In Our Time - Edgar Allan Poe

Episode Date: December 28, 2023

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Poe (1809-1849), the American author who is famous for his Gothic tales of horror, madness and the dark interiors of the mind, such as The Fall of the House of Usher and The Tell-Tale Heart. As well as tapping at our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, Poe pioneered detective fiction with his character C. Auguste Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue. After his early death, a rival rushed out a biography to try to destroy Poe's reputation but he has only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon as well as an author.WithBridget Bennett Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of LeedsErin Forbes Senior Lecturer in 19th-century African American and US Literature at the University of BristolAndTom Wright Reader in Rhetoric at the University of SussexProducer: Simon TillotsonReading list: Peter Ackroyd, Poe: A Life Cut Short (Vintage, 2009)Amy Branam Armiento and Travis Montgomery (eds.), Poe and Women: Recognition and Revision (Lehigh University Press, 2023)Joan Dayan, Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction (Oxford University Press, 1987)Erin Forbes, ‘Edgar Allan Poe in the Great Dismal Swamp’ (Modern Philology, 2016)Kevin J. Hayes (ed.), Edgar Allan Poe in Context (Cambridge University Press, 2012) J. Gerald Kennedy and Scott Peeples (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Edgar Allan Poe (Oxford University Press, 2018)Jill Lepore, 'The Humbug: Poe and the Economy of Horror' (The New Yorker, April 20, 2009)Toni Morrison, Playing in the Dark (Vintage, 1993)Scott Peeples and Michelle Van Parys, The Man of the Crowd: Edgar Allan Poe and the City (Princeton University Press, 2020)Edgar Allan Poe, The Portable Edgar Allan Poe (Penguin, 2006)Shawn Rosenhelm and Stephen Rachman (eds.), The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe (Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995)

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Edgar Allan Poe, 1809 to 1849, is famous for his gothic tales of horror, madness, and the dark interiors of the mind, such as the fall of the house of Russia, and the tell-tale heart.

As well as tapping into our deepest fears in poems such as The Raven, croaking, Nevermore, he pioneered detective fiction with his character C. August Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morg. After his early, drunken death, his rivals tried to kill his reputation,

but he's only become more famous over the years as a cultural icon, as well as an author. With me to discuss the life and works of Edgar Allan Poe are Erin Forbes, senior lecturer in 19th century African-American and US literature at the University of Bristol, Tom Wright, reader in rhetoric at the University of Sussex, and Bridget Bennett, Professor of American Literature and Culture at the University of Leeds.

Bridget, poet, an unhappy childhood. What was unhappy about it? Well, as you said, he was born in 1809, and he was born to a pair of actors. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died two years later in 1811. that by this time there were three children and they were split up. He was fostered to a couple called John Allen and his wife Frances Allen and his brother and sister went to live with other people. So that's the first part of it, early death and being split up. When he went to live with the Allens, initially it seemed like he was happy.

His foster father was a trader in tobacco. He was born in Boston. So then he moved south to live with his foster parents. his foster father was a merchant but also had a side trade in enslaved people he went to England to carry on his trade there and at that point Poe was at school for a short period in England

he also travelled in Scotland and again things seemed okay at this point but by 1820 the foster father had a financial collapse returned to Richmond and things then got worse I'm talking about Richmond America I'm talking about Richmond America I'm talking about Richmond America, yeah.

Poe seems to have felt he wasn't loved enough by his foster parents, and there seemed evidence for this that he wasn't. He seemed like a melancholy, unhappy boy. He formed a strong attachment with the mother of a friend called Jane Stith Stanard, but she died a year after he met her. So there's a series of kind of deaths that happened earlier. This clearly marks him, and he appears to be looking for maternal figures. He also formed a strong attachment with his foster mother,

but she too didn't seem to return his affections. And he also got engaged to a young woman called Sarah Elmira Royster. He then in 1826 went to the University of Virginia, spent a year there, felt that he wasn't supported financially sufficiently by his foster father, got into gambling, got into debt, had to be taken out of university and felt that he'd been publicly disgraced. So that was the first part of it. And to skip over the next series,

He then went curiously, I think, to West Point, where he was chucked out again, not because he wasn't brilliant because he was, but because of bad behaviour. Bad behaviour, because he wanted to be chucked out. By this point, he had broken with his foster father. He had headed north initially to Boston to make his own way. He had initially entered the US Army,

and then he left that, and he wanted to start again in West Point. But he was court-martialed in 1831. He had a final break with, Alan in 1834 and then Alan died. And that was the end of this period of death's argument. Post seems to have been a man who could have an argument in an empty room and he had lots of them all the way through that early part of his life.

And they need to pick it all up and start all over again, didn't he? Regularly. The argument and the money-making... But after the West Point, he hasn't worked at university, hasn't worked at West Point. The chap who doesn't support him. He's still been there. He's gone. So what next?

What next? He seeks out people he might want to live with, including his aunt and his first cousin, Virginia Clem. And he then starts to seek to find ways of supporting himself financially because he's disinherited essentially by his foster father and he doesn't have access to means, to financial means. So the next part of it is, how do I live then? How do I find money? How do I find love? Rather quixotically, he decides to make money by gambling. Yes, not very successfully. I think he thought because he was such a brilliant mathematician, which he was, that he could beat the system. In fact, the system beat him, and he carried for most of his life a burden of heavy debt. I think the system always beats you, doesn't it, no matter how brilliant you are. Some people are I'm told, I don't know, but read stories.

Very few, but he wasn't one of them. Clearly, this wasn't his way out. Okay, well, thank you. Tom Wright. Poe was in a society then that in his nick of the woods was changing a bit. It was professional writers were writing for short stories and short articles, which is for periodicals. There were more periodicals. This was growing, and he thought, this is one way for me,

I'll earn a fortune, pay off my gambling debts, but becoming a writer, which he did. Can you tell us about that? I can. So when Per was growing up, authorship was a closed shop, really. He derided the kind of people who made it as authors as wealthy gentlemen of elegant leisure. the kind of people like his hero Lord Byron with his aristocratic fortune

or Walter Scott who'd had inherited wealth or his fellow American Washington Irthing there was never going to be a place for someone like Poe in that kind of world but around the time that we're talking about when he started writing you know jacksony in America Jackson or the time that's known as the market revolution

things are starting to open up and they're opening up for a number of reasons one of them is demographic there's a massive expansion of the middle class that's happening. And it's a really literate middle class. It's one of the most literate societies in history. There's over 90% literacy rates in the northern states, which is more than in France, more than in England. And so there's a mass readership that's developing. And suddenly in the 1820s, print becomes very cheap as well. New technological developments means it's really cheap to make a

newspaper. It's really cheap to make magazines. And so new newspapers proliferate, and in particular magazines, and these are the kind of places where literature was found. As you were saying, Melvin, and this is where he found his role. Because the third factor is that there's a whole host of new cultural roles for the author. An author could be an editor, a book reviewer, and one of the interesting features of this period is that they could also be a performer. There was a lecture circuit that grew up in the 1830s and 1840s in particular, where people perform their work. You know, they perform poems or perform essays. And by the end of his life, Poe was doing this kind of thing. It's the world that we later associate with Dickinson, how he made money. So Poe is suddenly

finding himself able to do lots of these things. And I think we're going to come back to this again and again, Melvin, that there's this myth of Po, and it's partly set by his obituaries, it's partly set by people who wanted to have it in for him, that Poe was this otherworldly figure. He was this loser who couldn't hold down a job. We've already heard that he was bad at gambling, but that he in some ways wasn't a professional. But this is not true. This was an extremely hardworking, extremely diligent man. He said that genius is diligence. And during his two decades, as a professional writer, he wrote 70 stories, he wrote a novel, he wrote philosophical treaties.

And despite all of that, he runs into problems with this literary scene at the time. It's a really regional literary scene, you know, that Richmond is different to New York to Boston. He's constantly traveling up the Eastern Seaboard for different jobs. and it's a very volatile market and it's a really small literary scene and in a small literary scene you need people to like you

now he was really bad at this Poe was constantly slagging off he was constantly criticising well-known writers he was constantly picking feuds and he saw that as part of what his role was in the literary scene but it didn't help and it meant that someone even as talented as him

was unable to make a living I've just written down genius's diligence Very, very briefly, how did it become associated so quickly with the idea of the Gothic, of Gothic writing? Yeah, so he's looking around and thinking, what's the best-selling work? On the one hand, there's comic stuff, okay, and then there's grotesque sensation stories about the dark side of humanity and that people enjoy reading for the dark thrill. And he threw himself into that, and he doesn't invent the Gothic genre. Obviously, it comes from the late 18th century from the dark,

German authors, Ernst Hoffman and British authors. But he really injects... Which British authors? So Horace Walpole, for example, were the kind of people that then go down into Mary Shelley and that kind of tradition. Poe is adding something totally new, though. He's making it... And I think there's two things.

He's making it all about the interior life and the psyche of the narrator. And he's making the Gothic into a kind of intellectual puzzle. And I think you can sum that up with one of his stories called Lygia, for example, which is a story which he thought was his best. It's not one of his most famous, but it's one of the most indicative of what he does with the Gothic. There's a man whose wife is dying, and he's mourning her,

and as she dies, he marries someone else, and then the new wife starts dying as well, mysterious circumstances, then turns into the former wife, Ligia. Now, on the one hand, this is just a straightforward tale of, you know, it's gothic sensationalism. But Poe turns it into an intellectual, actual riddle because he puts, in the start of all of his stories, he puts quotes at the beginning, and you may have noticed us from reading his work.

I have noticed you can't avoid it. It hits you in the face as soon as you start reading. Pose a deeply pretentious writer. He wants you to know how much he's read. No, I like the way later notes. I enjoy it. So they're from German writers or French writers. This one, Ligie is from a British 17th century philosopher of witchcraft, and it's all about the will and the vigor of the will. And then you have to think about this story of the resurrected wife in terms of the vigor of the will. So he's forcing you to turn the Gothic into an intellectual puzzle. Now, some people said, and some people say now,

we don't think of Poe in the main tradition of American literature because he's so fixated with this genre, with the Gothic. But I think it actually is his key weapon because it allows him to ask some of the most powerful questions about the psyche, about the relationship between the body and the mind and all of the dark, the deepest fears, as I think you said at the beginning, Melvin, the underpin. And also about, particularly about love and death,

They're in. We've heard that death already about it. It becomes a major theme, love and death together. And beyond death, if the listeners aren't going to think I've gone completely crackies. I mean, there are stories in which people die and are still, you can tell us, still addressed, still take a part in the story and so on. Can you just embroider that? Yeah, so death is all over Po. You could certainly find Poe stories that aren't about death, but.

But, yeah, by and large, it's a huge theme. And as you say, often linked with love. So we have this kind of horror mixed with this kind of beauty throughout poem. He very famously says that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical subject. And often with his poems, the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical subject. In his stories, it often becomes quite gruesome where we see corpses, corpses of women, corpses of men. corpses of cats. Copses of cats that come back to life. So in Poe's story, the black cat, we have this very gentle, humane narrator. He begins, is very gentle and humane. He's a great

lover of animals. He adopts a cat and many other pets as well and loves him, but especially he loves this one cat, Pluto. But he falls into drink, sort of loses himself. At one point, the cat annoys him. He gouges out. the cat's eye. I'm sure you want to go on. He ends up hanging the cat. And then there's a mysterious fire that destroys his house. He's sunk quite low.

Eventually another cat. He adopts another cat who ends up, like Ligia, sort of being the same cat. He tries to kill that cat too, but accidentally kills his wife. Thinks he's going to get away with this perfect crime by walling her. I think you're getting one of the perfect crime. No, in Poe, you never can get away with that perfect crime. he walls her up and the police come to inspect find out what's happened. He's so convinced that he's gotten away with it.

He knocks on the wall, but he had inadvertently put the cat in there as well. In this instance, the wife is not still alive as she often is in post stories. There are many stories like Baranisi where the narrator is, again, one of these sort of diseased monomaniacal figures who marries his cousin. cousin and becomes obsessed with her teeth. And she grows ill and dies, or he thinks she dies. And then there's this moment in the story where he wonders, what's happened? What has he done? And it turns out that what he has done is gone and dug up the body of his ostensibly dead wife removed her teeth. He's got them in a little box by his bed, but somebody wakes him up to tell him that actually

she's still alive. So in this way, he's kind of saved her. And that's a story where he really did push those boundaries of good taste and got quite a bit of pushback. And there's quite a lot of that. It is chilling, isn't it? It does, got on my skin, anyway.

That one really gets me. Not the story to read at 2 o'clock in the morning. Briefly, is there anything to be made of the fact? America is by and large at that time. This is a generalization, but I hope not a gross generalization.

In an optimistic, we are here, we're mood, and he was going down in the opposite. He was the south of their north, going deeper and deeper down. Is there something in that? Well, people certainly think there is. So Poe has a very complicated place in the sort of American literary tradition and American literary history, where for a long time, there was this sense that Poe was,

and Tom has already referenced this, outside of the main currents of American thought. A fascinating figure, a problematic figure, a problematic figure, but not really one who can teach us anything about America. And that was Vernon L. Parrington, an early 20th century literary historian who sort of coins that idea. Now, later, in the mid-20th century, we have somebody like F.L. Matthiasen, who is really building up the discipline of American literary study. He has this famous book, The American

Renaissance, doesn't talk about Poe. In the 90s, Tony Morrison, the African-American novelist, gets up and says, actually, Edgel and Poe is extremely important to the history of American literature. And she looks back at this period that we think of as being so optimistic, so individualist, so bright-eyed and hopeful. And she's looking at the literature in that period,

and she says, actually, it's really haunted, it's really troubled, it's really door. What are Americans afraid of? And when we think about American literary history from that perspective, we can see that poet's actually absolutely central. Yes, and she brings in the black area of American life

into his writing, although it's not obviously there except very few times. And uses that Tony Morrison, uses that to do a representation of himself. Bridget Bennett, he began his career writing poetry, and he was praised for that, but Neil was one of those who did, cheered him up a lot, didn't it? He decided to focus on writing short stories

because, as Tom explained, they were available to make a quick money for. And he was quite good at that too. He developed to a certain extent, he developed a sort of short story form, didn't he? He did. I mean, he said famously, to be appreciated, you must be read. So there's no point writing if no one reads you.

And I think we can all be slightly sympathetic towards that position. And as Tom was explaining, he really clearly understands how to position himself within the emerging literary marketplace. So having published a number of poems to some acclaim, but not much. He realises that there isn't a great future in it. But nonetheless, he remains very attracted by poetry, by the poetic form.

And he had read a lot of Milton, Shakespeare, Pope when he was at school. He was a fan of Byron. He was also a fan of Coleridge who famously says, I wish our clever young poet would remember my homely definitions of prose and poetry. That is prose, words in their best order, poetry, the best word. in their best order. And so Poe was clearly someone who loved poetry. He theorised about poetry.

He was a very important theorist of poetry, but he also wanted to be read. So this new market of literary magazines is the place where the short story can be well placed. And he sort of flourished there? He sort of flourished there. So, for example, when he published, I think Lygia, he won a competition,

he'd won $10 for that. He won $100 for the gold bug. he was able to place his stories and he began developing the kinds of horrible, gruesome things that Erin's been talking about as well as other stories which sometimes satirised the world around him,

some words with a mummy for instance, or there's another story, the facts in the case of M. Valdemar where he talks about someone, yes, mesmerism and someone coming back to life but being between some... It's an unusual story insofar as his dying protagonist is a man, not a beautiful woman, and he's caught between life and death,

and he keeps saying, I tell you, I am dead, let me die. It's disgusting, last two sentences. Absolutely disgusting. It's just plain disgusting. I mean, not rude, not swearing, none of that, just disgusting. I do have the quote here. You want to read the quote?

Sure. This man has been mesmerized to life while he's been dying. He's stayed alive for seven months, and then one another, they bring him back to life even though they think he's dead. That'll have to do. Right.

Then the last two lines. The last two lines. Amid ejaculations of dead, dead, his whole frame at once absolutely rotted away. Upon the bed, there lay a nearly liquid mass of loathsome, of detestable putrescence. Right, Tom. Tom, Tom Wright. To what extent could he be called a Southern writer?

So Erim was talking about how people have begun to stop seeing Poe as this person who just floats three of national identity, and they've been trying to work out. where he fits. You know, he's, he's born in Boston, he works, works in an awful lot, but he's, he's raised in the South. His foster father raises him to be part of the Southern gentry. He goes to the University of Virginia, the bastion of Southern intellectualism. And in some ways, viewing him as Southern has, it's really illuminating for his work. Someone who really definitely thought he was Southern was his fellow Virginia in the 20th century writer Ellen Glasgow. And she said

that he was, he was the distillation of the Southerner. And what, and what she meant by that, is that he had this formal diction, this fondness for rhetoric, this problem with democracy, cultural conservators. He wasn't an abolitionist, was he? No, no, no, and we might talk about that. Well, let's talk about this person.

Yeah, exactly. So you can read some of his stories as very southern. So follow the House of Usher. It's an aristocratic family. Okay, that sounds like a plan to elite in the South, that the House of Usher might sound like a gone-with-the-wind kind of mansion, and the sins at the heart of the story might be the sins of slavery. And so there's definitely a way that you can read him,

as Southern and particularly you can seem as influential on the Southern Gothic. So, we've heard about him and the American Gothic, but this Southern Gothic tradition which really takes hold in the early 20th and mid-20th century, you know, Tennessee Williams, Flannery O'Connor, that kind of stuff.

Well, you think he had an influence on Tennessee Williams? They did. They thought that Poe was one of the literary heroes of the South, for one thing, in a country that mainly celebrates people from the north. But these themes of southern decay and themes of sin and haunting really ripen in the literature of the Southern Gothic. But I think Melvin's a really answer your question.

Poe did everything he could to not be nailed down to a place. You've read his stories. You can't tell where they're set. They're in this, the pit and the pendulum, the tell-tell heart. They're in these mysterious other worlds. And the point of his Gothic was, it was placeless. You want to come in? Well, I was just going to add to that that in one of the letters he writes to his foster father,

he says that Richmond, the United States, are too small for me. My theatre will be the world. He has a grand ambition for sure. Can we switch for a moment from the gruesome to the charming? And let's switch to Annabel Lee, the poem Annabelle Lee. And Erin, over to you. So it is very difficult to just switch to the charming with Poe. There are absolutely elements of charm,

and he's got a real investment in beauty. Well, Annabel Lee's as charming, pomis, about this. If you tell us a bit about it in Quitalina, too, that would be good. Yeah, so it is a charm. charming poem, but it also has the death of a beautiful woman at its center. So this is a story of childhood love. Annabelle Lee is the speaker of the poem's deceased first love, and he talks about the passion of their love, the passion of their connection, the lifelong influence that it's had on him. He says that she dies because the angels in heaven were jealous of their connection. And it concludes

with this stanza. For the moon never beams without bringing me dreams of the beautiful Annabelle. and the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes of the beautiful Annabelle Lee. And so all the night tide I lie down by the side of my darling, my darling, my life and my bride, and her sepulchre there by the sea, in her tomb by the sounding sea. So he goes and sleeps beside her tomb for the rest of his life. Having had this charming poem until... Exactly. So it is very lovely and it's very sing-song and it's got this innocence to it. It's about a kind of childhood innocence, but we end up sleeping with the dead.

Bridger, this has been mentioned but one of those famous stories is the fall of the House of Oshah. It's a terrific title apart from everything else. Can you briskly say what it's about and then tell us what it signifies. Everybody can join in if they want, right? Yeah, so briskly, it's set in an unnamed location

that doesn't seem to be the United States. It's clearly Gothic. A narrator is coming to a house. He talks about what the house looks like. He's been invited there by the owner of the house because the owner's lonely or something and wants to see his old friend. he's a childhood friend, but he actually hasn't been in contact with him for years.

He doesn't really understand why he's been invited there, but the owner, Roderich Usher, is very melancholy. The House of Usher is both the line of Usher, the family line of Usher, which is an incestuous line that has produced sickly people, but it's also the physical house. And he notes coming up to the house that in front of it is a lake that he calls a tarn, and kind of somehow mysterious effluences are coming from it. And he also notes that on the front of the house,

there's a crack from the top to the bottom. So we know bad things are going to happen. Very briefly, comes into the house, meets with Roderic Usher, sees his sister, Madeline Usher, who's clearly died. He's decayed, is paler than pale. Pale than pale. He's a musician. He likes to play the guitar.

He likes to read and paint indeed with this unnamed narrator. Madeleine dies and is buried. His sister? Madeline, his twin sister, it turns out, is buried by the two men. And then one night, about eight days after her death, there's a terrible storm. Both men wake up. In order to calm, Roderick, the narrator reads a kind of story that's a kind of medieval story, an extraordinary story that's been invented by Poe, of course. And at the kind of end of this story with the literal breaking down of a door, the door breaks down.

Madeline breaks into the room. She hasn't been dead at all. Of course she hasn't. This is Poe. And embraces her brother who then collapses and dies. and the narrator terrified runs from the house that of course cracks into and falls into the tarn never to be seen again.

So this is extraordinary in lots of different ways, obviously. Reading it, one might think of the kind of part of Matthew, the New Testament, where it talks about house divided. A house divided cannot stand. And this phrase would be famously... A house divided against itself, cannot stand. Exactly.

And this phrase that would be picked out famously by Abraham Lincoln a few years later talking about slavery. So this lends a kind of credence to the idea that this may well be a narrative that is in some way about enslavement. But it's also about kind of decays of families. It's about a kind of psychological terror. Perhaps it's a kind of early pre-Froidian version of the unconscious with this split mind. It's also about this extraordinary miraculous woman breaking out of a tomb and wreaking havoc everywhere she goes. Indeed. And there's also a sense that actually the story has brought her back to life from a death that she wasn't in. It's actually the

literary itself that brings her back out. Can we turn to you, Tom, and switch to the detective story? And when I first came across this reading, not rereading, I hadn't read a lot of these before, most of them I hadn't read, and suddenly I was in Conan Doyle. And the precise way that Doyle cracked things, the locked room, every little item, no, we can't go in that direction. We in that direction, and then mud on the shoes and darling and all that. And it was a pinch, it was straightforward, very very successful steel.

And there's nothing wrong with that. That's part of literature, isn't it? You steal from other people. That's how it progresses. What do you have to say about that, Tom? Well, what you're doing is praising Poe for the second great achievement of his career. So he's this amazing Gothic writer, but he has this second string to his bow.

He invents, he invents... I wasn't putting him down, I think it's amazing. No, he... Well, I'm just, sorry, just finished. But it's the precision in which Conan Doyle knicked so much from Poe that is and then people have to Nick from Conan Doyle, linking from Poe sort of thing. So that's enough of that, you. So it's such a powerful template, you're right. And so obviously it doesn't start with Poe. The idea of like trying to get to the bottom of a crime or a misfortune is one of the master tropes of literature. And even in the literature of the time, you might think of Dickens in Olive Twist or Barnaby Rudd or

the old curiosity shop, they have people trying to detect things, but Poe sets up this very powerful template that, as you say, when you read it, is immediately recognizable. And it's about this focus on the detective as this kind of creative figure who's at the center of things. So the most famous of the stories, there are three that he writes, but there are two which I think it's worth talking about the murders in the Rue Morg, which is his most famous story. So obviously, our listeners are going to be rushing to their books. And I'm certainly not going to do them disservice of spoiling the story. But it's quite a spoiler.

Indeed. Indeed. And that's the point with Poe, that the ending is always the point. So there is a double murder in Paris. And it's a very gruesome murder of a mother and daughter. The police are at a loss to work out how to understand this. So they end up bringing in the services of this mysterious, solitary, urban, sophisticated, psychologically attuned figure, who we now recognize as the inspiration for Conan Doyle, August Dupin, who then solves through psychological insight

a very strange crime. And particular insights. I mean, how does that window open? Where's the nail? That sort of thing. So he's very bad. That's what Donald took from him as well, I think. It's not just psychological.

No, it's not just psychological. Poe called these tales that you wrote, tales of raciosination, really getting to the bottom of something. Because Poe was someone who loved Riddles, he loved codes, he loved maths, he loved cracking systems. He's very good mathematician, we're told. And he's recognising that in this new urban world in which a crime is a new thing,

these can be symbols for philosophical problems. And that comes to the head in his second most famous story, the purloined letter in 1844, where it's even simpler that it's set in Paris again, and there's a letter by the Queen that's got some kind of compromat, some kind of embarrassing detail, and it's gone missing. And the police are trying to find it. They don't know where it is. So who do they get?

They have to get the superhero sleuth Dupin into to work his magic. And this becomes a real philosophical riddle. Now, people have really gone to town on this story. And we might talk about Po's influence in France. French people loved him. Obviously, these stories are set in Paris. That's inevitable. But 100 years after these stories in the 1960s and 70s,

French philosophers were warring with each other to try and understand what was going on in the purloined letter, Jacques Derrida and Jack Lacan, and coming at it from a post-structuralist psychoanalytical perspective, part of me thinks that Poe would have loved this. Part of me thinks that even someone as pretentious as Poe might have raised his eyebrow. But spooling back to the beginning, it's not bad to basically invent and propose and see through the detective story,

which has been one of the great staples ever since. And taking, I mean, we shouldn't take away the trimins and all that. But he did it. He did. As usual, the introduction in the first two or three paragraphs basically say, this is what I'm going to do. And he makes it a high-brow genre. He makes it a genre which, it's not just Conan Doyle that leads to,

but leads to CSI, leads to the wire, leads to all of the novels that those who are fans of detective fiction. Bridget. And just not, I mean, even reading them now, for the most part, they're still really readable. No matter how many times you read them, you're still intrigued by them. Gripping, aren't they? Yes. I completely agree with that, with the exception of the third story

that you didn't mention, Tom, which is the mystery of Marie Roge, which is a little bit more tedious to read. But I think that one of the things that we take from that story, though, is another contribution of Poe's, which is that he's using a genuine news story that was a scandal at the time, the murder of a beautiful young woman in New York. And he's setting that same story in France and Paris

and working through the newspaper accounts in New York to set up this tale in Paris. and that hadn't been done before. There's nothing more moving than the death of a beautiful woman. Death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world. But then he adds, and equally it's beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such a topic are those of a bereaved lover. Erin, just go back to you.

How does Poe depict race and slavery? Much well or what? This is a really complicated question. So he has very few. literal depictions of African-American characters of slavery. He does have a few, and they're worth talking about. But what we see intensively throughout Poe's body of work is an examination of and an experimentation with thematics of color. So we already talked about the black cat. I think we'll probably certainly talk about the Raven before we're done today, a large, ominous black bird.

and these figures of blackness in Poe's poetry are inevitably linked to the racialized world in which he was living. The most obviously seen in the story the gold bug. Yes, so in the gold bug, we do have an African-American character, Jupiter, who had been enslaved to the main character of the story, William LeGrand, to his family. His family has fallen into debt. Before they fell into debt, they very wisely, manumitted Jupiter and Jupiter becomes this figure that Poe is working with this trope of the

steadfast servant right who remains so loyal to LeGrand that he stays with him even after he's free and he's a heavily caricatured figure he's presented as a little bit thick Poe uses estranging left arm from his right

right correct he uses estranging literary devices like dialect to make him seem that much more exotic. Very difficult to read sometimes. There's a heavily, explicitly racist language in the tale. But as Tony Morrison observes of Jupiter, there are unmanageable slips in terms of this characterization.

So Jupiter is represented as potentially going to beat his master several times. Flog is the word. Throughout the whole second half of this story, he's somewhat ominously carrying a side around, and we're not quite sure what might happen, might he take the reins, might he take power? The narrator of that story is obviously somewhat obtuse. And so his observations of Jupiter, we don't necessarily trust.

And so we have reason to wonder, is Jupiter maybe a bit more savvy than our narrator thinks he is. So it's very confused in a way, and it's quite a light touch given the emotion he had in the South. you're in a book sort of expected more, but that's what I think and it's what you think that matters in this. Let's talk about, can we switch again, sorry, unless it's urgent and has to be said and where you go.

It's a quote from Poe when he leaves his foster father that I think is really interesting. It's in his letter. So in a letter when he has a huge falling out with John Allen, this is a letter of 19th March 1827, one part of this letter, he says, you suffice me to be subjected to the whims and caprice, not only of your white family,

but the complete authority of the blacks. These grievances I could not submit to, and I'm gone. So I think that's a really revealing letter because it's not clear which part of it has upset him more. He's clearly furious about both parts of it, but it's that last part of it, these grievances I could not submit to what? that's the final straw. That's what he appears to be saying.

Yes. Can we turn to his relationship with women while I'm with you, Bridget? As a very young man, he became engaged to a woman who he knew locally and how father stops this arrangement between them because he didn't like the fact that Poe was known to drink. Drink a lot. Drink a lot. Drink himself into oblivion at times indeed. Subsequently, very notoriously, he married his third. 13-year-old first cousin, Virginia Clem.

Now that intrigues me, because why did he marry? Did he marry her for companionship? Or did he marry for all the other reasons? Because there's a big difference, and we don't know. And he's a lonely man, and a young girl who maybe have nowhere else to go, come and live with him, instead of living with him, as people might have picked up from your remarks. Critics are very divided about what actually the relationship was between the two.

There's no evidence as to what the relationship. What would the evidence? I mean, the evidence might be a child. They didn't have a child. So that might be evidence. But he certainly was aware that his peers were uncomfortable with this. Although marrying a first cousin wasn't illegal, it wasn't that conventional. And certainly when you're 27. Not all the time in the Middle Ages. This was 19th century, United States. Some things don't move on. Well, but she was 13 and he was 27 when they married. So what had happened to proceed this, though, was that he had gone to live with his aunt, his father's surviving sister, and Virginia was her daughter.

So quite what was going on, it's just not very clear. Although I know Erin has a supposition about this. Well, I think that when he falls out with the Allens, he does go and live with Maria Clem, Virginia's mother and Virginia, and they are a happy threesome. He's getting a lot of female affection, female attention from them. And some critics say, and I guess, I believe them, that he wanted to maintain this family, this little family that he had made.

They are his biological family, but they're not the people who raised him. And that one way to keep everybody together was to marry Virginia before somebody else got a chance to. Tom, there are two stories set in London? Are they relevant to this conversation, or do we hop on? I think they are because I'm going to make the case, Malfin, some of his most important stories. So, you know, most American literature at the period was set in rural settings. It's they would have you believe that America was about the frontier or about the encounter with nature. But Poe was fascinated with the Gothic of the city and in particular the Gothic of the crowd. So he lives in London when he's when he's a boy in Ston, when that was kind of outlying from London.

He sets a story there in a school. He sets a story in the black death, a pandemic kind of story. But he has this story called The Man of the Crowd, 1840. I think it's his best story. And it's its most interesting story to me. And it can be summarized really quickly. There is a man who's sitting not far from where we're recording this, I think in Regent Street, looking out at a crowd going by.

He's just from a hotel cafe. He's just recovering from an illness. And he's watching the crowd go by. And he becomes fascinated with spotting all of the different types that you can see in the crowd, all the different classes, all the different occupations, all of the different tribes. And then he spots one decrepit old man

who seems to have this mysterious air about him, this wildness in him, and he starts following him. And he doesn't stop following him for 24 hours, because he continues to walk through the rich parts of the city, through the slums. He goes into a gin shop. He goes into a theatre. He comes out, he can't work out what's going on. And it comes to the end of the story, and he doesn't find out.

He can't because he says, this man is the essence of true crime. I cannot, it's a mystery which will not permit itself to be told. So again, you've got this, he's trying to add this philosophical layer about troops that won't permit themselves to be told. People have subsequently pointed to this story as a forerunner of crowd theory. Lots of people were thinking about crowds in the 19th century. And Poe was one of them. And Poe was one of the people who sets the terms for this debate. But I think it's also about reading a crowd is really a metaphor for how we read. If he's trying to go through a crowd like a social scientist, seeing everyone as a type,

and then there's data which doesn't match what you're looking for, or if you're an artist, you're trying to read and then suddenly something doesn't match the aesthetic. That's like us when we're trying to read for meaning. When we're trying to read someone as weird and enigmatic as Poe,

we're like that narrator going through the streets of London and we're ultimately thwarted and at the end and it's... Well, just like anybody else sitting outside watching people go by, it's terrific, isn't it? Yeah, and one of the terms

that we associate with that now is one that people point to Poe as the originator of. This idea of the flaneer. Flanour. Yeah, exactly. So the mail, and it's always a man, unfortunately, a man of leisure

who's watching the city go by, and it's this subjectivity that's so influential through 19th century art, particularly in France, and into modernism, and it's something that, again, we can point to Poe and point to his stories that are some of the few that are set in specific places, the ones that are set in London,

are the ones where this begins. It's getting exhausted by a number of talent your husband. I would just like to pop in Aaron the idea briefly of him as a literary critic. He was merciless. He was. He was merciless and he particularly didn't like his contemporaries, the transcendentalists, a group of writers, mostly living in and around Boston, whom he disparagingly referred to as the Frog Pondians in reference to the Frog Pond in Boston Common. So these Frog Pondians, he also calls transcendental vagabonds. And many of his criticisms.

Can you give us a few names? So we're talking about people like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, very famously for Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, with whom he starts this sort of flame war in which he accuses Longfellow of plagiarism. Lives of great men all remind us. Yeah. But many of the criticisms that he levels at the transcendentalists,

one feels could potentially be turned back on him, particularly ideas around their obsession with ideas that are very difficult, very abstruse, very difficult to wrap one's head around, things like this. but he calls them a clique of pitiable dunderheads who go about babbling in parables, a set of thumb-sucking babies and idiots. So he really doesn't hold fire

when it comes to the transcendentalist in many of the literary elites of his day. Well, that's very good. I mean, that puts him in this place. I don't want to rush things, but I think we'll touch on, Richard, how his work was received in France, especially by Bodler.

That was important. It was. Going back to what Tom was saying about crowd theory in the flaneur, obviously Vaudelaire is the theorist of the flaneur. He encountered Poe's work in 1847, initially the tales, and then subsequently the poetry and then the work about poetry. And he translated a lot of his work. Some of it had already been translated into French, but Baudelaire's translations were extremely well received.

So he admired the stories in particular. Later, symbolists such as Malamei really, admired the poetry and other French poets admired the theory, the poetic theory. So he was admired for three different kinds of things. Very little admired here. Well, T.S. Eliot famously said later in the 20th century, the French clearly see something that the English speakers have not seen in Po. And so Poe's kind of work was seen as being available to symbolists,

the colour symbolism. and we've talked about other versions of kind of symbolism, but also this terror, this horror, this darkness was something that really spoke to French writers. Tom, are you coming back to the terror of the darkness or something else? Yeah, and the visual nature of this, because France and the USA being the two great countries of cinema, one of the influences that comes through France

is because he's adopted and embraced in 19th century France, he becomes part of the language of early cinema. Some of the earliest films are Poe adaptations. And then that is how it feeds back in. to Britain as well. In people like Hitchcock, you think, you know, I was talking about Ligeria and we've been talking about dead women. Vertigo is essentially a Poe story. And the language of cinema, it's going backwards that Hitchcock imagines that he's getting it through the influence of French values about art and cinematic aesthetics.

Let's move to the raven, which we tell that every school child in America knows, this long poem. Do you want to kick off on that? Yeah, well, I would say that that's absolutely true. So the poem is about a bereaved lover, and he is sitting alone in his room, thinking about the woman that he has lost when he starts to hear a tapping sound.

He's a tapping my tapping at all. That's right. He wonders what it is. He opens the door. There's nothing there. He goes back into his room. room, he opens the window and in-flies a stately raven. The raven purges on a pale white, a placid bust of palace. And it turns out that the raven can speak. He can say one word,

which is never more, which the speaker of the poem uses to torture himself, essentially, asking him questions like, will I see my wife again in the future, to which the raven? replies, never more. They get into a back and forth. Eventually he commands the raven to leave. The raven says, never more. And the poem ends with the speaker of the poem, lying in a shadow on the floor that's cast by the raven

on top of this bust of palace. Yeah, good, good. And the rhythm eases you along, doesn't it? It's very simple. Yes. So he composes the poem, in chokies, so a long syllable followed by a short syllable. And it is very catchy.

It's very easy to read. And it draws you right in. So I'll read the opening lines. Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore. And so we're right there. He's telling a story. He's carrying us along.

We want to know what happens next. Thank you. Can we just summarize from each of you? What his legacy is now? Tom, starting with you, Tom Ryan. Well, we've heard that he's the father of Gothic and he's the father of the detective story. But I think one of the other things that he is,

he's one of the funniest writers in American literature. You can sit down with that book you've got there, Melvin, and shake and weep. But I think you can also laugh along because he's an amazing satirist. He satirizes the literary world of his time. He satirizes race relations. He satirizes capitalism.

modernity. And that's really I think what his lasting legacy is. As someone who, partly through bitterness, partly through a traumatic biography, is able to see the hypocrisy around him in a very precise way. And maybe moving away

from the literary to some degree and just thinking about the personal. I think he has this kind of cultural cult, in fact, status. Partly, we haven't talked about what he looks like, but there's famous images of him. It's looking quite melancholy, rather beautiful, big moustache.

It's a very familiar kind of image. So he does have that kind of cult following, which I think is part of the legacy. I mean, in last year's Eurovision Song Contest, the Austrian song was Who the Hell is Edgar? And if you haven't listened to it, you should listen to it. But there's also a kind of sadness. So one of the things that Baudelaire said about him

was Pose death is almost a suicide, a suicide, a long time in preparation. Yes. So he has that kind of haunting romantic. Walking down street, He pulled a clothed in somebody else's clothes and drunk out of his mind. Yeah, when he was still very young. And we don't know what happened.

No. Finally? Yeah, so I would agree that his cultural reach is huge. There's an American football team named after him, the Baltimore Ravens. The name was chosen by a popular poll. He has nearly at this point, nearly 500 writing credits on the internet movie database, which is quite remarkable for a man who died more than 50 years before cinema began to be invented. And for me, what is Po's most enduring legacy

is the way that he really had his finger on the pulse of the contradictions of the American National Project that we have, as you said earlier, this idea of hope and optimism and rationality built on a bedrock of indigenous displacement and racial enslavement. Well, thank you all very, very much, Bridget Bennett, Erin Forbes and Tom Wright, and our studio engineer, Jackie Marjoram.

Next week, it's Carl Bart, the influential Swiss theologian. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. Right.

The only real question I want to ask you, what didn't you say that you, what would you like to have said that you didn't have time to say? Well, I'm very interested in the way that the Gothic in general, yes, and Poe in particular, gets picked up by African-American writers

and a lot of the themes and the tropes that Poe and Gothic writers work with get adopted by people like Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Henry Box Brown, as ways of describing the horrific experiences they endured while enslaved that they need this fantastical, supernatural, language and rhetoric in order to be able to begin to access these truths that are stranger and more horrific than any fiction.

Do you want to come in? Well, and thinking about this in relation to what we know about his biography, that creates an additional set of problems of problematic about thinking about what his personal attitude seemed to have been, which we touched upon but didn't talk about that much. And they can be hard to establish.

Well, as I was just saying, it can be quite hard to establish, but we know that he was involved in buying and selling people. He sold an enslaved man for his aunt, is that right? And it's certainly biographers, believe that when he was young in Richmond

living with the Allens, he was taken to various plantations. So he was well, and of course he was well aware of the world of enslavement around him. As I suggested, his foster father had a kind of side deal where he was dealing in enslaved people. So he also infamously

wrote, and I can't quite remember the detail of this, but he wrote a famous... I have the details. I'll leave it to you then. It's known a... the Paul Ding-Dreaton review. And it's disputed whether or not Poe wrote it. He may well have written it. He may well not have written it. And it is a positive review of two intensely pro-slavery works that appeared in the Southern literary messenger when Poe was an editor of that

journal. So Poe was certainly editing the journal when this very positive pro-slavery review appeared. And in this review, the writer, Poe, or possibly Judge Beverly Tucker, describes the intense feelings of love and affection that he maintains are possible between the enslaved and the enslaver that aren't possible in any other kind of relationship. So it's a deeply disturbing review. Yeah. Yeah. I'm really fascinated by this myth that grows up of him as an outcast and how that gets set off by the worst thing that happens to him is actually after he dies,

his worst enemy gets the opportunity to write the first draft of history who writes his obituary in the key newspaper, the New York Tribune of the day. Yellow-fashioned, literary, envy. Absolutely. This guy, Rufus, right. Exactly. And I often ask my students, when we're doing Pope,

what are you actually scared of? What are you really scared of? And they tend, for their generation, It's all about reputation. It's about controlling the image. Poe lost control of his image. He was painted as this melancholy, alcoholic laughingstock who couldn't hold down a job and was a dreamer

who wandered the streets in madness and melancholy. And in some ways, that's been a really baleful influence because it means people have just seen him as outside of the norm. But actually, I think you could see in long term, that's been a benefit. People have seen him as this kind of outcast countercultural figure. So next time you're in front of a copy of Sergeant Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club band

Look right at the top You've got all of these icons of the counterculture Or rebels, you know James Dean Bob Dylan, Marquis de Sard And right in the middle You've got that iconic image of Poe And it's Poe, this person Who's fighting against the establishment

Partly it's to do with drug culture potentially But it's partly this outcast rebel figure And whether he realised it or not His enemy, Rufus Griswold, in creating this harmful myth Was helping him set Poe up As the kind of person that outsiders from whatever kind of source, whether it's African Americans

or whether it's counterculture beats like the Ginsburg or the Beatles. He's mentioned in various Beatles songs. They all cling to him as an icon of what it is to be an outsider. One of the critics says it was as if Mozart had bequeathed his manuscripts to Salieri. What was Poe thinking about? It's exactly what would happen in a Poe story. Not only is his death, not only is his death a Poe story, but the aftermath is almost two on the nose.

Yes, yes. He was hounded by this man, wasn't it? It's an interesting example of a baseless in terms of anything that real had happened between them, but he just wanted to deny and destroy Poe's reputation in any way he could. There were constantly films made about Poe, and some of them are good, some of them are terrible. There was one that was pretty terrible 10 years ago. John Cusack plays Poe as a literary, as a kind of detective superhero,

and there is a scene in that film where Ruper's Griswold gets sliced into, just as like in the pit in the pendulum. So at least on film, he's had some kind of comeback. I was no angel, though. We've heard from Aaron some of the comments he made about other people. I don't know if you guys have seen the new Netflix series House of Usher. Yeah. So this is one that's out now.

And it is a sort of romp and pastiche through all the postage. universe. Characters are named after Po. Because it's set in the present day, isn't it? Yeah. And I think it's really powerful. What I think it's influenced by is the most Poish thing that has been in recent years, Black Mirror. Black Mirror is what Poe would do. It's contemporary concerns, philosophical riddles. And I think that the current version of House of Usa takes that kind of present setting and really goes for it in a very powerful way. And it really has that pitch-perfect blend of horror and humor that we've been talking about. So here's up and running.

long time up we're not all that long in in terms of homer do you find a lot of your friends read him do you find it's in the circulation now you remember how powerful goth culture is you know outsider culture you know for generations ed and below there's a massive audience for outsiders who are your friends read it because if I think of my friends no and that that's people don't take him seriously academics like us tend to

tend to avoid him because he's too strange to get your hands on. And a little lowbrow maybe as well. As an American, all of my friends have read Poe for years, right? So I don't know that they're currently reading Poe, but every kid reads the Raven. Maybe you memorize the Raven. You certainly get a fair handful of Poe short stories in school. I lived in France recently for a few years and the people I knew, they all study Poe at college, you know, partly to learn English, but Poe is a massive part of

French educational culture. But also one of the things the French appreciated in the 19th century about Poe was this playfulness with language, this playfulness with words. I mean, one of the things we haven't talked about, actually, is the extent to which in his text there are so many quotes from other texts. There are extracts of poetry.

There are all kinds of references to often really arcane texts or texts in other languages. And he's really playfully referential in that way, highly intellectual, often to outsmart his readers, I think, or perhaps just to trump them and just say, look at me, I'm quite cleverly. It's always possible that Poe is having a laugh. He loved hoaxes.

He published anonymous hoaxes about balloon flights across the Atlantic that got printed in newspapers and then were revealed to be not true. And that was part of his humour. Part of all of these stories that we've been talking about, there is always the possibility at the back of your mind that he's laughing at you, that he's laughing at you for a... taking it so seriously. Before we close,

is his death, actual death, the last day or two, still a mystery? Have you anybody any ideas about it? I mean, he was found on the street, as I said earlier,

in somebody else's clothes, drunk, and a couple of days later he was dead. Near a polling station, which is a key thing. The theory that's most tempting from a historical perspective as a historian,

you'd fixate on the fact that he may have been press ganged into voting multiple times in Baltimore elections. and he'd been putting someone else's clothes, maybe they shaved his moustache off and made him vote repeatedly. This happened a lot.

And that's, again, almost too on the nose as a po-esque critique of democracy and persona and anonymity and all that kind of stuff. But I don't know. But beyond that, it still seems to be a mystery. It's a tragic end. Wrapped in a conundrum in a very poish way, yeah. Simon, our great producer is coming here.

No mystery here. Does anyone want to your coffee? I've had so many of those biscuits I'll have tea please anybody in our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson I love you

I know that Carolyn is 80 a wealthy widow Dave is in his 50s homeless a former drug addict with a long criminal record their love affair causes a huge rift in Carolyn's family. That's our mom. We're not going to let you just do that.

I'm Sue Mitchell, and this story unfolded in California on the street where I live. Look at you brought into your house. He's a con artist, mother. Is Dave a dangerous interloper or the tender carer he claims to be?

That's why I'm here. Thank you Lord. Find out in intrigue, million-dollar lover from BBC Radio 4. Listen on BBC Sounds. If anything happens to him, I will just die.