Word: poe
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...most miserable and mystifying celebrities in all literary history is now subjected to the probes of advanced psychology. His life and works are considered, as never so thoroughly before, in an inextricable interrelation. The finding, less surprising for its nature than its seemingly complete demonstrability, is this: Edgar Allan Poe's whole life "was a struggle, conducted with all the cunning of the unconscious, against a realization of the psychic impotence of his sexual nature...
...Poe's childhood is a crystal ball wherein the seer discovers an im- placable inferiority feeling fastened upon the sensitive orphan son of an itinerant actress and a disinherited Baltimore mooncalf. The child was sheltered, not adopted, by hardheaded John Allan of Richmond. He was insecure in a town of lordly livers. And what went deeper, at home and at school his mother's calling was made his shame. Psychoanalysis calls his loyal passion for her dead purity a "fixation." Another woman once laid a kind hand upon his head, and upon her too he "fixed" after...
...obtrusion of these two dead women upon Poe's subliminal nature is seen in the self-frustration of incipient amours before his marriage with a "consumptive angel" of 13, Virginia Clemm. She afforded him a public and private refuge from erotic impulses that he could not consummate. He called her "sister" and could pretend to himself that he had married for purity. Illness during her adolescence and a full stop in her mental development made this "purity" permanent. Her naive mother supplied the one other element-devoted care-essential to a little world where Poe's abnormality might...
This pitiful, crazy world lasted eleven years, until Virginia died. Poe then rushed from one "soulful" woman to another, vainly seeking fresh refuge. He soon died insane, bigamously engaged but still carnally innocent. Convulsive fits of drinking throughout his life had been not a cause but a secondary symptom of his deep malady. The operation of this malady, the astonishing dexterity of his subconscious defensive tactics, are traced through all phases of Poe's life in startling fashion-his braggadacio debts at the roystering University of Virginia, his self- inflicted infantry career, his self-arranged expulsion from West Point...
...take my choice at 10 o'clock this morning between two romanticists of almost equal appeal. Professor Murdock is talking in English 33 on Edgar Allen Poe in Harvard 2, while Wordsworth will be Professor Lowes' subject in subject in English 28 at the same time in Sever 11. Poe has had a strange fate since the war, his letters and his table talk and his random jottings have received immoderate attention. It will not be long before he will be recognized more widely as being one of our great romantics. And besides. Poe was once expelled from college. Professor...