‘Edgar Allan Poe: A Life’
By Richard Kopley
University of Virginia Press, 736 Pages

Edgar Allan Poe does not suffer from a shortage of biographers, and Richard Kopley pays tribute to two of them: Arthur Hobson Quinn and Kenneth Silverman. So, what is there to add? The short answer, to quote Matthew Bruccoli about his own biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald, “more facts.” 

In this case: “Unique to this volume is engagement with the revealing correspondence of the stepdaughter of Poe’s best friend to her distant relative who planned to write a Poe biography. Flora Lapham Mack, stepdaughter of John H. Mackenzie, wrote extensively about Poe—especially Poe in Richmond—to William Lanier Washington. Some of the letters are owned by the Poe Museum; others are in my collection.”

More than from any other Poe biographer, we get the nuances of the writer’s life, almost on a day-by-day basis — an approach that certain reviewers deplore but that is an indispensable way of re-creating the whole man. Of course, readers of Poe biographies will be familiar with the broad outlines of Mr. Kopley’s narrative, but he shows how the details dovetail in Poe’s stories so that, in the biographer’s words: “If disintegration is sometimes his theme, integration of his life in his work is often his method.”

Poe himself always seemed to be on the verge of falling apart. It did not take much to get him drunk; he gambled himself into debt; and yet women were very fond of him, wanted to take care of him, and the fellow had his light side: He was skilled at the fandango and had all sorts of fun in the hoaxes he perpetrated on and off the page. 

As Mr. Kopley concludes: “What remains remarkable is that despite his susceptibility—which ultimately led to his death—Poe was able so long to persevere. With the help of those who loved him, including Maria Clemm and John H. Mackenzie, Poe could return from desperation to aspiration. And he could do so with increasing resonance in his writing and, on occasion, with a noble effort to attain consolation. Poe would eventually be defeated by his affliction—but until then, he would manage to win varied and enduring victories.”

That Poe was an addict seems certain to Mr. Kopley, and those who knew Poe best believed he could not help himself. In other words, his dipsomania was not a moral failing. The powerful unity of effect in his stories and his literary criticism, his striving for symmetry, was not merely an aesthetic conviction but the consequence of the way he thought the universe was put together.

Mr. Kopley quotes from Poe’s work of cosmology, “Eureka,” that “the sense of the symmetrical … is the  poetic essence of the Universe,” and as such is “embodied in Poe’s own fiction.” In “The Fall of the House of Usher,” for example, Roderick Usher, whom Mr. Kopley calls a “neurasthenic aesthete,” mistakenly entombs his catatonic sister, who briefly revives and then dies on her brother, who collapses and dies as the house itself disintegrates.

Quite aside from the thrills and chills of a horror story meant to excite the popular imagination, Poe is, if you will pardon the expression, dead serious in describing a world of death and disintegration that the “neurasthenic aesthete” intuits and dreads. In terms of content, the story may seem gruesome and terrifying, but as Mr. Kopley concludes: “The Fall of the House of Usher” is a classic, a memorable consequence of “patient thought and careful elaboration.”

Poe, the child of actors who died when he was young, spurned by John Allan — the adopted “Pa” who said he could find no redeeming quality in Poe — who seemed forever on a fruitless quest to establish himself, failing as an undergraduate at the University of Virginia, then again as a cadet at West Point, then again as a magazine editor, nonetheless persevered, finding in the creation of literature the perfection he could not achieve in his own life. It is a poignant story told by a biographer who has spent a lifetime acquiring the material and the insight that will make his work for a long time to come the standard biography of Edgar Allan Poe.

Mr. Rollyson is the author of “American Biography.”