Robert Regan

He was not regularly paid for supplying fiction and poetry, that wasn't his job. But, he got a few extra dollars,typically $10 a story for those contributions. And I think they contributed more than his critical articles to making the Southern Literary Messenger a very popular, widely-read magazine. I won't go though all of Poe's magazines, but I do want to say that the Southern Literary Messenger tripled its subscription list in the five years in which Poe was the de facto editor. He then moved to Philadelphia for 5 years and wrote for and edited three magazines in Philadelphia. One of those, Grahams,increased its subscription list 7 times during Poe's tenure.

It would be impossible to say that Poe wrote for a low-brow audience. The low-brow audience probably got their fiction from what we would think of as newspapers, weekly newspapers. But, he was not writing for an exclusively high-brow reading public either. He aimed at a general audience, but he always dreamed of having a truly select audience and wanted to establish his own magazine. He tried and tried but never succeeded in that enterprise.

Poe had 2 other very traumatic deaths to deal with. The first was his mother. His mother was a singularly beautiful English actress. I call her an English actress because she was born in England, but she had come to America as a child actress, and she had made her career on the American stage. In her mid 20s, with 3 young children, she fell ill in Richmond, Virgina and died. Poe was on her pillow in the illustration of her death that ran in the local newspaper.

Poe was then adopted (but not legally adopted) by a Richmond family — the Allans. After Poe had completed his 1 year at the University of Virginia and had served a year and a half in the United States Army, Mrs. Allan died. So there were 3 very significant deaths. There was also a woman — - Mrs. Stoddard — - Poe had fixated upon when he was a high school boy, in Virginia. She died when Poe was 15. He always claimed that his greatest poem "To Helen" was written as a tribute to her.

So a lot of women, dying women, in Poe's background may have generated material for the dying women in those tales. But, I want you to notice one thing about those dying women. Poe was always sympathetic to them. Now, one of the stories, "Ligeia" may lead you to a different conclusion. Poe was not sympathetic to Ligeia, but he is sympathetic to the lady Rowena. And maybe we will return to this difference in attitude later.

Poe was a good husband, a good provider for his wife and mother-in-law, an extraordinarily effective journalist, who as I have already suggested, made the magazines he worked for extraordinarily successful. Almost all of his friends of his friends genuinely admired, perhaps even loved, him.

After his wife's death, three women fell in love with him and one of them — a women who had been his girlfriend when he was in high-school in Virginia, but whose family had compelled her to marry someone else — became his fiancee.

The allegations that Poe was some kind of monster are explicable. Wwe know where they come from, but they are entirely untrue.

Why Philadelphia? One could still argue that Philadelphia was the cultural capital of the United States at that time, though dominance was shifting toward New York — fast. Some of the best magazines in America were in Philadelphia. Poe secured a position at one of those magazines and came. I say came, I must tell you that I am in Philadelphia.

But, let's talk about "Ligeia" The narrator of "Ligeia" is obviously crazy. What is the narrator of "Ligeia" doing for us? Think for a moment what has happened — the real action we know about in this story. The narrator has murdered his new wife, Rowena. One may assume that Rowena's kinfolk, who live just down the road in this western part of England, will be displeased about this turn of events. So, where is the narrator of "Ligeia"? Let me call him, "Mr. Ligeia." When he tells us his story, he is in a cell. And he is copping a plea. It's the insanity defense. Poe does not allow us to decide whether he is really insane, or only pretending to be insane. But it hardly matters. I suggest that when you go back and read the story again, you try this notion: There never was any Lady Ligeia. She is purely a figment of the narrator's imagination. Or, a fiction he has invented. He is a homicidal maniac, a wife-killer, and in that respect he is quite typical of Poe's narrators. Poe the feminist will again and again give us the brutal man who has injured or murdered a guiltless woman.

One more story--"William Wilson." Wilson tells us where he us at the very beginning where he is, if we read carefully. He has committed some dreadful acts that we need not hear about. He won't even tell us his name. He is the Charlie Manson of his time. If he told us his real name, we would immediately know what a monster he is. But, why did he commit all of those dreadful crimes that he will not tell us about? It's because of that other William Wilson that he confronted in school. Was there really another William Wilson? Poe won't tell us. Maybe this homicidal maniac is really a homicidal maniac, or maybe he is a homicide who is trying to get off on the insanity defense.

The French have an expression that psychiatrists have borrowed — a follie deux — a folly for two, or a madness for two. Pyschological literature records many real cases of people who lived together in isolation. The sane one, taking on the neuroses of the other. By the end of "Usher," I would argue, our narrator is as unreliable as Roderick Usher.

In the middle of the story, we have one of Poe's great poem's, "The Haunted Palace." Poe first wrote and published the story, then wrote the poem and incorporated the poem into the story. Isn't it likely that he saw the necessity of communicating a sane mind's falling into insanity to his readers? That's what the poem is about, of course. It seems to be only about Roderick's going insane. But it seems to me possible, that it is also to suggest that the narrator is going insane. If this is the case, Madeline Usher is just where the two friends put her — buried deep under the House of Usher — that's where bodies tend to stay — isn't it?

As for detective stories, Poe read a great amount of what we would now call true crime reportage. Magazines were full of it. Nobody else had written a fictional detective story, so here Poe invented the form exnihilo (from nothing.)

Poe's finest contribution to science, however, is not in any of his science fiction tales, but in his last great, non-fiction work. It is called, "Eureka." And it's a short book and a tough read. Lots of mathematics. What it aims to tell us is where the world came from. And it is, as far as I know, the first true big-bang theory of the creation of the universe. The French scholar Claude Richard discovered in Princeton a letter from Einstein extolling this as a discovery which foreshadowed his own discoveries. Sadly, Richard — one of the most reliable Poe scholars of the 20th century-- died before he published his finding and no one else has seen the letter.

Jane Austen, Mark Twain, Charles Dickens ... these are writers in whose works we think we are seeing the author and coming to love the author. Henry James, Edith Wharton, William Faulkner .. these are writers we would never confuse with the characters in the stories they tell us. These writers, these six, are good at the particular thing they do. Poe was good at both. Maybe that's the explanation for the tenacity of the Poe Canon.

I have, by the way, moved from believing that Ligeia was real to believing that she was figment of the narrator's imaginating, then back again, and back once more. I foresee changing my mind at least twice in the future! These are really splendid questions, by the way. I keep changing my mind because I believe that Poe wants it that way.

The strongest argument against theories of a serious and long-term illness lie in Poe's athletic accomplishments. He was a very, very strong teenager, indeed. He once accepted a challenge to a race swimming upstream in the river that runs through Richmond, Virginia. Seven miles upstream, he swam. And when he came to the end and was pulled by his handlers into the rowboat, he said to the other young man, "We'll double the wager and swim back." The other young man collapsed. Poe was abroadjumper and right though his brief career at West Point showed signs of robust health.