January 19 is the birthday of a number of brilliant and fascinating people, including Janis Joplin and Robert E. Lee (who was two years older than Poe, but graduated before the latter entered West Point). None, however, were as enigmatic and difficult as Edgar Allan Poe, poet, critic, editor, horror writer, and inventor of the detective story.

The mystery was to some extent deliberate; Poe published misleading brief accounts of his life, but nobody knows why. It may have been sheer mischief; he told his fellow students at West Point that he was descended from Benedict Arnold.

What is known for sure of Poe’s life is depressing in the extreme. His parents were actors; before Poe was two his father abandoned the family and promptly died. Poe’s mother died of consumption when her youngest son was not yet three. He was unofficially adopted by a merchant’s family, grew up in an atmosphere of comfort seasoned with contempt, and was ultimately disinherited after quarrels over debts, gambling, and irresponsibility.

Throughout his life, his finances were uncertain, and he had a skill for turning successes into disasters. He edited several magazines, increasing circulation and income, but lost these jobs because of drinking, drugs, or conflict with the magazine owner. He seems to have quarrelled with virtually every man he knew, particularly any man who had authority over him.

Nevertheless, women loved him, and he had a number of close friendships with women. He held “Aunt Muddy,” his aunt and mother-in-law, especially dear, and his marriage was in many ways a menage-a-trois of Poe, his wife, and his mother-in-law. This may seem more natural, or less, when one understands that he married his thirteen-year-old first cousin, who became an invalid before she was 18. She suffered a long, dragging death from tuberculosis, while her husband continued to write ghastly tales of beautiful dying women.

Meanwhile, Poe flirted with a number of other women, sometimes to the point of scandal, possibly to the point of fathering an illegitimate child. After his wife’s death, Poe was lost, and went searching for another love. One engagement ended when he couldn’t keep a promise not to drink. In September 1849, he proposed to a childhood sweetheart and was accepted. He left on a business trip, and within days, Poe was found in the streets of Baltimore, delirious and dying. He was forty.

This final illness was as mysterious as much of Poe’s life; experts have suggested that it may have been brain fever, acute alcoholism, withdrawal from opiates, the effects of a mugging, even rabies.

The failures, miseries, and horrors of his life are too easily conflated with those of his fiction and poetry. Since his death, his fiction has influenced authors from Baudelaire to Borges to Disch. The detective form he invented has become one of the richest and most varied of all fictional genres. He also had a hand in shaping modern horror fiction and a powerful influence on horror in films. He even wrote science fiction, and the rules he laid down for the short story are still taught.

Not a bad legacy, all in all.

“Alone” by Edgar Allan Poe

From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.
Then – in my childhood, in the dawn
Of a most stormy life – was drawn
From every depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that round me rolled
In its autumn tint of gold,
From the lightning in the sky
As it passed me flying by,
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue)
Of a demon in my view.