The Portable Edgar Allan Poe Read Online Free PDF Page A

creativity. That summer he told Lowell of the “mania for composition” that sometimes seized him; since December 1843 he had composed “A Tale of the Ragged Mountains,” “The Spectacles,” “Mesmeric Revelation,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oblong Box,” “The Purloined Letter,” “ ‘Thou Art the Man,’ ” and “The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether,” as well as “The Balloon Hoax” and several shorter pieces. Like “The Gold-Bug,” most of the new tales portrayed American scenes, and Poe declared that he was writing a “Critical History of Am. Literature.” For a small Pennsylvania newspaper he was also writing a chatty column called “Doings of Gotham.” Once indifferent to American subjects, he manifested a pragmatic shift in focus. That spring Poe again proposed to Lowell coeditorship of a “well-founded Monthly journal” featuring American authors; he reminded Chivers of a similar offer, and in late October he cajoled Lowell a third time while sending proposals for both the magazine and a new, multivolume collection of tales to Charles Anthon, an influential New York professor.
    Disillusioned by Whig partisanship and cheered by the copyright campaign of Young America, a group of rabid Democrats, Poe lent token support to the Democratic Party in 1844, befriending the head of a political club and writing the lyrics to a campaign song. He commented wryly on the contest between Whig Henry Clay and Democrat James K. Polk in his metropolitan gossip column, and in November began contributing “Marginalia” to the partisan Democratic Review . But he privately mistrusted the expansionist agenda of Polk, and in a tale partly inspired by the election of 1844 satirized the chief rationale for U.S. imperialism—belief in Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority—in “Some Words With a Mummy.”
    Even as he was caricaturing the predicament of the American magazinist in “The Literary Life of Thingum Bob,” Poe accepted a position in October with N. P. Willis’s Evening Journal, where his celebrated poem “The Raven” first appeared in January 1845. Widely discussed, reprinted, and parodied, the poem made Poe a celebrity, yet its evocation of unending melancholy also marked a rehearsal of his impending bereavement. He distracted himself from constant worry about Virginia by playing the literary lion in New York salons and by plunging into daily journalism. But his squibs for the Mirror and subsequent contributions to a new newspaper, the Broadway Journal, curbed his productivity in fiction, which in 1845 amounted to only four new tales, including “The Imp of the Perverse” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar.” But his newfound fame, partly excited by Lowell’s biographical sketch of Poe in Graham’s, gave him greater editorial freedom, which he used to renew his attacks on Longfellow. He extended his assault on the professor poet in a well-attended February lecture on American poetry, but he also remained adamant about copyright, and that month published “Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House,” his most searing analysis of literary property and the economic thralldom of American authors. Evert Duyckinck, leader of Young America, rewarded Poe’s advocacy of copyright by publishing first Tales and then The Raven and Other Poems in his Library of American Books.
    Soon after his “Prison-House” manifesto, Poe joined the staff of the Broadway Journal, which was owned by John Bisco and Charles F. Briggs. There he accelerated the Longfellow war by adopting a pseudonym (or so it appears) to stage a notorious debate with himself about the revered poet. Briggs initially countenanced Poe’s monomania on plagiarism, but by May became alarmed by his renewed drinking after a long abstinence. Lowell and Chivers, who both visited New York that spring, testified to his reckless dissipation. But Poe managed somehow to revise many of his tales and poems for reprinting in the