Word: poe
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Changeling Fantasies. For a man who aspired to be a gentleman and dandy, Poe made an unwise choice of parents. Unlike these thespidolatrous times, the U.S. of 150 years ago did not think much of actors, on the quaint ground that they tended to have loose morals. Poe's mother had been playing Boston when Edgar was born in 1809. By all accounts she was a fair Lady Teazle and a wistful Ophelia, but Poe's father David was no Prince Hamlet but an attendant, and an intemperate lord. He deserted his wife when she was pregnant...
...good ladies of Richmond adopted Edgar and his illegitimate sister Rosalie. Edgar fell to the childless wife of a tobacco and drygoods merchant, part-time slave trader and fulltime hypocrite named John Allan. No wonder Poe was addicted to changeling fantasies of noble descent. From being a backstage baby practically weaned on gin, he became "Master Allan," was educated at school in England and sent to the University of Virginia (after less than a year he left, in disgrace and in debt...
Chained Lion. Poe was in the grip of Byronism, but as a Childe Harold he was handicapped. In his defiance of society, Byron had the backing of Newstead Abbey and of a hard, aristocratic realism. Poe fought blind. The search for identity was complicated in Poe's case by multiple miscasting. The gentleman, the lover, the adventurer, all cut absurd figures behind the back of Poe the poet. His sense of vocation as poet and fabulist never deserted him. It did not fail him even when Allan had him measuring yard-goods in the store, when he "ran away...
...When Poe left the house of "Old Swell-Foot" Allan, poems were literally a penny each.*His death-haunted spirit could not long function in the field of pure poetry, but Poe carried heavy weapons in journalism, which, to him, was a corpse-littered no man's land between art and business. By peddling and shamelessly pushing his articles and stories, by the needlework of his aunt and his grandmother's minuscule pension ($240 a year derived from Grandfather Poe's services during the Revolution), Edgar kept alive in the "literary snake pit" of 19th century...
Wifey's Buddy. Poe was one of those drinkers to whom one jigger was the same as a jug. He enriched Thomas White, the "illiterate, vulgar although well-meaning" editor of the Messenger, but White was forced to record: "Poe has flew the track." Another time he wrote Poe, fearing "that you would again sip the juice," adding the wisdom of a spacious age: "No man is safe who drinks before breakfast." As if drink were not bad enough, Poe almost certainly was a drug addict; more than one of his fictional characters confessed to being "a bonden slave...