(2 of 3)
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 to sea," served as a private, and it survived the debacle at West Point. "Lion ambition is chained down," he wrote in his Tamerlane, which was run off by a printer pal while Poe was doing duty in the quartermaster's office in Boston.
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 U.S. letters.
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 to the trammels of opium."
If Poe and alcohol made an impossible couple, it was nothing to his bizarre relations with women. The poet's broken-field running in the sexual arena would baffle a convention of psychiatrists. Author Winwar gallantly charts the whole painful performance, beginning with Edgar's first sonnets smuggled by his sister into an exclusive young ladies' seminary (although poetry was then acceptable currency in "date-patterns," his frenzies must have startled the girls out of their wits). There followed an ocean of vows and verses to members of what he learned bitterly to call "the pestilential society of literary women."