Edgar Allan Poe: Love, Death and Women

Born in Boston in 1809, died in Baltimore in 1849,

American writer Edgar Allan Poe

is one of the world's greatest crime and horror authors.

His influence on literature extends far beyond the grave,

and he's credited with inventing the detective and science fiction genres.

Poe's gruesome and tormented stories reflect an equally tormented life.

One of the first Victorians to try and earn a living as a writer,

his daring career choice ruined his relationships.

He died destitute, despite literary acclaim.

His most significant works include The Pit And The Pendulum, The Fall Of The House Of Usher,

Murders In The Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, and The Raven.

Poe created some of the most distinctive female characters

in the history of fiction, and is famously quoted as saying that the most melancholy

and poetical topic in the world is the death of a beautiful woman.

Poe's women, either they're already dead or they're going to die,

or they know they're going to die and then they do.

The woman has to die for there to be story.

I tried at one point to figure out the kinds of women that he was looking for in his life

and it seemed as though about half of them were motherly types.

And then the other half seem to be the sisterly types.

I think Poe rather fears women, because they die so easily.

He is drawn and also repelled by the this idea that he's going to be abandoned yet again.

As a crime writer, I'm greatly influenced by Poe

and fascinated by how his private life fed into his work.

Both were pitted by the loss of all the women he loved.

Throughout his life, Poe was embroiled with

at least a dozen women, but I'm particularly interested in

his tormented relationships with four key women. Virginia, his young wife.

Eliza, his dead mother.

Sarah Helen, a spiritualist poet he nearly married.

And Frances, the darling of New York's 1840s literary scene.

As if cursed, Poe was rejected, or bereaved, by all of them.

SHE COUGHS

For me, reading Poe's work, it's so obvious

he's trying to reanimate these women,

constantly exploring the hinterland between life and death,

striving to keep these women alive.

In the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud upon her name during the silence

of the night, or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if,

through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardour of my longing for the departed,

I could restore her to the pathways she had abandoned.

Ah, could it be forever?

Upon the earth.

When Edgar Allan Poe was writing in the early 19th century,

America was gripped by puritan ethics, slavery, rampant disease and poverty.

These turbulent times would erupt into civil war, accompanied by another revolution - in literature.

Poe was a pioneer in America's Romantic Movement, which rejected religious fanaticism.

He reinterpreted the horror and romance of Gothic literature

with his psychological exploration of death and madness.

He satisfied a public which craved his gory and macabre stories.

Poe got inside his reader's heads like no-one else, and produced work

which ensured his posthumous fame in media he couldn't have envisaged.

Yes, I've actually built several of those torture and horror devices

that Poe described in his tales. The Pit And The Pendulum.

That's a thriller, isn't it?

Well, I certainly look forward to seeing them.

Imagine building those things.

A very curious hobby.

It's more...than a hobby.

I first read Poe when I was about 12, and I loved the goriness and the darkness of him,

but I write in a form that he invented, and reading him now as a writer technically,

if you want to know how to send shivers up the spine of a reader

or make them afraid to fall asleep, then Poe's your man.

Poe's horror stories terrified his readers, and his detective fiction

was so gripping that people assumed he must have criminal tendencies.

A visionary thinker, Poe pushed the boundaries of fiction

in a way that has influenced writers ever since.

Agatha Christie, influenced by Poe.

Charles Dickens, influenced by Poe.

Walt Whitman, influenced by Poe.

Herman Melville, totally influenced by Poe.

Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, everything he wrote was Poe.

Jules Verne, total rip-off of Poe.

Like most giants of Victorian-era literature, Poe was a man.

But he was surrounded by a coterie of women who exerted powerful influences on his storytelling.

By delving into letters, journals, poetry and prose written by Poe and his women, I want to uncover how they

became female archetypes that repeatedly occur in his writing.

The mother figure, the unobtainable icon, and the virginal maiden.

And, because all great mysteries begin with finding a corpse,

I shall begin Poe's story in the final days before his bizarre death.

It's 1849, and Poe is 40 years old.

He's just had a failed suicide attempt,

and his reputation is in the gutter.

His health is failing,

he's not looking after himself and he looks terrible.

On a trip to find work, Poe ends up in Baltimore's rough docklands.

It's a city in the midst of social upheaval, a magnet for runaway slaves

and impoverished European immigrants.

It's a wild town,

and the last place Poe is seen alive is at this saloon,

where he goes on his final drinking binge.

When he came in, he had a drink.

I think there was more to it than just a drink.

It was an opium and heroin bar.

-Cos it's right next to the docks, isn't it?

-It was.

They did do drugs out of here, they did Shanghai men for the clipper ships.

I don't think I would've liked to live here back then.

Would you have drunk here back then?

Well, I probably would've had to be a prostitute.

He'd actually been missing for a couple of days when he was found here.

How do you think a drunk would've fared on the streets of Baltimore at that time?

Probably he would've just been mugged for money, kicked around and just left.

But if he was that drunk and if he was a stone cold alcoholic

and had blackouts, God knows where he would've wound up.

On October 3rd 1849, Poe is found in the streets of Baltimore.

He's delirious, he's in great distress and in immediate need of assistance.

Poe will never be coherent again long enough to explain how he came to be

in this dire condition, and, bizarrely, is wearing someone else's clothes.

Poe is taken to hospital, where he dies four days later on October 7th 1849.

He's just 40 years old.

He's said to have died from 'congestion of the brain',

a common euphemism for alcohol abuse.

The actual cause of his death is never confirmed.

Thank heaven! The crisis, the danger is past,

and the lingering illness is over at last.

And the fever called living is conquered at last.

The sickness, the nausea, the pitiless pain,

have ceased with the fever that maddened my brain.

With the fever called living that burned in my brain.

Despite his many loves and literary admirers,

Poe dies penniless, childless, alone and desperate.

What could've happened in his life to make death so welcome?

To find out why he passes away in such pitiful circumstances,

I'm going to look back at his tragic life,

exhuming his most significant relationships to see why his heart and his fiction grew so dark.

I'm going right back to his youth, two decades earlier,

to the prime of his life, when he should've had everything to live for.

It's 1828, and Edgar Allan Poe is 19 years old.

He's already suffered a lot of misery and heartache.

Orphaned as a toddler, he's fostered by John and Frances Allan.

During his childhood, they spend time in Britain, where Poe was taught Latin and French

and read the classics of European literature.

As a young man, his relationship with his foster father, John Allan, is fractious.

Poe is insecure, he picks fights, drinks and gambles.

But he adores his foster mother, Frances.

After she dies, John Allan cuts him off without a penny.

At the time, he's enrolled at West Point military academy in New York,

where his talent for poetry exceeds his talent as an officer.

He's discharged within a year, and leaves with massive debts.

Homeless and destitute, he ends up at this house in Baltimore

with his only blood relatives, his aunt, Maria Clemm, and his two cousins.

For the first time since being orphaned, Poe experiences a real sense of belonging.

And he becomes particularly attached to his young cousin, Virginia Clemm.

We grew up together, yet differently we grew.

I, ill of health and buried in gloom,

she agile, graceful, and overflowing with energy.

Hers the ramble on the hillside,

mine the studies of the cloister.

I, living within my own heart,

and addicted, body and soul, to the most intense and painful meditation.

She, roaming carelessly through life,

with no thought of the shadows in her path,

or the silent flight of the raven-winged hours.

Virginia was apparently a very charming young lady.

Everyone that met her was just enthralled with her beauty,

with her manners, and they said you couldn't help

but to fall in love with her.

Virginia's considerable charms have the same effect on her cousin, Edgar.

But he doesn't realise the depth of his feelings for her until he nearly loses her.

While away from the family home to find work,

Poe receives a letter which makes him confront his feelings.

A cousin, Neilson Poe, is offering to take Virginia into his home

and raise her as a proper lady.

So Maria Clemm writes this letter to Edgar asking, "What should I do?"

And this is the first time that Poe expresses affection for Virginia.

Poe writes a desperate letter to Maria Clemm,

telling her that if Neilson Poe takes over guardianship of Virginia

and the household is split up, he will kill himself.

My dearest Aunty,

I am blinded with tears while writing this letter.

I have no wish to live another hour.

You well know how little I am able to bear up

under the pressure of grief.

I love, you know I love Virginia passionately, devotedly.

I cannot express in words the fervent devotion

I feel towards my dear little cousin, my own darling.

All my thoughts are occupied with the supposition

that both you and she will prefer to go with Neilson Poe.

Poe's plea to his Aunt Clemm works, and she declines Neilson Poe's generous offer.

Poe gets to keep his precious family together.

In 1836, he marries Virginia.

He is 27, and she is 13.

From a modern perspective, it's easy to suspect Poe of the ultimate taboo,

but in the 1830s marriage between cousins is perfectly legal,

and because the life expectancy

of women is only 40, 13 is considered old enough.

I think in many ways he married her to stop her from marrying somebody else, to stop her from growing up.

He wanted to keep her just as she was. And he did.

There's no reason to think their union was at all consummated.

I don't think that Poe's relationship with Virginia

was like that.

We do know that they went to Petersburg on their honeymoon,

and their bedroom suite only had one bed,

so they were at least in the same bed there,

but we don't have absolute proof

when or if they consummated their marriage.

But if we look to stories like Eleonora,

it seems to indicate that they did had a passionate love affair.

We sat, locked in each other's embrace,

beneath the serpent-like trees,

and looked down within the water of the River of Silence at our images therein.

We had drawn the God Eros from that wave.

Ever with thee I wish to roam.

Dearest, my life is thine.

Give me a cottage for my home, and a rich old cypress vine.

And, oh, the tranquil hours we'll spend,

never wishing that others may see!

Perfect ease we'll enjoy,

without thinking to lend ourselves to the world and its glee.

Ever peaceful and blissful we'll be.

She just idolised and adored him.

And Edgar and his wife and mother-in-law

just formed this little trio that escaped the whole world.

They focused on each other and each other's cares.

And even when Edgar was poor, and could barely afford to feed himself,

he made sure she had a piano and sometimes a harp to play.

He loved to hear her sing and make music.

He would play the flute along with her.

The mother-in-law would sing along.

They had little concerts together at night.

But the newlyweds' situation is far from idyllic.

To support his family, Poe searches for any kind of paid work,

from teaching to bricklaying, but jobs are scarce in 1830s Baltimore,

and he's knocked back every time.

The Poe family, in this time period, they were starving.

Sometimes Maria Clemm and Virginia would go out with a basket

and ask for donations.

Many people did that.

Edgar applied for several positions.

Nothing ever came of that.

They were starving. They were starving.

Poe was writing poetry and not making any money.

But yet, despite this poverty,

Poe began his literary career here, as a short story writer.

This was Poe's bedroom, and it was here that he began to write.

My baptismal name is Egaeus.

That of my family I will not mention.

Yet there are no towers in the land more time honoured

than my gloomy grey hereditary halls.

The recollections of my earliest years

are connected with that chamber and with its volumes.

Herein was I born.

Poe's first short story, Berenice, from 1835, is a surreal tale of love,

death and madness, about a man's obsession with his cousin.

When she returns from the dead after a prolonged illness, he rips out her teeth.

It's a daring and original tale, flouting all the conventions of the day.

Poe's decision to become a professional writer was unheard of at the time.

Fiction just wasn't a money-making proposition.

Rich people would pay a publisher to publish their book,

or all their family and friends would have to promise to buy a copy before it came out.

But here is Poe with no money, no means of support,

deciding to do this full time, and that's suddenly possible because of magazines.

Suddenly there is a market for fiction

and the whole process becomes democratised and professionalised.

One of Poe's aesthetic principles was that the ideal length of time

to have a reader read something he had written

would be like maybe 20 minutes, or half an hour,

because you could have the reader completely under your control,

the reader wouldn't be thinking about anything else,

wouldn't be putting a novel down to go take a walk

or eat a meal or something, would just be completely absorbed.

He's such an deeply interesting psychological writer,

and so much of what he writes exposes his own thought processes.

That, I think, was a bit of a turning point in the evolution

of the short story, that people saw all kinds of possibilities not just for telling a tale,

but actually going into the interpretation of the human psyche

and finding out what makes us do the things we do.

Men have called me mad, but the question is not yet settled,

whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence,

whether much that is glorious,

whether all that is profound, does not spring from disease of thought.

They who dream by day are cognisant of many things

which escape those who dream only by night.

For a writer as sensitive as Poe, the 1830s are fruitful years to delve into the mind.

Victorian scientists are making discoveries that cast doubt on

the claims of the Bible, and its reassuring notion of an afterlife.

As the promise of paradise fades, the moment of death becomes terrifying.

Death's inevitability is made even more frightening by

the indiscriminate spread of wasting diseases like cholera and tuberculosis.

Medicine is not yet advanced enough to explain or treat symptoms of lingering illnesses

which could be mistaken for death, and sometimes are.

The shallowest breathing of tubercular lungs,

the comatose sleep of typhus, or the suspension of movement by stroke and paralysis.

Expressing the most common fears of his precarious times,

Poe's stories find a receptive audience.

He taps into primal human phobias, including the ancient fear of being buried alive.

To be buried while alive is, beyond question,

the most terrific of these extremes which has ever fallen

to the lot of mere mortality.

That it has frequently, very frequently,

so fallen will scarcely be denied by those who think.

The boundaries which divide life from death

are at best shadowy and vague.

Who shall say where the one ends and where the other begins?

For Poe, I think the end point is often a recognition

that one can't fully understand intellectually the circumstances of death.

So rather than heave some vision of an afterlife,

Poe really views the end of life

as the extinction of consciousness, the end of all things.

And that's probably what scared him more than anything.

I once again struggled to cry aloud.

A long, wild, and continuous shriek

resounded through the realms of the subterranean night.

As he whispered me of a violated grave, of a disfigured body

enshrouded, yet still breathing, still palpitating, still alive!

His audience was interested in gore and sensation,

and so if he wrote about those things he would make a hit,

make a sensation, become more popular, become more successful, make a name for himself.

And to some extent, I think that might be what he believed.

But I think he was also haunted by disease and death.

It was a topic he couldn't let alone.

She had seen that the finger of death was upon her bosom.

She had been made perfect in loveliness only to die...

On a chair lay a razor, besmeared with blood.

On the hearth were two or three long and thick tresses

of grey human hair, also dabbled in blood,

and seeming to have been pulled out by the roots...

Upon the bed there lay a nearly liquid mass

of loathsome, detestable putrescence.

He doesn't pull any punches when it comes to death, suffering, torture. And it wasn't just for titillation.

Poe's object was less frightening people

than getting the fear out of himself and somewhere else.

It's very much the equivalent of whistling past a graveyard.

He is there to be as scary as possible to prove that

he is not scared, and of course it proves nothing of the sort.

Poe's magazine stories receive no literary praise, but they are enjoyed by the public.

With no copyright laws yet in place for this new profession, he earns little money.

But this doesn't deter him.

He tries to earn cash and recognition by entering writing competitions.

Eventually he secures a job as the editor of a New York journal,

where he busies himself with reviews of other people's work.

But Poe drinks on the job and publishes spiteful criticism of his contemporaries' writing.

A flashy succession of ill-conceived

and miserably executed literary productions,

each more silly than its predecessor...

The only thing noticeable was the peevishness of the writer, the only thing...

..left an absolute and irreparable mental leprosy, rendering it a question whether

he ever would or could again accomplish anything

which should be worthy the attention of people not positively rabid.

It's an incredibly stupid thing to do.

The publishing world is small and incestuous and Poe soon makes enemies.

SHE COUGHS

Life has also taken a turn for the worst at home.

Poe and Virginia have been married for six years

and Virginia is in the front parlour playing the piano and singing,

and suddenly she's wracked by violent coughing and she brings up blood.

It's the first sign of the TB that will kill her.

They move to this small country cottage, partly for the good air,

in what is ironically now one of the busiest thoroughfares in the whole of the Bronx.

Wow, it's very small.

Yes, this was the parlour where the Poe family spent their time.

Virginia spent a lot of time in bed because she was sick throughout the whole time.

It's very warm downstairs, rather than upstairs. This is why Virginia was moved downstairs.

But she was still cold, so when Edgar Allan Poe was at West Point,

he kept the cloak they give you,

and this was the same cloak he wrapped Virginia in to keep her warm.

They also had a cat which they named Catterina, because it was a girl.

And she would also snuggle with the cat.

It's very sad, but this is when Edgar Allan Poe's works started getting more emotional.

This is how he wrote Annabel Lee, Ulalume, it brought out the most emotional part of him.

We loved with a love that was more than love,

I and my Annabel Lee.

With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago, in this kingdom by the sea,

a wind blew out of a cloud, chilling my beautiful Annabel Lee.

In that time period if you had tuberculosis, that was a death sentence. You did not survive that.

It was a disease of the lungs, and many times people would just choke and drown in their own blood.

Sometimes it would be very sudden, sometimes it would linger.

Because Virginia was so young she didn't just die.

She was sort of young enough to sort of fight the disease for five years.

Sometimes she'd get worse, and it felt she was about to die.

He said he prepared for her funeral, he was prepared for her death, and then she'd get better.

So he thought that she was cured, and he became optimistic

and looked forward to a happy life together, then she got worse, then she got better.

He said it felt like she was dying over and over again.

Each time I felt all the agonies of her death,

and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly

and clung to her.

I became insane with long intervals of horrible sanity.

Poe is living a double life.

By day he's the editor of a popular journal,

but as darkness falls he becomes the night nurse of a sick wife,

as Virginia battles her painful illness.

For three long years, he listens to Virginia's cough, or her silence.

Alcohol and writing are the only outlets for his suffering.

He writes compulsively, channeling his emotional turmoil into his work.

These are his most productive and creative years, in which he composes

works that will later be lauded as the most quintessentially Poe.

Looking upward, I surveyed the ceiling of my prison.

A very singular figure riveted my whole attention.

It was the painted figure of Time, save that in lieu of a scythe

he held a huge pendulum, such as we see on antique clocks.

A slight noise attracted my notice, and, looking to the floor,

I saw several enormous rats traversing it.

They had issued from the well which lay just within view to my right.

While I gazed, they came up in troops,

hurriedly, with ravenous eyes, allured by the scent of the meat.

I heard all things in heaven and in the earth.

I heard many things in hell. How, then, am I mad?

You will think so no longer when I describe the wise precautions I took

for the concealment of the body.

First of all I dismembered the corpse, I cut off the head and the arms and the legs.

In 1845, Poe writes and publishes his masterpiece, The Raven.

It's filled with detail, metaphor and reference to Virginia's decline.

It's a cruel twist of fate that the greatest turmoil of his adult life

is also the catalyst for his greatest achievement.

Once upon a midnight dreary

While I pondered, weak and weary

Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping

As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door

"'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door

"Only this, and nothing more."

This fashionably melancholy poem finally earns Poe the critical recognition he craves.

But with Virginia perpetually reanimating from the brink of death,

his success couldn't be more ill-timed, or more welcome.

He is propelled into overnight stardom.

A sensation among New York's literati.

He finds himself in great demand to recite.

Women love him. They attend his readings in droves.

Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering,

fearing, doubting,

dreaming dreams no mortals ever dared to dream before.

But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,

and the only word there spoken was the whispered word "Lenore".

I think Poe was seen as this incredibly entertaining and dark,

brooding, but also very original talent by this very elite,

almost untouchable group of literary personages.

Among his swooning admirers, the most influential

is the glittering socialite and poet, Frances Sargeant Osgood.

Nearly the same age as Poe, she has two children and an unhappy marriage.

She is a successful writer, earning a good living from her highly respected poetry.

Osgood is one of those rare poets who really understood

the medium of print, and recognised that she could appeal to people

by developing a kind of coquettish persona,

where she would give as much as she wanted,

but then take away and appear to be somewhat childlike, fairy-like,

evasive, in a way that would have appealed to men in particular.

Thou should'st be a beauteous bird

Flying at her lightest word

Nestling near her silken zone,

Like a gem on beauty's throne.

In one anecdote, while she was listening to Poe recite,

she was looking up at him adoringly with her dark eyes

and clearly was enthralled,

and appeared to everyone in the room also to be absolutely taken with Poe's demeanour.

And finally when she did meet him, she said, "I liked him very much."

With his proud and beautiful head erect,

his dark eyes flashing with the electric light

of feeling and of thought,

a peculiar, an inimitable blending of sweetness and hauteur

in his expression and manner, he greeted me,

calmly, gravely, almost coldly,

yet with so marked an earnestness

I could not hope being deeply impressed by it.

My soul from our first meeting,

burned with fires it had never before known.

As I hope to live, her talents were of no common order,

her powers of mind were gigantic.

I felt this, and in many matters became her pupil.

At this point Poe is the editor of the newly created Broadway Journal.

Poe and Osgood court each other through its pages.

He publishes their poems side by side.

Osgood may sign her poems Violet Vane, but everyone knows it's her.

I know a noble heart that beats for one it loves how "wildly well!"

I only know for whom it beats

but I must never tell!

Never tell!

Hush! Hark!

How echo soft repeats

Ah! Never tell!

Beloved! Amid the earnest woes that crowd around my earthly path

Drear path, alas, where grows not even one lonely rose

My soul at least a solace hath

In dreams of thee, and therein knows an Eden of bland repose.

The evidence is actually rather thin that Poe and Osgood had a physical relationship.

But they both had reputations that could be ratcheted up based on their relationship to one another.

Poe, who had only published really a couple of thin volumes of poetry,

recognised that she had a kind of literary cache that he would like to feed into.

It's quite possible they had a sexual relationship.

Certainly the scandal mongers said so.

It's difficult to know whether or not they did.

My thinking is probably they didn't,

because Poe like to hear himself talk a lot more than he liked anything else,

and so I suspect that the sexuality was mostly verbal.

Back at home, Poe's wife, Virginia, is still struggling with tuberculosis.

Virginia knows about her husband's correspondence with Frances Osgood

and tolerates their relationship, believing it to be platonic.

She considers Osgood a family friend and a sobering influence for Poe,

personally and professionally.

There were various points at which Poe,

who had gone on benders, of course, throughout his career,

tried to dry out, and this was probably one of those times.

During that period, Poe wasn't drinking,

so my guess is that he felt the need to maintain a certain air of propriety around Osgood.

And that was one of the reasons why Virginia actually approved of this relationship.

You have to credit Virginia, because she put up with a lot of nonsense.

Poe was gone a lot, he would try to sell his stories, and then there was the vicious gossip

that Virginia would hear about Poe having an affair with this person, Poe flirting with this lady,

Poe spending time with this person over here.

Poe's reputation as a drunk has already been exacerbated by his mean-spirited literary criticism.

His enemies are now only too happy also to brand him a scandalous philanderer.

At the height of their entanglement, when Osgood is supposed to be

estranged from her husband, she gives birth to a baby girl.

And a malicious rumour circulates that Poe is the father.

The baby dies within a few months and Osgood never confirms who the father is.

The damage to herself and Poe is already done.

Angry at the wagging tongues, Osgood publishes a scathing retort in the form of a poem.

A whisper woke the air

A soft light tone and low

Yet barbed with shame and woe

Yet might it perish there nor further go?

Ah, me! A quick and eager ear caught up the little meaning sound

Another voice had breathed it clear

And so it wanders round

From ear to lip, from lip to ear.

Poe and Osgood are in the sights of New York's most vicious gossip monger, Elizabeth Ellet.

A published playwright and historian, she's a jealous rival of Osgood both professionally and romantically.

She also starts to court Poe through her poetry.

But Poe dismisses out of hand publicly, and then, goadingly,

he prints her poems next to Osgood's for comparison. It's a massive blunder.

Slighted, Ellet seeks revenge.

She sends poison pen letters to the now gravely ill Virginia,

accusing Poe and Osgood of all sorts of debauchery.

Already extremely fragile, Virginia is traumatised.

In a society where reputation is everything, there is only one

possible outcome - Poe and Osgood stop seeing each other.

They decided that the relationship was going to be damaging to both of them.

It had reached a kind of tipping point in terms of

the mores of 19th century readers and even their own contemporaries.

After that point, around 1846, they no longer saw one another.

Poe loses the woman who represents the type of intellectual recognition he craves.

Frances Sargent Osgood is his unobtainable icon and she has gone.

He's also on the threshold of the shattering loss of his virginal maiden.

Poe leaves his job at the Broadway Journal to care for Virginia in her terminal months.

He says that on her deathbed, Virginia blames the Osgood-Ellet scandal for hastening her death.

Remove from the world with it's sin and care

And the tattling of many tongues

Love alone shall heal my weakened lungs.

After fighting tuberculosis for five long years,

Virginia dies in the freezing winter of 1847.

She is just 24.

How shall the burial rite be read?

The solemn song be sung?

The requiem for the lovliest dead That ever died so young?

But she is gone above With young hope at her side

And I am drunk with love of the dead, who is my bride.

Coming here and seeing how small and modest the house is,

you have a real sense of what an intimate family they must have been, and how Maria Clemm and Virginia

really gave him that stability and intimacy and sense of belonging that he'd craved all his life.

So it must have been devastating to lose Virginia,

and how fundamentally that must have shifted his entire world.

After her death he said he just couldn't live another year without her.

He was just having a breakdown.

The newspapers reported that he would be dead soon, too.

In the excitement of my opium dreams, I would call aloud

upon her name during the silence of the night,

or among the sheltered recesses of the glens by day, as if,

through the wild eagerness, the solemn passion, the consuming ardour

of my longing for the departed,

I could restore her to the pathways she had abandoned.

Ah, could it be forever? Upon the earth.

Virginia's death sends Poe spiralling out of control.

He's back on the drink and starts taking the powerful opiate drug laudanum.

I feel that a shadow gathers over my brain,

and I must trust the perfect sanity of the record.

After Virginia's death, he had gone into a real bad physical and mental decline.

One of the care givers who took care of him said to him,

"Unless you find a woman who's strong and will help guide your life,

I'm afraid you're going to have a sudden death."

So, in 1848, a year after Virginia died,

he kind of set out to find the strong woman.

In his drug-addled grief, Poe pursues several women,

but the most receptive to his frantic advances

is the eccentric poet Sarah Helen Whitman.

He's caught a glimpse of her outside her house in Providence, Rhode Island,

as his carriage passes by.

In his desperate need for a new wife, he hounds Whitman with romantic verse.

I saw thee once

Once only

It was a July midnight

And from out a full-orbed moon, that, like thine own soul

Soaring, sought a precipitate pathway up through heaven

There fell a silvery-silken veil of light, clad all in white

Upon a violet bank

I saw thee half reclining.

Whitman and Poe have a lot in common.

She's widowed, childless, an established writer,

and she's interested in the same themes as Poe - death, the afterlife, the gothic.

He had heard that she was a lady of eccentricity

and sorrows and he thought, "Aha! That's my thing - eccentricity and sorrows."

She is six years older than Poe, unusual for the times, when men were expected to be with younger women.

Well known around town as a clairvoyant, Whitman holds weekly seances.

She studies mesmerism and healing, and claims she can cure headaches with her hands.

She wore what was considered pagan dress, you know, in this Victorian time.

She liked to wear a lot of scarves and shawls.

They would fall off as she walked down the sidewalk.

It was the joke that her friends had to walk behind her and pick up her scarves and her veils

that she was always dropping. She wasn't the most conventional person, shall we say.

SHE SIGHS

Suddenly a chill wind leapt through its woven harmonies

All its silver chords were snapt like a wind-harp's by the breeze.

Graves closed round my path of life

The beautiful had fled

Pale shadows wandered by my side

And whispered of the dead.

She was using ether and they said a faint odour of ether

would waft behind her as she went down the street with her scarves and veils.

But this wasn't unheard of at that time.

Ether was considered to have medicinal value.

She wore a little coffin around her neck.

I don't know if she had that as a memento mori,

because she felt as though she herself had only a short period of time to live.

She had a heart condition - at least she believed it - and so she was always kind of reminding herself of

the shortness of life, and I think the coffin fit that.

Poe courts Whitman here at the Athenaeum library,

an acceptable public place to meet for this rather unconventional couple.

From the very start, this relationship is characterised by conflicting hopes and motives.

Poe is looking for a substitute mother, someone who can tether him

and look after him, and Whitman is involved in a mad romantic adventure with a charismatic younger man.

The magic of a lovely form in woman

The necromancy of female gracefulness

Was always a power which I had found it impossible to resist

But here was grace personified, incarnate

The beau ideal of my wildest and most enthusiastic visions

I resolved in my mind a thousand schemes

By which I might obtain the elder lady.

Poe came to Providence five or six times to visit her,

and each time he came he urged her and urged her very strongly to marry him.

He wouldn't accept no for an answer, which she'd already told him after the first time.

And the second thing he would do quite often

is to appear at her house after drinking, which was the one thing,

that she said she could not marry him if he kept drinking.

And I have read that she thought that sleeping with him would kill her.

Had I youth

And health and beauty

I would live for you and die with you

Now, were I to allow myself to love you

I could only enjoy a bright, brief hour of rapture

And then die.

She was afraid that because of her heart condition

that having normal sexual relations would probably do her in.

And he said, "Don't worry, I won't make demands on you."

At your feet, if you so willed it, I would cast from me forever

All merely human desire

And clothe myself in the glory of a pure calm and unexacting affection

I would comfort you, sooth you, tranquilise you, my love.

The courtship went on for three months, and it seems longer than that because it was so dramatic.

There were scenes. There was much weeping and begging

and misunderstandings and some drunkenness.

But he somehow, after all that,

managed to convince her to accept a conditional engagement,

and she said, "All right, if you will stop drinking

"and if my mother will approve of it, I will marry you."

So how they became engaged was that he kind of wore her down, I think.

But Whitman's mother doesn't approve.

She is aware of Poe's reputation as a drunken philanderer.

She forces her daughter and Poe to sign a contract.

If they marry, Whitman will be cut off from the family estate for good.

She said she would rather see her daughter dead than married to Poe, and she said it in front of Poe.

He called her the old devil, by the way.

If only he hadn't wanted to marry her they would have been very good friends, I think.

She said he had given charm to her lonely existence.

I knew from the first that our engagement was a most imprudent one.

I clearly foresaw all the perils and penalties

to which it would expose us.

The union was prevented by circumstances over which I had no control!

Whitman loves Poe, but the threat of being cut off

is compounded by the fact that he won't stop drinking, despite her ultimatum.

Reluctantly, she breaks off the engagement and ends their relationship.

Poe, meanwhile, is distraught.

His sense of loss is wildly disproportionate.

He barely knows this woman, and this is a theme that comes up again and again in his correspondence.

He attempts suicide, he gets incredibly depressed, and it's always to do with the loss of a woman.

After Whitman's rejection, Poe tumbles into a pit of despair from which he never recovers.

I was but a child groping, benighted.

How had I deserved to be so cursed with the removal of my beloved?

I saw, I felt, I knew that I was deeply, madly, irrevocably in love,

but, ere long,

the heaven of this pure affection became darkened, and gloom,

and horror, and grief, swept over it in clouds.

Throughout his life, what Poe sought from women was unconditional love,

acceptance and recognition, but they always slipped from his grasp.

Sarah Helen, the mother figure he hoped would save him.

Frances, the unobtainable icon he pined for.

Virginia, the pure maiden he adored.

All these women embody the single most inspiring and absent influence

on Poe's life, the woman who died at the same age

and of the same disease as his wife Virginia,

the woman who represents all his archetypes in one - his mother, Eliza Poe.

To understand how deeply the loss of his mother affected Poe,

I'm going right back to the beginning, nearly 40 years, to his infancy.

It's 1811. Poe is two years old and living in Richmond

with his mother, Eliza, his brother, Henry, and his sister, Rosalie.

His mother is a 24-year-old actress.

She's successful and popular, but acting is still seen as an unsavoury profession.

It's regarded as just one step away from prostitution.

Indeed, la, without an oath, I'll make an end on't...

At this time, not even performing Shakespeare is acceptable.

Young men will do't, if they come to't;

By cock, they are to blame.

Eliza has never known anything else except acting,

and stands firm against the slurs of treading the boards.

She becomes a leading actress, so much in demand

that during her short life she plays over 200 different roles.

This is the last place standing in Richmond, Virginia, where Eliza is known to have performed.

Once a theatre, it's now a masons' Lodge.

To please has been my never ceasing aim,

and to effect this end,

to me you find what various character has been assigned.

A miss just in her teens, a rigid nurse.

A boy to please old maids. O lud! 'Tis worse!

Sometimes I have appeared a ghost, 'tis true.

But yet I'm flesh and blood as well as you.

The first imprinting of a female figure in Poe's mind is his mother.

He must have perceived her as a kind of fairy-like figure

on stage surrounded by bright lights, this wonderful vision.

Eliza was described as being very beautiful and charming,

and one reviewer in Norfolk, Virginia, said she was the handsomest women he'd ever seen.

Eliza was born in England and when she came to the States

she was performing in cities where acting had only been legal for a few years.

Edgar is born into a moralistic society that shuns him for most of his early life.

He doesn't just have one parent who's on the stage, but two.

His father, David Poe, is also an actor, but unlike Edgar's mother, not a very good one.

Poe's father has a reputation for being an actor

who erupts at bad reviews, threatening critics with violence.

He's touchy and perverse. Time and again he bites the hand that feeds him.

He's known to have just completely forgotten his lines on stage.

He suffered from a paralysing case of stage fright.

He was so bad he got hissed off the stage.

he got booed so badly he threatened the audience from the stage.

It's partly because he considers himself too good to be an actor, and partly because he drinks.

David Poe disappears for good not long after baby Edgar is born.

And Eliza is left to raise her young children on her own.

On my word, tis the father's son.

I'll swear 'tis a very pretty boy.

She manages to look after the infants and continues to work.

I saw him run after a gilded butterfly, and when he caught it...

But in Edgar's second year, she catches the killer disease TB.

She was continuing to act until within a few months of her death.

But then she was unable to perform any more, to bring in money to support her family.

But because she was such a beloved actress, local families started volunteering their time.

Society ladies, even, who wouldn't be caught dead associating with an actress, started visiting her,

bringing her meals, caring for her.

It was said to be quite the fashion of the day for society ladies to care for Mrs Poe.

SHE COUGHS

Knowing that her death is imminent, Eliza cuts off a lock of her hair

as a keepsake for little Edgar.

She dies in December 1811.

After her burial, Edgar is separated from his siblings

and fostered by the wealthy John and Frances Allan.

Frances Allan is one of the society ladies who had cared for Eliza Poe in her last days.

Edgar grows to love his foster mother,

but John Allan never officially adopts him, insisting that he keep the name Poe.

Poe sort of had a chip on his shoulder.

Other kids looked down upon him,

they mocked him because he was an orphan and because he was the son of an actress,

which was not much better than being the son of a prostitute. So Poe had to work extra hard.

He went all out to prove that he was better than everyone around him.

When there was a big competition, he was 15 years old, and the students in his academy

set out to see who could swim the farthest in the James River.

He outlasted them all, he went six miles against the tidal currents.

So Poe always wanted to place himself at the top of the class,

do best in his studies, be the best athlete.

He represented his academy in boxing and track, but he also developed a bit of a temper and a hostility

to people who were looking down upon him,

and there are descriptions of him getting into fights with other children.

But as an adult, he sort of defiantly said that "no earl was ever more proud of his earldom

-"than I was to be the son of an actress." And he attributed his talents to her.

To my mother, because I feel that, in the heavens above, the angels,

whispering to one another, can find, among their burning terms of love,

none so devotional as that of Mother.

All his adult life, wherever Poe goes,

to each new town or city, the first thing he does is visit the library.

He's searching for any articles or reviews that mention his mother.

One of the theories about Poe's recurring motif

of the beautiful young woman dying,

is that his mother died so early in his life that he never really understood that she was dead,

that he never got past that death. That he always had that feeling that she would come back to him.

Poe writes quite a lot about reanimation and the idea of reanimation.

And I think that perhaps on some level it is because he saw his mother die so often on stage.

She was always playing Juliet and Ophelia,

and to a child who is not even three years old,

the idea that she can be dead and then she will come back again

and then she can die again, it must have made it very difficult

to understand that she was never coming back.

His mother is the most powerful inspiration possible for Poe. It's the inciting incident,

the death he fears, after which all great stories can start.

But nothing in Poe stays dead for long. He yearns for his mother to haunt him.

Throughout his life, Poe searches for women to fill the void his mother left,

and in his work he reanimates elements of the mother he never knew,

bringing her back from the dead again and again.

She who had been dead once again stirred,

and, save that the eyelids were yet pressed heavily together,

and that the bandages and draperies of the grave

still imparted their charnel character to the figure,

I might have dreamed that she had indeed shaken off, utterly,

the fetters of death.

I was answered by a voice from within the tomb!

By a cry, at first muffled and broken,

like the sobbing of a child,

and then swiftly rising into one long, loud, and continuous scream,

utterly anomalous and inhuman.

Many people were orphaned at a young age in the 19th century.

What happened to Poe is not unique.

What is unique is how Poe channelled his experience.

The death of a beautiful woman was his greatest fear

and one he knew was shared by a lot of people at the time.

And if you're writing about the things that haunt you,

then those are the things that are going to be genuinely haunting to a reader.

Poe was terrified of losing the women close to him.

It was a cataclysmic grief he lived through time and time again,

but his artistry and skill is in writing about those terrors

so resonantly that we still feel them when we read his work today.

And then, then all is mystery and terror,

and a tale which should not be told. Disease.

A fatal disease, fell like the simoon upon her frame,

and even while I gazed upon her the spirit of change swept over her,

pervading her mind, her habits and her character,

and, in a manner the most subtle and terrible,

disturbing even the identity of her person!

Alas!

The destroyer came and went, and the victim...

Where was she? I knew her not.

Or knew her no longer as Berenice!

My love, she sleeps

Oh, may her sleep, as it is lasting, so be deep

Soft may the worms about her creep

Some tomb from out whose sounding door

She ne'er shall force an echo more,

Thrilling to think, poor child of sin

It was the dead who groaned within.

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