Yes, he liked Tennyson.
Some people accused him of-- well, actually,
only one person accused him of this.
He was particularly partial to female poets,
and he seemed to play with kid's gloves
when he was writing about female poets.
The only person who points this out
is Edgar Allan Poe himself, when he
writes a review of his own reviews
from the point of view of somebody
else who's criticizing Edgar Allan
Poe for all of his mistakes.
And he criticizes Poe for plagiarism.
This is Poe, criticizing himself of plagiarism.
Then he points out all of the places where
he has committed plagiarism.
It's bizarre.
But one of the things he mentions
is, he seems to have different standards for men and women.
He did like Coleridge, but here's the thing.
He liked some Coleridge poems, but not others.
He liked some Longfellow poems, but not others.
And this confused a lot of people,
because he would say really great things about somebody's
poem.
And then about that same poet, he
would say horrible things about another poem.
And it seemed like he hated the poetry.
And he was trying to say, no, no.
I'm reviewing the poems themselves,
independent of the author.
But nobody could quite get that at the time,
because at that period of time, for one writer
to say anything bad about another writer's work
was an insult. And everybody had to be--
it was rude.
And he would say, no.
It shouldn't be rude.
If we're going to be poets, if we're
going to be good about this, we have
to call out bad poetry when we see it and call out good poetry
when we see it, as well.
Yeah.
Did he review the French poets like Baudelaire?
No.
Insofar as the reviews that I've read--
and I've read a lot of them--
I don't think he does French.
He reviews a lot of British poets.
He has some choice things to say about Wordsworth,
but that's, I think, kind of--
he does British poets and American poets.
And possibly this is due--
he could read French very well, but he
was aware of his audience.
And he was aware that his audience was not
a French reading public.
And I think that he probably held back from that,
to some degree, because he didn't want
to come off as ostentatious.
He didn't want to come across as elite and privileged
because he knew this other language.
In fact, he calls it out all the time
when other writers use French.
He does use French himself, but he
loves to call it out in others, when they're
trying to sound bigger than they are
by using a different language.
Yes.
How did Poe pass away?
Nobody knows.
It's actually a mystery.
He was on the verge of making this magazine dream of his
come true.
He was going to marry his childhood sweetheart.
She had assented to marriage.
He had procured a funder that was going
to give him a bunch of money.
Everything was going right for him,
and all he had to do was get from Richmond, Virginia
to Boston to pick up his aunt, and then get back to Richmond.
But somewhere along the way, for whatever reason,
he shows up in Baltimore.
And nobody knows why he went to Baltimore.
Somebody finds him three days later,
and he's dying in the streets.
He's literally lying in the street, dying.
They take him to the doctor.
He mutters some things, and he says some things.
He calls out a name, Reynolds.
Nobody knows who Reynolds is.
It's a clue.
And then he dies shortly thereafter.
Lots of theories-- some think that he
had some kind of brain cancer, because he started
to seem much more crazy near the end of his life,
including the episode with Sarah Helen Whitman.
Some people think it was election day.
And election day, back in the 1840s,
was very different from election day
now, at least in some parts of the country.
It was common to drink a lot of alcohol on election day.
In fact, political parties would offer alcohol
at the polling booths to try to get people to come vote
for their candidates.
And there was a practice in which
some of these political parties would
kidnap somebody who had gotten drunk
and then take them from polling station to polling station,
having them vote multiple times.
And they think that maybe that's what happened to Poe,
and he got so drunk that his body couldn't handle it.
And then there are other theories.
There are theories that, maybe, somebody was out after him.
Near the end of his life, he did get a lot more paranoid.
And we don't know.
So short answer is, we don't know.
And it's still open for solving.
I read a book years ago--
Yeah.
Sorry.
Yeah.
I read a book several years ago--
I think it was a novel--
that has Poe as a student at West Point.
Yes.
Is it based on fact?
Oh, yes.
Yes.
He was at the University of Virginia,
and then he went to West Point after that.
He became distinguished at West Point.
He didn't finish there, but he became distinguished
in algebra and French.
And he held some sort of record, that he boasts about a couple
of times, about swimming a river.
And I don't know West Point that well,
but there's some river there that he had swam--
some distance out to an island and back
in a record amount of time.
And apparently, if you believe the legend--
there's so many legends about Poe.
There's so many myths.
You're never really quite sure what's fudge and what's genius.
But he held that record up until the late 20th century.
He was quite an athlete, and he was athletic.
He was quite a swimmer.
I think he also at least claimed to have
held some record in the standing broad jump,
as well, which is odd.
Also-- and this is at the University of Virginia.
He apparently drew a portrait of Byron
on his ceiling with charcoal, which
would have been nice to see.
Yeah.
That's a good question.
Yeah.
OK.
Yeah.
The microphone is on its way.
Oh, look at--
So I know that one consequence of his very pointed criticism
was that he would get into these public arguments
with the other literati.
Yes.
Are there any particularly amusing anecdotes or reveries
you care to share with us?
You know about this, Safari. This
was a setup question.
There is a whole section of this talk
that I had to cut out for matters of time,
and it's called the Longfellow War.
In this war, he called Henry Wadsworth Longfellow,
the Smith Professor of Modern Languages at Harvard University
and the esteemed center of the literary clique of Boston--
who was also really wealthy.
He had just married this wealthy magnate's daughter,
and he had received as his wedding gift
a mansion which you can still go visit today.
And they have chamber music out on the porch, and everything.
Longfellow was the opposite of Poe, in so many ways,
and Poe claims that Longfellow plagiarized
a couple of his poems.
And he prints these poems side by side and calls him out.
And then Longfellow's friends come to Longfellow's rescue
and write all of these letters.
But the best letter is written by somebody named Outis.
And Outis takes Poe to task and says, this isn't plagiarism.
But Outis also, curiously, kind of likes Poe's poetry.
He's like, Poe, you write great poems.
I just wanted to say, before I go, you write great poems.
But you're totally wrong about Longfellow.
And then he shows a poem that he says that Poe
plagiarized "The Raven" from.
This poem is called The Bird of the Dream."
And he prints a couple of the stanzas
there that Poe is meant to have plagiarized.
It's about a bird that comes to somebody who has just
lost somebody who had died.
Poe spends the next four months replying to Outis, article
after article after article.
This thing Outis got wrong, this thing Outis got wrong,
this thing Outis got wrong.
It's remarkable.
And by the end of it, you start to think, at first,
Outis seems totally legit.
And by the end, you start thinking,
Poe actually won this thing.
I think Poe's got it.
What scholars discovered-- and this is basically
the consensus.
It's not a full consensus.
There are some people that don't think this-- is
that Outis was Edgar Allan Poe.
And Edgar Allan Poe had created this entire drama with himself
in order to sell magazines.
He kept himself in the public eye by--
and what's so ironic about this is
that that means that he wrote "The Bird of the Dream,"
which nobody has found anywhere.
He wrote "The Bird of the Dream" to accuse himself
of plagiarizing "The Bird of the Dream."
It's baffling.
But it also just sort of underlines the point
that Poe is sort of like PT Barnum, who
understood popular culture.
And he understood how scandal and the potential for scandal
had a grip on people's imagination.
He understood, and he could manipulate
that for his own benefit.
And he wasn't opposed to saying horrible things about himself,
although Outis does say nice things about his poetry, which
in retrospect, seems like a clue.
But he wasn't above saying bad things about himself
or treating himself as a character in this drama that
was the bad guy, just to keep himself
in the middle of things.
Well, that was so great.
I wish that I could say, "for more, go online to our website,
and you'll see the extended interview,"
but really what I mean is, Paul's book is over there.
I'm sure he'd love to stick around and answer
more questions.
Thank you all for coming out.
Yeah.
Thank you.
Paul, thank you.