Edgar Allan Poe (2 page)
Authors: Kevin J. Hayes
In light of Edgar Allan Poe’s impact on the history of literature and the arts, his life deserves another look. From the late 1820s through the next two decades, he created some of the finest short stories, some of the most memorable poetry and some of the most insightful and perceptive criticism ever written. The amazing thing is that he did all this in the face of abject poverty. Though he lived much of his adult life in squalor, he never turned his back on literature, never compromised his art for the sake of commercial gain. In a letter he wrote to one publisher early in his literary career, Poe used the language of the marriage ceremony to express his dedication to the world of literature. His was a pitiful life in many ways, but Poe’s commitment to literature is awe-inspiring.
The Contest
Learning the outcome of an 1833 literary contest sponsored by the Baltimore
Saturday Visiter
, Edgar Allan Poe received the news that October with mixed feelings. He was thrilled one of his entries, ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’, had won the fiction contest but disappointed that another, a contemplative poem in blank verse titled ‘The Coliseum’, had lost the poetry contest. Always a fierce competitor, Poe took defeat hard. The judges had chosen ‘The Coliseum’ as the best poem, but once they awarded ‘Manuscript Found in a Bottle’ the fiction prize, they gave the poetry prize to the author of ‘The Song of the Winds’, an unknown Baltimore poet named Henry Wilton. Poe’s disappointment turned to anger when he learned ‘Henry Wilton’ was the pen name of John Hill Hewitt, the editor of the
Visiter
. How could a magazine’s editor win a contest sponsored by its publisher?
Soon after the winning entries appeared, Poe headed to the
Visiter
office at the corner of Baltimore and Gay, where he caught up with Hewitt as he was about to enter. Poe scowled ominously.
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‘You have used underhanded means, sir, to obtain that prize over me,’ Poe said sternly.
‘I deny it, sir,’ Hewitt replied.
‘Then why did you keep back your real name?’
‘I had my reasons,’ Hewitt told him, ‘and you have no right to question me.’
‘But you tampered with the committee, sir,’ Poe insisted.
‘The committee are gentlemen above being tampered with, sir; and if you say that you insult them,’ Hewitt responded, looking Poe in the eye.
‘I agree that the committee are gentlemen,’ Poe said, ‘but I cannot place
you
in that category.’ As Hewitt told the story, Poe’s dark eyes now flashed with fury.
Hearing these sharp words, the quick-tempered Hewitt could no longer control himself. He struck Poe, who staggered back but remained on his feet. Happily, passing friends stopped the quarrel before one man could challenge the other to a duel.
Though the contest had provoked Poe’s ire, his trouble with Hewitt went much deeper and involved Lambert A. Wilmer, who had come to Baltimore to edit the
Visiter
. Wilmer had reached a professional agreement with Charles F. Cloud, the magazine’s proprietor. Cloud would supply the capital, and Wilmer would invest his time and editorial expertise. The two would share profits equally. At this time editing periodicals remained largely an amateur pursuit, an endeavour undertaken by those with other means of support. Wilmer’s arrangement marks a groundbreaking step toward professional editing.
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When Cloud established the
Visiter
, its main competition was the
Baltimore Minerva
, which Hewitt, a composer and music teacher, edited part-time. Under Wilmer’s leadership, the
Visiter
succeeded, forcing the
Minerva
out of business. Hewitt approached Cloud next, offering to edit the
Visiter
for nothing. Cloud accepted the offer and dismissed Wilmer. Whereas Wilmer was trying to make journalism a serious profession, Hewitt’s actions reverted it to an amateur pursuit. Wilmer successfully sued Cloud for breach of contract.
Hewitt’s dilettantish attitude toward editing underlies Poe’s dispute with him. Poe sympathized with Wilmer’s efforts to turn journalism into a bona fide profession. By this time – he was twenty-four – Poe had decided to devote his life to literature and hoped to edit a magazine himself someday – someday soon perhaps. That Hewitt had entered a contest sponsored by his employer Poe considered a professional breach.
Hewitt saw the matter differently. Though editor of the
Visiter
, he saw no conflict of interest. Since he was not being remunerated to edit the magazine, he felt free to enter a contest it sponsored. His entry did not seem unprofessional to him because Hewitt did not consider himself a professional. His actions were not unprecedented.
The Bouquet
, a Boston literary magazine that had sponsored a contest the previous year, told contestants, ‘The editor has the privilege of becoming a competitor.’
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Poe’s reaction demonstrates what intense emotions contests could unleash. Since writing was largely an amateur endeavour, a contest offered a rare way to compensate authors. The
Visiter
let winners choose between cash or prizes. Poe chose cash, receiving fifty dollars for his winning tale. Instead of the twenty-five-dollar poetry prize, Hewitt chose a silver cup. Losing this extra twenty-five dollars fuelled Poe’s anger. He
was
robbed: ‘The Coliseum’ is far superior to Hewitt’s poem.
The speaker of ‘The Coliseum’, a traveller wishing to immerse himself in Rome’s heritage, seeks ‘springs of lore’ within the ancient ruins. After much weary travel, he takes strength in what the Coliseum represents. His words echo Fingal’s contemplation of the ruins of Balclutha, a walled town belonging to the ancient Britons in ‘Carthon’, one of James Macpherson’s Ossianic poems. Fingal intones, ‘The thistle shook there its lonely head: the moss whistled to the wind.’ Poe’s traveller observes, ‘Here, where the dames of Rome their gilded hair / Waved to the wind, now wave the reed and thistle!’ (ll. 21–2). Shrugging off his melancholy, Poe’s traveller listens to what the ruins say. The idea that building stone could retain memories of what has occurred within the Coliseum may seem fanciful, but Poe understood how sensitive, imaginative minds could unlock memories stored within physical objects.
Reprinting ‘The Coliseum’ two years later, Poe subtitled it ‘A Prize Poem’, thus awarding himself the recognition the contest judges had denied. Ten years later he still resented their decision, according to the biographical essay Henry Hirst contributed to the Philadelphia
Saturday Museum
. Though Hirst wrote the essay, Poe supplied much of its detail. Hirst said ‘
both
premiums were awarded’ to Poe ‘although, among the competitors were many of the most celebrated names in our literature’.
4
In the late 1820s and early 1830s, publishers sponsored contests to gain notoriety for their magazines and to increase both subscriptions and advertising revenues. But many of them genuinely wished to encourage the development of American literature. Sometimes contests awarded prizes for different genres – essays, poems, tales – but premiums for fiction were typically the highest. In other words, contests assigned a commercial value to literature. Poe wanted most to be a poet, but contests made him realize that fiction was more lucrative. He changed focus and began writing short stories.
Poe relished a good competition. The
Visiter
contest was not his first. Two years earlier the Philadelphia
Saturday Courier
had offered a hundred-dollar premium for the best tale. News of this contest spread north to New Hampshire and south to the Carolinas.
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Poe was living in Baltimore when he heard about it. With nowhere else to go after leaving West Point, he had returned to his Aunt Maria Clemm’s Baltimore home in Mechanic’s Row on Wilkes Street, Fells Point, where he shared cramped quarters with his ailing brother Henry, his adolescent cousin Virginia and their bedridden grandmother. Through sheer tenacity, Maria Clemm held the household together. Mayne Reid, who enjoyed her hospitality years later, characterized Mrs Clemm as ‘a type of those grand American mothers – such as existed in the days when block-houses had to be defended, bullets run in red-hot saucepans, and guns loaded for sons and husbands to fire them.’
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William James Bennett,
Baltimore from Federal Hill
, 1831.
Maria Clemm’s mother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, received a modest annuity after the death of her husband, Revolutionary patriot David Poe, Sr, which supplied the family’s main source of income. Anxious to contribute to the household and eager to pursue his literary career, Poe prepared several tales for the
Courier
contest. The more tales, he reckoned, the better his chances. By the deadline, 1 December 1831, contestants had submitted more than eighty stories, which the editor generally found ‘striking, interesting, and well-told fictions’.
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Though the premium the
Courier
offered seems quite generous and its publisher’s desire to encourage American literature heartfelt, a contest gave publishers a significant side benefit: it supplied original content without requiring them to remunerate authors. Contest submissions typically became property of the magazine, which could do with them whatever its editor wished. A good contest gave weeklies copy they could use for many weeks to come. The
Courier
kept publishing contest entries through the following year, sometimes using them as lead articles.
Less than a month after the deadline, the judges had reached their decision. To Poe’s chagrin, Delia S. Bacon won the contest for ‘Love’s Martyr’, a tragic tale of a young woman betrothed to a British officer who ventures from her frontier village to see him but is slain accidentally by Indians sent to escort her. One South Carolina editor thought ‘Love’s Martyr’ an excellent choice, finding it ‘beautiful and interesting’.
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Poe questioned the quality of Bacon’s writing. She reused this episode for
The Bride of Fort Edward
, which Poe reviewed. ‘Nothing less than a long apprenticeship to letters will give the author … even a chance to be remembered or considered’, he observed. Her prose ‘stands sadly in need of a straight jacket’.
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Under the heading ‘Prize Tale’, the
Courier
published ‘Love’s Martyr’ on 7 January 1832. ‘Metzengerstein’, which appeared the week after, may have come in second. The differences between Bacon’s tale and Poe’s are obvious from the outset. ‘Love’s Martyr’ begins: ‘It was almost morning; the deep blue of the midnight heaven had half faded, and the stars were going out, one by one, in that pale dome, as though the glory they had all night showered upon the silent earth, had exhausted their eternal fountains of brightness.’ Poe was right: her prose does need a straitjacket. Before this first sentence is over, her wordiness devolves into nonsense. If the fountains of brightness are eternal, how can they be exhausted?
‘Metzengerstein’, in contrast, begins with a brief yet elegant pronouncement: ‘Horror and fatality have been stalking abroad in all ages.’ This memorable opening emphasizes the indisputable existence of evil. The conjoined word pair that forms the sentence’s subject identifies the tale’s frightening nature. Personification lends humanlike qualities to horror and fatality while making them something other than human. Monsterlike, they are immortal creatures forever roaming the planet. Poe thus treats the eternal with subtlety, without using the word ‘eternal’. Whereas Bacon’s phrase, ‘eternal fountains of brightness’, embodies a cliché typically used to describe enduring goodness, Poe’s sentence emphasizes the omnipresence of evil. Bacon depicts eternity as a manifestation of God’s benevolence; Poe portrays man’s contact with eternity as an encounter fraught with fear.
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The judges obviously read beyond the opening sentences to decide the winner. Bacon’s subject matter may have played a part in their decision. A romantic story set in the past, ‘Love’s Martyr’ belongs to the genre of historical romance, the most respected form of fiction among contemporary American readers, as the ongoing popularity of Sir Walter Scott and James Fenimore Cooper shows. Indeed, Bacon’s plot closely resembles
The Last of the Mohicans
. Jingoistic critics believed American authors should take their inspiration from American subjects. Announcing a fiction contest in 1832, the publisher of the
Cincinnati Mirror
suggested competitors set their tales in the Ohio Valley or, at least, link their stories to regional history.
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The literary contest could reinforce style as well as subject. Editors encouraged authors to write what readers wanted most: historical romance.
Gothic fiction, with its Old World settings, had been around since the late eighteenth century, but it was not regarded as highly as historical romance among nineteenth-century American readers, who considered it derivative of German literature. Critiques of Poe’s Gothicism or ‘Germanism’ would dog him throughout his career. For a later reprinting of ‘Metzengerstein’ he added a subtitle – ‘A Tale in Imitation of the German’ – to forestall further criticism, making it an homage to the literary tradition. ‘Metzengerstein’ is a Gothic experiment, an effort that celebrates the Gothic and advances its possibilities.
