The Edgar Allan Poe Bicentennial

I recently read a review of Peter Ackroyd’s Poe biography at the Irish Independent, called “What happens when others fail to see your superiority“. The title of the review is explained by the following quote:

He was a perennial orphan, an excitable drunk, a shameless liar, a grandiose melancholic, who lived most of his life in poverty. A friend described him as the man who never smiled. His great gift, apart from his original talent, was boundless self-belief: he once announced, “My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself.” Edgar Allan Poe, adds Peter Ackroyd mildly, was hardly a Christian at all.

A little more information might be helpful to readers. The quotation comes from Edgar Allan Poe: his life, letters, and opinions by John Henry Ingram (published 1880; the quote also appears in History of American Verse published 1901 by James Lawrence, and was probably reproduced from Ingram). Here is the passage:

Mr. H— . . . called upon [Poe] and found that his advice was wanted with respect to the proposed publication of “Eureka” in book form. “I had heard his brilliant lecture on the occasion of its first delivery, and was much interested in it,” says this gentleman. “I did all I could to persuade him to omit the bold declaration of Pantheism at the close, which was not necessary to the completeness or beauty of the lecture. But I soon found that that was the dearest part of the whole to him; and we got into quite a discussion on the subject of Pantheism. For some time his tone and manner were very quiet, though slowly changing as we went on, until at last a look of scornful pride, worthy of Milton’s Satan, flashed over his pale delicate face and broad brow, and a strange thrill nerved and dilated for an instant his slight figure, as he exclaimed, ‘My whole nature utterly revolts at the idea that there is any Being in the Universe superior to myself!’

Since Ingram quotes Poe on superiority with reference to Eureka, it is worth mentioning that the only opinion I remember Poe expressing in writing on the subject comes, perhaps coincidentally, from the same book:

No thinking being lives who, at some luminous point of his life of thought, has not felt himself lost amid the surges of futile efforts at understanding or believing that anything exists greater than his own soul. The utter impossibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought; — these, with the omniprevalent aspirations at perfection, are but the spiritual, coincident with the material, struggles towards the original Unity — are, to my mind at least, a species of proof far surpassing what Man terms demonstration, that no one soul is inferior to another — that nothing is, or can be, superior to any one soul — that each soul is, in part, its own God — its own Creator: — in a word, that God — the material and spiritual God — now exists solely in the diffused Matter and Spirit of the Universe; and that the regathering of this diffused Matter and Spirit will be but the re-constitution of the purely Spiritual and Individual God.

Let the reader take note of a few things. To read the quote that appeared in the review, one must conclude that Poe thought he was the best man in the universe; but he says in Eureka that he believes no soul inferior to any other. These are two different opinions. And since it is reasonable judgment to let a person’s own account of his thoughts take precedent over that of a stranger, we must at best think that Ingram’s Mr. H—- misheard the poet.

Let it also be observed that Poe’s statement that “each soul is, in part, its own God” is not easily, or grossly, distinguishable from the Gospel statement that the believer in Christ has Christ in him, and that the Father is in the Son. I am not insisting that Poe was a Christian, but pointing out the ambiguity where none is suggested either by Ingram or the reviewer.

But, whatever else the reader does, let him observe that the snide title of the review is founded on a second-hand account. Whether the quotation that inspired it passed without citation from Ackroyd to the reviewer is unimportant. What matters is that the reviewer eagerly seized on it as a handle for vilification without bothering to learn or explain that it indicated a far different opinion than the one the quotation and the review’s title imply.