Edgar Allen Poe, I really like this tagging of him as the ‘People’s Writer’. I still need to brush up on all my Poe biographical data, I was much better in the subject back in my middle school days. I have since then revisited Poe several throughout my education.
This class should make us experts on everything Poe, and we are so lucky to be in the
In response to today’s class, I must argue that I think that for us to use the word ‘crazy’ to describe the People’s Writer is entirely unfair. None of us are doctors, we are English majors, we are scholars, and I hope that we revisit the same question when we are much more advanced in our expertise, at the end of the semester. Hopefully among us we can find a doctor, who could help us decipher the psyche of Poe, the dynamic of his mind, and maybe link some patterns we see in his life and lifestyle to what we already know about him. We know about his image, his public persona, (which at this point, with all the sources available to us, is more personal and invasive than he ever intended or was aware of his public persona to be).
So we have before us the opportunity to get to know E.A. Poe better but as for right now, I don’t like to label him ‘crazy’. We know he experimented with drugs. We talked about the idea of his home, and if he was raised in a broken home. I think that Professor Harrison brings up a very good viewpoint when he mentioned to us that Poe had the benefits of being raised within a family, and he was enrolled in good school. We don’t necessarily know what he went through personally, (throughout his life’s ordeals of family, school, etc.) and how his then youthful and fractured psyche perceived the various elements of his life. How did the knowledge that his parents were gone affect him throughout his life? Clearly family and death are themes of the public persona that we know of as Poe. Also the question of his mysterious relationship with
We may try to decipher his life more through his writing, but isn’t it fair to say that Poe was writing for some audience other than himself, and perhaps not necessarily for self expression? We have the image of Poe, the drunken People’s Writer, but could any member of the People’s class have written with the skill and success of Poe? Especially, under the influence of drugs, and whatever pressure turned him towards them.
I think it is fair to say, knowing what we know about him, that Poe wrote some of his publications with a competitive motivation, to impress his audience. There is an ulterior motive of any writer who intends their work for public access. Maybe his writing was just as much influenced by what he perceived as his own public image, or what he thought people wanted.
I believe that if any member of our class was to pursue their talents as intensively as Poe had, that they could be just as successful. I think so, because I think that Poe must have been under a lot of pressure throughout his life, and his writing must have been an outlet for his stress. He clearly put a lot of time and mental energy into what he wrote down for us to read.
4 comments:
Hmmm--I see what you are saying, Patricia. Perhaps it is unfair to use any variation of the word "crazy" to describe Poe. However, I at the same time feel it's rather hard to avoid it. And you bring up a good point about how much was the "Real" Poe and how much of it was the Poe that people wanted or he thought they wanted.
His work stands out and speaks for itself, and that is why we study him today and have an entire Senior Seminar devoted to the man and his work. I like thinking of him as a Yeats....someone who wanted to write for the sake of writing.
Whether you agree or disagree, Poe was certainly unique among his American brethren, a new generation of writer who believed in l'art pour l'art, and wanted it to be just that.
I find the labeling of Poe as crazy to be frustratingly interesting.
What exactly is it that we are saying when we use such word as “ madman, eccentric, or lunatic to describe him?
These words simply dismiss him. That’s all, they don’t describe him. What I find particularly telling is that these are the words that are used to describe people who resist- especially women. Women resisting patriarchy are usually depicted as crazy or mad.
I liked Dr. Harrison, calling Poe “different.” This word is much more telling about who Poe really was, while at the same time explaining why Poe gets painted as crazy.
Society in general fears and despises “different.” For example the witches of Salem were different and they ended up being killed for it. Society likes for everyone to be similar- for each person on the hierarchy to know their place.
The last few sentences in the Norton introduction read:
His life life was divided almost equally between the North and the South. In a curious way, Poe’s own internal division, his own civil war with himself, through springing from different sources, was mirrored in the dissension in American society that culminated, not long after his death, in a war with itself. (xlciii)
I think this internal war in Poe started as a foster child, living the life of privilege but knowing that he was somehow “different” than the other children he went to school with. Works such as "William Wilson" show Poe as feeling divided, as being two people, warring over one life.
Just from this short introduction we have had this past week to Poe, we see that he was a very complicated individual. I look forward to getting to know all the different variances that make of the man and the writer, born, January 19, 1809 – Happy Birthday Edgar.
Obviously, I'm on the same page with you here Patricia in that I think that Poe=crazy does more to obscure than to illuminate the events in Poe's life, much less in his stories. I found the following line in your post really telling:
"We know about his image, his public persona, (which at this point, with all the sources available to us, is more personal and invasive than he ever intended or was aware of his public persona to be)."
It's interesting to think about Poe here as falling into the same sort of media/publicity trap as more contemporary celebrities. As I write this, I'm wondering if it might be useful to consider Poe as a nineteenth century celebrity -- certainly, he's not as famous as more familiar c. 19 celebrities (Barnum, Jenny Lind), but, through his reputation as a severe critic, and the sensational nature of some of his stories, he becomes a sort of literary celebrity -- or at least a noteworthy or even notorious writer.
The problem, then, is the new ways in which the pursuit of a literary career, considered as either a calling or a craft, subjects Poe to an unwelcome and unavoidable public scrutiny. Here, I'm recalling one of his letters to Lowell in which he goes on at length about how the engraving accompanying one of his write-ups looks nothing like him. While we refer to Poe as an author, he's also an object or commodity circulating in a rapidly expanding c. 19 marketplace.
Good Post! I believe that it is impossible to call Poe "crazy" because we have limited insight into his life and psyche . One of the problems with Poe and his life story is that his bibliography's vary from author to author. Its difficult for us to decipher the man from the myth. What we DO know about Poe is that it would be difficult to define him as a crazy person. His thoughts, critiques, and stories/writings are all coherent and well thought...this is certainly not the writing of someone who has lost their mind. I feel that if Poe were TRULY crazy, in the literal since that is, that he would have been institutionalized. It seems to me that Poe was just a different kind of author/person than most of his time, perhaps due to his genius. It is common knowledge that a genius works on a different level of exsistance than the masses; perhaps labeling him as "crazy" was the only was for some to fit Poe in to our sociatal norms.
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