Contradicting Ideas In Edgar Allan Poe's Life

Edgar Allan Poe has perhaps the most peculiar life and literary career of any author in the Romantic and Gothic American literary movement. As the creator of the science fiction genre failed to reach fame before his demise, there is much speculation about what type of legacy he should hold. Poe is one of the only American writers that critics either celebrate as a genius or despise as a failure with misgiven fame. He uses contradicting ideas to create thought-provoking works with aspects of horror as well as love and allows his purpose to shine through while still leaving ample room for interpretation.
Background
Before Poe’s parents, Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and David Poe, his lineage was full of agricultural and artisanal tradespeople until
From his father, he gains most of his negative and self-destructive qualities: alcoholism, pride, a volatile temperament, self-sabotaging tendencies, melodrama, instability, self-pity, and sensitivity to criticism (1 6). While his mother passes on her best qualities: precocity, imagination, talent, courage, dedication to his craft, and, unintentionally, his iconic image of a dying and beautiful young woman (1 7). After a lifelong struggle between his catastrophic childhood, the unfavorable genetics from his father, and the fruitful genetics from his mother, Poe finally cracks during his final year of life. He relocates himself and his career constantly, aimlessly, and without reason or plan up and down the east coast (1 244). He finally acknowledges his depression in a letter to Annie Richmond that told, “My sadness is unaccountable, and this makes me the more sad. I am full of dark forebodings. Nothing cheers of comforts me. My life seems wasted - the future looks a dreary blank,” (1 245). A written letter of this anguish obviously causes great concern from analysts even today and directs additional speculation surrounding his death: an intentional suicide or a murder. Regardless of his cause or death or cause of depression, it is obvious the extent to which Edgar Allan Poe suffered during his life as is displayed in his
While the maelstrom and chaos of the nineteenth century surrounding technology and science allowed Edgar Allan Poe’s romantic and mysterious writings to explode in popularity and gain momentum, its clashing nature against every other public interest caused major disagreements among literary scholars from his life until now (5 867). The Americans and French have the most prominent disparity in their impressions of Poe. Contradictory of what one might be led to believe, Poe’s homeland of America continues to despise him while the European and French audiences, whose authors he tried to emulate, love him. While most artists are increasingly celebrated posthumously, Edgar Allan Poe’s strange subject matter, deviating themes, alcoholism, rumours of plagiarism, and overall poor reputation was too off-putting for the general American audience and caused him to suffer in both life and death (4 143). All in the same period, French symbolists analyzed the pieces of Poe and, time and again, found themselves baffled by his use of imagery and the clear form they could draw from his words (3 132). Since the French were so open to the new style of writing that Poe suggested, their literary community thrusted new and learning writers into the plethora of Poe tales and poetry in order to absorb and continue the practices of his new and different use of language (3 132). In his homeland, America,