- Edgar Allan Poe, or as he was known in life,
just Edgar Poe.
We remember him for his
spine tingling, tales of horror and the macabre,
as well as inventing the detective fiction genre.
But unlike many of the great authors
of Western classic literature,
he's become an icon unto himself,
recognized to this day by name,
arguably as much as the titles of his stories and poems.
Aside from the odd raven or black cat,
none of this stuff features any characters from his stories.
It's the cult of personality of the man himself
that has stuck most in popular consciousness, but why?
(upbeat music)
Poe lived in many places during his short 40 years
on this cursed planet,
and he is claimed as a famous historical resident
of Boston, Richmond, Baltimore, New York, Sullivan's Island,
Philadelphia, London, and even Scotland.
So there is this feeling of collective ownership for many.
Baltimore even named their football team the Ravens
after Poe's poem, and maybe that's why
their Super Bowl championships are nevermore.
It's no secret that Poe had a difficult and tormented life,
a starving artist who could never catch a break,
making a pittance on his writing,
no matter how popular it was.
And you know, people vibe with a sad boy,
look at Jack Skellington, and just look at him.
But was he really that sad?
Like this picture, for instance,
of all the many portraits of him
that were taken during his life,
the one taken right after his suicide attempt
has become the most ubiquitous.
It is unquestionably the worst photo of him that exists.
After Poe died, from what many people believe now
was a brain tumor,
this was the image that was pushed into the public
by his literary enemies.
Seriously, this guy had a list of nemeses a mile long.
It's basically like the press using his mugshot
to make him look bad.
His foster father, John Allan, nemesis number one,
bought the suit in the photo
for Poe's beloved foster mother's funeral.
John Allan hated Edgar
and never spent money on him if he could help it.
But as a high society gentlemen,
it would've been embarrassing
for his foster son not to wear mourning clothes.
He wasn't goth,
He was just poor.
John Allan adopted Poe when he was orphaned
by his stage actor parents at the age of two.
Allan was one of the wealthiest men in Richmond
and raised Poe to be a society gentleman
who was expected to live a certain lifestyle
or else shame the whole family.
But John Allan also refused to
adequately support Poe financially
repeatedly setting him up for failure.
He sent Poe off to university
without enough money to pay for his classes,
so Poe had to drop out.
When Poe joined the army to follow in the footsteps
of his renowned military grandfather,
Allan helped Poe enroll at West Point,
but did not provide Edgar
with the means to actually acquire the education,
so Poe was dishonorably discharged.
But why would the man who raised him hate him so much?
Well, when Poe and his foster mother Frances
found out that John Allan was keeping two,
count them, two secret separate families,
Poe took Frances Allan's side
'cause he was a hashtag feminist,
so daddy cut him off and went out of his way
to make Edgar's life miserable,
disowning and disinheriting him.
Says Harry Lee Poe, former president of the Poe foundation
and a family relative,
"Poe never signed his name Edgar Allan Poe,
"nor did any of his writings in his lifetime
"appear with this name.
"He used the initial A but never the name of John Allan."
The reason we remember him as Edgar Allan Poe now
is thanks to his greatest nemesis of all, Rufus Griswold.
These two men had once been amicable colleagues
but after Poe gave Griswold's writings a lukewarm review
in a literary magazine,
Griswold had an out for Poe for the rest of eternity.
As soon as Poe died,
Griswold released a scathingly, slanderous obituary
depicting Poe as a raving madman doomed to hell,
which is a lot. (claps hands)
As Kent Ljungquist put it
in the "Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,"
"The obituary was a combination of half truths
"and outright fabrications
"about Poe's personal habits and conduct.
"Griswold's portrait in which Poe's role as a critic
"was relegated to that of a 'dissector of sentences',
"almost irrevocably damaged his reputation."
Griswold also con Poe's mother-in-law
into turning over all of Poe's writing to him.
He published Poe's collected works
with an introduction that slandered him terribly,
and then kept all the money for himself.
Poe's family never saw a dime.
To, again, quote Harry Lee Poe,
"Griswold stated that Poe's stories
"were largely autobiographical.
"While many of Poe's love poems
"were clearly inspired by events in his own life,
"Griswold suggested that Poe's horror and terror pieces
"were as well.
"The tradition of interpreting Poe's stories
"as autobiographical in their details
"continues among critics and scholars to this day."
When in life, Poe said the opposite,
that he didn't attempt
to express his own self for the stories
but that instead he focused on only creating beauty.
But thanks to Griswold
and the slander of Poe's other many literary enemies,
we remember him as this frumpy, sad boy
who saddened himself to death.
But, again, why?
You see, Poe worked as a literary critic.
See, at the time it was common practice for critics
to only print favorable reviews of their friends' books
in exchange for puff pieces of their own works in return.
Poe wasn't playing that.
In his career with various literary magazines,
he pursued the practice of balanced, honest criticism,
focusing on both positives and negatives in the stories.
Poe often looked down on his contemporaries
for their tendency towards imitation.
Poe considered himself a genius of originality.
To quote another famous literary snob,
and by snob I mean icon Oscar Wilde,
"imitation is the sincerest form of flattery
"that mediocrity can pay to greatness."
Says scholar of 19th century literature, Sandra Tomc,
in the "Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe,"
"As a critic he could not and would not lie.
"As a consequence, he made enemies,
"but their number was legion, and he was only one."
But while Poe was alive,
he was as much known for his tales of humor and grand hoaxes
as his tales of terror.
Known as his burlesques, these comedic stories
include elements of satire and wit
that often resembles slapstick.
Poe found humor in everyday situations,
especially among people who took themselves too seriously.
And yeah, a lot of the times
these were thinly veiled mockery of his literary peers
who retaliated by painting him publicly
as a friendless, lunatic.
Says Robert T. Tally Jr.,
professor of English at Texas State University, go Texas,
"One could make the case that Poe was primarily a humorist,
"if sometimes a black humorist,
"and that his tales of terror or mystery
"were secondary to the main body of his collected works."
But as Lee Poe says,
"His humor does not survive today because it's usually
"dependent upon the reader's familiarity
"with a timely situation he would satirize."
"Poe probably suffers from this
"misconception of his body of work
"more than any other American writer
"because the middle school and high school
"American literature anthologies
"tend to select a few of his most gruesome stories
"for their young audience."
These gruesome stories include
his famous tales of the Arabesque and the Grotesque.
Poe elevated the horror genre changing it from
the common penny dreadful blood and gore
to something deeper.
His stories and poetry explore themes of
the alienation of loss,
the question of life after death and the existence of God,
the power of love over death,
the human race's capacity for evil and cruelty,
the irrationality and irony of vanity, pride,
jealousy, guilt, revenge,
both legal justice
and a universal, cosmic, metaphysical justice,
as well as science is both a danger
and a guide to spiritual truth.
Poe was also a pioneer of science fiction,
inspiring the likes of H. G. Wells, and Jules Verne
and many other giants of the genre.
Not as many as Mary Shelley,
but we can give him a credit where credit is due.
He wrote stories of air travel
across the Atlantic and to the moon,
of dystopian futures
and of the exploration of the line between life and death,
adventures beyond the boundaries of the known world,
and the sentience of matter
and the relativity of time and space.
When acknowledging his own debt to Poe's influence,
Arthur Ray Bradbury said,
"Poe's influence on the modern short story
"is unmatched in English and American literature.
"He gave it style, organization, dignity,
"and meaning and set it on the road
"to becoming one of the most challenging forms of fiction
"a writer can attempt."
He gave us a twist on first person narrative,
the unreliable narrator.
He upended the concept of the morality tale.
In his day, it was often insisted all stories have a moral,
but Poe said,
"Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem."
He criticized his peers
for their insistence in teaching didactic, moral lessons
and mocked them in satire.
Poe's extensive work as a literary critic
also forced him to reflect on his own writing.
He revised many of his most famous works multiple times
and republished them.
We remember Edgar Allan Poe the way we do in large part
because he was the victim of malicious posthumous branding,
but he was so much more than a sad boy
with a bad, terrible, no good portrait.
Of course, his horror stories and poems were influential
but he had much more impact on other genres
in a way that is rarely discussed.
Plus, despite his enemies
trying to ruin and bury his legacy,
I have never even heard of that Griswold
until I wrote this video script.
To quote the Raven, "Haters gonna hate."
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