Edgar Allan Poe in 1849 in Lowell, Mass. Credit: Wikimedia Commons.

“There comes Poe with his raven, like Barnaby Rudge,
Three-fifths of him genius and two-fifths sheer fudge.”

These lines from James Russell Lowell’s 1848 satire A Fable for Critics were repeated in America in 1918 by Francis X. Talbot, S.J., when the fearsome future literary editor and later editor in chief of the magazine was just a lowly Jesuit scholastic teaching at Boston College. In a long essay for America, Talbot acknowledged that while “[p]opular opinion has always regarded Poe with favor,” nevertheless “academic analysis looks askance at his defects.” 

Talbot, however, who otherwise never passed on a chance to play the curmudgeon, mostly spared Poe: It was clear he had a bit of a soft spot for the troubled writer, who had died almost 70 years before after leaving his indelible mark on American literature. While acknowledging that Poe “estranged his friends and incensed his enemies” throughout life, Talbot concluded: “After the span of years, when his jarring originality loses its harshness, his criticisms lose their sting, and his moral life becomes rather an object of pity, we judge him more kindly.”

Poe has also been scaring us ever since. In a 2020 Halloween roundup of good horror reads, two America editors (both Jesuits) picked Poe, one for “The Cask of Amontillado” and another for “The Tell-Tale Heart.” They are not alone: Even back in 1918, Father Talbot was noting that Poe “sensed the popular craving for utter awfulness and weird mystery,” so it seems appropriate to look closer at the old rogue as we approach that most Catholic of secular holidays, Halloween. 

Born in Boston in 1809, Poe was raised by foster parents John and Frances Allan (whose surname he took as his middle name) in Richmond, Va. Poe proved to be a good student, excelling at Greek and Latin and learning French during several years in England. He briefly attended the University of Virginia, leaving after one year. 

His first book of poetry was published in 1827, around the same time he enlisted in the U.S. Army, and was followed two years later by a second. After being dismissed from officer training at West Point four years later, Poe pursued writing fulltime. Despite his later fame as a short story writer and poet, Poe achieved his only real professional success in those years as a literary critic. In 1838, he published his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and followed it a year later with a two-volume collection of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 

In 1835, Poe married Virginia Clemm, the daughter of his aunt. The Poe biographer John Tresch called their relationship “a passion at odds with today’s sensibilities and viewed with some suspicion at the time,” but also noted that marriages between cousins were considered “fairly common” in that era. More problematic was that Virginia was 13.

Poe also earned a reputation over the years for erratic and inconstant behavior, usually ascribed to alcohol abuse, the use of opiates or mental illness. “Poe was a singularly human creature,” wrote Thomas J. Lynam in his 1942 America review of a Poe biography, “trailed by all the horrors and sorrows that follow upon drink, poverty, addiction to drugs and the shadow of insanity.”

Not until 1845 did Poe find real critical success, when the publication of his endlessly anthologized poem “The Raven” made him famous (though it earned the often-penniless author almost nothing). Throughout his writing life, he was better known in Europe than the United States, and his horror and detective stories heavily influenced both genres for decades.

When, a decade into their marriage, Virginia Clemm became dangerously ill with tuberculosis, Poe moved with her to Fordham, then a very rural area of the Bronx—his house, “Poe Cottage,” remains there today. His new neighbors were the Jesuits, who in 1846 had taken over nearby St. John’s College, later to become Fordham University. During his wife’s illness and after her death in 1847, Poe was known to socialize with the Jesuit community, especially the future president of the university, Edward Doucet, S.J.

Poe’s connection to the Fordham Jesuits (most of whom were French speakers at the time) became legendary in part because of an observation Poe made to a friend: He enjoyed the company of the Jesuits because they “were highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars” and “they smoked and they drank and they played cards, and they never said a word about religion.” 

Fordham boosters have also long claimed that Poe’s famous poem “The Bells” was inspired by the bells of what is now Fordham’s University Church, whose tintinnabulation he would have heard both during his visits to campus and from his nearby cottage. That the story is almost certainly false—the church’s bell tower wasn’t even completed until 1849, a year after Poe supposedly wrote the poem—seems to bother no one. There is now an “Edgar Allan Poe Way” on campus, and the school has erected a plaque claiming the connection.

In 1848, Poe released his long essay “Eureka,” a semi-scientific reflection on the nature of the universe that included a version of the “Big Bang” theory eight decades before scientists accepted the idea. Poe’s long and quixotic essay had its detractors but also admirers, including Albert Einstein. According to Poe’s biographers, he considered “Eureka” his crowning accomplishment, telling his aunt that “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka.’ I could accomplish nothing more.”

A year later, Poe was found semiconscious on the street in Baltimore; he never truly regained his senses, dying four days later on Oct. 7, 1849. Reports after (his death certificate is lost) were that he repeatedly called out the name “Reynolds” and the attending physician at his death said his final words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”

In the almost two centuries since, Poe has become something of a symbol in popular culture of the tortured genius or the mad writer. His influence on literary history is more substantial, including in the genres of literary criticism, short story theory, detective fiction, science fiction, Gothic horror and even scientific writing. (Baltimore’s professional football team is also named in honor of his most famous literary creation: the Ravens.) 

It has been more than a century since Francis X. Talbot weighed in on Poe’s influence, but perhaps his closing line from 1918 is the best. “We are gradually adopting the opinion long current in Europe,” Talbot wrote, “where Poe is considered the greatest, if not most typical, American genius.”

•••

Our poetry selection for this week is “In Times That Trouble,” by Mary Cecelia Bowman. Readers can view all of America’s published poems here.

Other recent Catholic Book Club columns:

Happy reading!

James T. Keane

James T. Keane is a Senior Editor at America.