Word: poe
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...HAUNTED PALACE, A LIFE OF EDGAR ALLAN POE (408 pp).-Frances Winwar-Harper...
When a West Point court-martial decided that Plebe Edgar Allan Poe was not officer material, it rendered a sound judgment. It was not only that the overage (22) cadet had been a U.S. army private, that he drank, ran up heavy debts and asserted (falsely) that Benedict Arnold was his grandfather. Poe was a poet and a born soldier of misfortune -ill-armed against the world. Life was a bad dream to him; he is remembered today not for his success in coming to terms with it but for the fantasies and fictions that celebrated his defeat...
...snug, overstuffed parlor of early 19th century optimism, Poe played Hamlet to his own ghost, and it is sometimes difficult to separate the poet from the poltergeist who tipped over the stuffed birds, broke the bric-a-brac and put the ladies into a flutter. It is the thesis of Veteran Biographer Frances Winwar (Coleridge, the Wordsworths, Byron, Shelley, Keats) that Poe's "ghoul-haunted" imagination has contemporary validity. For all its outmoded idiom (castles, princesses, etc.) Poe's death-obsessed verse speaks true today. In this admirable biography, Author Winwar lets a hundred well-informed witnesses speak...
...Poe was right about himself: he was a child in mind as his wife (whom he married when he was 27 and she 13) was a child in fact. But it was no mythical kingdom by the sea in which he had to live, but a hard-headed republic of farmers and merchants...
There is even an old 1880 bathroom with an immense tub containing graduated levels. There is an outdoor balcony room enclosed in iron-work, where Kittredge used to hold seminars in the old days. In the basement a darkened wine cellar moulds away in the blackness, straight out of Poe, but without the benefit of wine...