burial alive and in people who are guilty of burying others alive? Very few people would probably accept Freud's theory, but that master psychologist as a rule bases his theories on facts, and hence I will quote his views on the subject. In a footnote of his book on The Interpretation of Dreams, p. 244, he says: "It is only of late that I have learned to value the significance of fancies and unconscious thoughts about life in the womb. They contain the explanation of the curious fear felt by so many people of being buried alive, as well as the profoundest unconscious reason for the belief in a life after death, which represents nothing but a projection into the future of this mysterious life before birth. The act of birth, moreover, is the first experience with fear, and in this the source and model of the emotion of fear."

Would Freud's theory not also account for Poe's great gift of the analysis and depiction of the emotion of fear?

Morbid fear or anxiety is well depicted by Poe, especially in his Fall of the House of Usher. As we learn from psychoanalysis, morbid fear is inhibited sexual desire; it is a reaction against the libido. The individual's sexual impulses incapable of being repressed strive for forms of wish fulfilment, and these when repugnant are treated like something hostile, and provoke fear. Morbid fear differs from normal fear in being continuous and attributed to a source which is not the real one, the actual source being unconscious. If a woman, for example, is very much in love with a man who turns out to be a vile criminal, her love may become incapable of being fulfilled any longer because of the part played by her moral sense; shrinking from contemplating her love's fulfilment with the man she really still loves, she may develop an anxiety. This is only one of the innumerable cases of misdirected desire that may cause anxiety. Then there are physiological factors responsible also. Dr. Brink has made a study of the subject.

Poe had himself suffered from a damming of the libido. He is Roger Usher, and is describing his own morbid fear. One feels that the narrator of the tale presents a case of psychosis, for he sees impossible things happen. He imagines the house had a pestilent vapour about it. He tells us that Roger's condition infected him, and that the wild influences of Roger's fantastic and impressive superstition crept over him. He must have been deranged, for he imagines that he sees Roger's dead sister, whose coffin had been screwed down by them, come out of the vault and drag Roger to death. He also thinks he sees the house crumble into fragments and sink into the tarn. Either his whole narrative is a hallucination or only these few parts of it are.

Roger himself, however, is the real type of sufferer from morbid fear. He has inherited a peculiar disposition, and no doubt suffered from repressions, though nothing is said about this. He attributes his disease largely to anxiety about his sick sister, Lady Madeline. But the cause is in his unconscious. Those who are acquainted with the theories of psychoanalysis and the life of Poe will feel that Roger, like Poe, must have lost a mother early, then the mother of a friend, then his foster-mother. He also, like Poe, was no doubt thrice disappointed in love, and probably also drank. His symptoms were such as afflict neurotics. He was in constant terror and felt that he must die soon in some struggle with fear; he dreaded the future. He read strange books and imagined queer things. His sister died, and, with the aid of the narrator of the story, was buried in a vault in the house. He soon entertained fancies that he had buried her alive, and he was in mortal fear that she would wreak vengeance on him. When the teller of the story read to Roger some pages of a romance, Roger interpreted various unrelated actions described there as a rending of her coffin and the grating of iron hinges on her prison. He imagined she stood outside, and then that he was being crushed to death by her. And he died in fear. The vision of his sister was imaginary with him and the narrator as well, for Lady Madeline could not have escaped from the screwed down coffin and the vault, and having lain many days without food, would not have had strength to crush her brother to death. Usher died because of morbid fear.

Poe was a good delineator of the neuroses. Here we have a picture of his own life and know that he must have experienced some sort of anxiety, as the tale is so true to life. He was only thirty when the story was published, and the main character here, as in Berenice and the Assignation, is a neurotic. Behind it all one sees the mourner for the lost Lenore, the orphan, the victim of love through Stella Royster, Elizabeth Herring and Mary Devereaux.

Poe had also another trait, and that was a sadistic one. This accounts for his tales of people torturing and being tortured, as The Pit, and the Pendulum, and the Cask of Amontillado. He was sadistic as any one can see by his delight in writing critical articles calculated to cause writers intense pain. He punished his enemies by venting his hatred upon them in his essays. He had an unconscious instinct to cause pain for the mere sake of pain. He hints at this in his Imp of the Perverse, where he lays down a theory which is undoubtedly true, but which moralists try to shun. "I am not more certain that I breathe than that the assurance of the wrong or error of an action is often the one unconquerable force which impels us and alone impels us to its prosecution." He was also masochistic, he unconsciously liked to cause pain to himself. In his The Black Cat he calls perverseness one of the primitive impulses of the human heart, and he speaks of it as "the unfathomable longing of the soul to vex itself—to offer violence to its own nature, to do wrong for the wrong's sake only." Poe, as a child, had the sadistic and masochistic instincts. He is fascinated by contemplation of suffering, and in his Premature Burial speaks of the pleasurable pain we get from reading of terrible catastrophes.

His sadism and masochism figure considerably in his art. He could not carry out his desires to punish in life, and hence found a refuge in literature. We often carry out in imagination what we cannot actually do; and we wreak punishment and revenge that way; if we are authors we make books with such ideas. A very simple illustration will serve in Poe's case, yet it has never been noted. In Poe's tale The Cask of Amontillado the motive is revenge. The narrator vowed vengeance upon Fortunato, who had added insult to injury. He buries him in a vault. In his fancy Poe was punishing a real enemy, and though he had several, he hated none more than the author of Alice Ben Bolt, Dr. Thomas Dunn English. It is related he once sought the doctor, saying he wanted to kill him. The tale was published in Godey's Lady's Book for November, 1846, and was written probably a few months before. In July of that year Poe published the savage and violent letter to English in retaliation for English's reply to a very hostile article about him by Poe in the Literati. Poe's hatred for Dr. English is almost murderous. It is plausible to assume that a writer would unconsciously have his most bitter antagonist in mind while writing a bitter tale of revenge at the time of his most intense hatred for him. Poe was not satisfied with his own savage reply, and instituted a suit of damages for defamation of character, which was rewarded with a verdict several months after the publishing of his tale. In the story Poe wrote: "I must not only punish, but punish with impunity. A wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser." He calls Fortunato a quack in painting and gemmary, as he had called Dr. English a charlatan in literature, who did not know the rules of grammar. So this is an illustration of how sadism made him unconsciously write at least one tale of punishing an enemy by burying him alive.

III

After all, Poe is chiefly the dreamer and author of dream literature. The narrator of Berenice tells in detail how he was always dreaming. In Assignation the lover says, "To dream has been the business of my life. I have, therefore, framed for myself a bower of dreams." In Eleonora the narrator says those who dream by day obtain glimpses of eternity. Roger Usher was a dreamer. Poe's Eureka was dedicated to those who dream instead of those who think. He also wanted to transcend reality. He builded an ideal landscape in The Domain of Arnheim because he thinks art can surpass nature. He hated the ugliness of to-day and he tried in Some Words with a Mummy to revive a mummy to tell him of ancient Egypt and to give him the secret that enables one to suspend life temporarily and to be revived again centuries hence. He says in an early poem that all his days have been a dream. (A Dream Within a Dream.)

Poe was true to the psychology of the dreamer; he created things out of his fancies to be as he would like them to be because he did not have them in reality. He was poor and described mansions with wonderful furniture. He was sad because of deaths and lost loves and tried in some tales to conquer death. His The Raven is really an anxiety dream. Fear prompted it, the fear that he would never be with his lost Lenore, who probably was Mary. She then inspired this his most famous poem. His characters cannot help being dreamers, for their creator was one. He was so absorbed in his dreams that he never tried to take an interest in reality. Hence we find no moral note in Poe's work; there is one exception, William Wilson. He took no interest in philanthropy, reforms, transcendentalism or other movements of the day, and he disliked Emerson. One would never know from his work whether he lived at the time he did or in the eighteenth or twentieth century. One does not know from his work that there was a Mexican war or a slavery problem in his day.

The one moral tale Poe wrote, William Wilson, also has great value to the psychoanalyst. For it is a study of emotional conflicts and deals with the subject of dual personality and anticipates Stevenson's famous story, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. Poe is William Wilson, and he even describes his school days in England in the tale. It is the history of Poe's own struggle with his unconscious, with evil. He too was a gambler and probably cheated at cards like William Wilson. There are two William Wilsons, one representative of the unprincipled, the criminal, the unconscious primitive instincts in ourselves, and the other William Wilson who is the voice of civilisation, the conscious moralist seeking to repress the other. Surely this great tale is symbolic of man's struggle with his own conscious which civilisation trying to tame.

So we leave Poe. Others may take up the question of his alleged drunkenness and its overestimated effect on his art. But I have merely wished to point a few things in his work made clear with the help of psychoanalysis. Psychoanalysis has given the answer to those who object to Poe because of his lack of moral tone.

It should be added that Poe's great attachment to his mother-in-law, Mrs. Clemm, was due to the loss of his own mother in infancy.

Poe's devotion and love for women of his later life, Mrs. Osgood, Mrs. Richmond, Mrs. Lewis, and especially Helen Whitman, did not influence his work considerably in spite of the sufferings they caused him, but produced a few good single poems to some of them, notably, To Annie, Mrs. Richmond, and To Helen, Mrs. Whitman, and the pathetic, masterly letters to these women.