Edgar Allan Poe was more than a tormented poetic and literary genius writing macabre stories of gloom; he also was a husband, a companion and a friend.
“He was a social person. He wasn’t some disembodied brain floating through the cosmos. He had friends,” said Richard A. Kopley, author of “Edgar Allan Poe: A Life,” recently published by the University of Virginia Press. “He had friends who loved him, he had some enemies, and he lived in a world in which he was a very cherished person, and he knew it. And he brought his wife, Virginia, and his mother-in-law into that world.”
Kopley, a professor emeritus of English at Pennsylvania State University, DuBois, is the author and editor of numerous papers and books on American literature and the recipient of the 2018 Lifetime Achievement and Service Award from the Poe Studies Association.
He will discuss Poe and his new book Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in a Virginia Festival of the Book program in the UVA Special Collections Library – just across the street from Poe’s former room at 13 West Range, his quarters as a short-lived student at UVA.
Much has been written about Poe, known for macabre stories such as “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” and the hauntingly melancholy poem “The Raven.” He spent 10 months studying at UVA before leaving due to gambling debt and a dearth of funds.
Richard A. Kopley, author of “Edgar Allan Poe: A Life,” will discuss Poe Thursday at 5:30 p.m. in a Virginia Festival of the Book program in the UVA Special Collections Library – just across the street from Poe’s former room at 13 West Range. (Photo by David Shopper)
“Like everybody, I read Poe as a kid. I remember reading ‘The Gold Bug’ and thinking it was amazing. I remember being in class and reading ‘The Fall of House of Usher,’ and I was quite astounded,” Kopley said. “But I became serious about Poe when I was a graduate student.”
It was the novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket,” well known to academia and less to the public, that locked Kopley’s interest.
“That knocked me out. And it knocked me out increasingly as I read further, because it became stranger and stranger until you get to the final journal entry, the last paragraph of the narrative. And it is off-the-charts incredible,” he said.
Kopley’s new book combines a biographical narrative of Poe’s challenges – from difficulties with his foster father, his personal losses and struggles with depression, alcoholism and poverty – with close readings of his work. The focus is not only on plot, character and theme, but on language, allusion and structure.
“He was a virtuoso, and he wanted to be recognized as such,” Kopley said. “He invented the modern detective story. He wrote macabre tales; he wrote lyrical poems, mystery novels, cosmology, and the best criticism of his time. He tried to be great in every genre he worked in.”
Kopley’s book offers new perspectives on Poe’s life, his relationships and the themes in his work, all gleaned through his study of letters and communications culled from privately held letters previously unavailable to biographers.
Perhaps the most unusual perspective is the idea of Poe, a great talent who struggled with alcohol use, as an amiable guy with good friends.
“I’m thinking particularly of his lifelong friend, John H. Mackenzie, whom he had known since he was 3 and with whom he was friends to the end of his life, when he was 40,” he said. “Mackenzie was really at the heart of Poe’s social world in Richmond.”
