Edgar Allan Poe Overview

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration;... [more]

Poe once wrote that all worldly things contain "the germ of their inevitable annihilation." Pretty cheerful stuff -- clearly this was a man obsessed with ruin and with death. His characters typically suffer from various forms of mental and physical deterioration; their minds seem to have a predilection for the destruction of their bodies. Long before Freud suggested that humans might be driven by more than self-preservative instincts, Poe discovered the implacable, unreasonable drive towards self-destruction. He discovered it in himself, and he dramatized it in each of his characters. In addition to writing poetry that would strongly influence Baudelaire and others, Poe essentially created the genres of the detective story and the psychological thriller. With a combination of grotesque imagery, intense psychological conflicts, and brilliant plotting, his short stories practically vibrate with internal tension and suspense. A dark ferment, compounded by the mental instability of his principal characters, typically seeps through his narratives till it overflows into hideous revelations. This narrative arc and macabre sensibility parallel Poe's theories on psychology. He was fascinated by the strange instincts that drive humans to acts of violence. In the "Imp of the Perverse," Poe's narrator denounces science for ignoring our fundamentally violent nature. Science, according to this narrator, follows an all-too-rational idea of human action as motivated principally by physical needs. In the end, the narrator admits that he once murdered a man for no reason. What drives him to confess? Poe's perversion is always double-edged: there is the irrational urge to do violence and the compulsive desire to reveal it, to tell all and destroy ourselves. Throughout his work, Poe was intent on tracking the odd vacillation between these two vicissitudes. One notices the same themes reiterated in "The Tell-Tale Heart," one of Poe's best-known stories. Here, a murderer hides his victim under the floorboards and is haunted by the recurrent sound of the dead man's heart. As the heartbeat grows louder and louder, the murderer becomes increasingly mad and eventually collapses into confession. Once again, the horror and joy of violence hold Poe's character in a tormenting conflict. Underlying these tortured tales is an often-ignored religious sensibility. Poe's musings on death were not merely the morbid theories of an incurable manic depressive; he believed that the desire for death was fundamentally a desire to return to primordial oneness with God. Unfortunately, this desire manifested itself in Poe in the form of alcoholism, which resulted in frequent drunken perambulations through the streets of Baltimore in the middle of the night. It was after such a night of wandering that he was found lying dead in a gutter. Some say he died of over-consumption; others say the cause of death was rabies. If Poe's life was true to his fiction, some combination of both would seem most likely. [show less]