Edgar Allan Poe at the Morgan Library and Museum

[The Wall Street Journal, 3 october 2013] 

Show spotlights author's work as a poet, fiction writer, critic

Julia M. Klein

The Morgan Library & Museum Oct. 4, 2013, through Jan. 26, 2014

New York

George Bernard Shaw, often the most acerbic of critics, swooned over him. "Poe constantly and inevitably produced magic where his greatest contemporaries produced only beauty," Shaw wrote in 1909, the centenary of the writer's birth.

By contrast, a less impressed T.S. Eliot chided Poe for his "carelessness and unscrupulousness in the use of words," though he acknowledged Poe's importance to French poets such as Baudelaire and Mallarmé. In 1875, Walt Whitman was the only major American literary figure who deigned to show up at Poe's reburial and monument dedication in Baltimore. Whitman later wrote that he detected "a demoniac undertone behind every page," but nevertheless appreciated "Poe's genius."

These assessments are part of a Morgan Library & Museum exhibition, "Edgar Allan Poe: Terror of the Soul," that includes Poe daguerreotypes and other images; manuscripts, letters and first editions, and even a fragment of Poe's original coffin.

The material is drawn primarily from the holdings of the Morgan, the New York Public Library's Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, and Susan Jaffe Tane, whom co-curator Declan Kiely, head of the Morgan's department of literary and historical manuscripts, describes as the world's foremost private Poe collector.

Among the rarities on view are a fire-singed manuscript of "The Bells," a Poe letter to a journalist containing a revised stanza of "The Raven," and three of the 12 existing copies of the teenage Poe's pseudonymously self-published book, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827).

With more than 100 artifacts, the show spotlights the breadth of Poe's contributions as a poet, short-story writer and literary critic. It also illustrates his influence on several generations of writers, including Charles Dickens, Robert Louis Stevenson, Oscar Wilde, Vladimir Nabokov and Stephen King. The displays include Nabokov's lecture notes about Stevenson's Poe-inspired characters Dr. Jekyll andMr. Hyde and his 1960 "Lolita" screenplay, which quotes Poe's poem "Annabel Lee."

"Our take is that Poe doesn't do 'spooky,' he does 'existential threat,'" says Mr. Kiely. Rather than write standard-issue Gothic tales, Poe "uses the conventions of the Gothic . . . with great irony," says co-curator Isaac Gewirtz, curator of the Berg Collection. In a catalog essay, Mr. Gewirtz cites as an example Poe's creation of "the voice of a comically exaggerated aristocratic paranoiac" in tales such as "William Wilson."

Today, Poe is best known for such stories as "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado," as well as his late poems. Readers are less aware of his earlier lyric poetry, Mr. Kiely says, as well as his criticism, which was immensely popular in its day. Exhibited for the first time is Poe's unfinished, pseudonymous essay "A Reviewer Reviewed," in which he critiques his own writing.

Poe's work as a critic and editor is at the exhibition's center "because that's what sustained him," Mr. Kiely says. "Poe was somebody who had to live by his pen. He was the first American author to do that with even a modicum of success."

For example, Mr. Kiely says, "he was the first serious critic of Dickens in the U.S.," and managed to guess the outcome of the murder plot in Dickens's serialized "Barnaby Rudge." As a result, Dickens eliminated the clues Poe had identified when he published it in book form. The two writers met in Philadelphia in 1842, the year Poe went bankrupt, and a letter from Dickens to Poe is in the exhibition.

Poe was a "lively, engaging, magnetic person," Mr. Kiely says, as the show's photographs suggest. Dogged by tragedy, he lost his mother, his stepmother and his wife, Virginia, all to tuberculosis. He gambled and drank, was probably bipolar, and had what Mr. Kiely calls "difficulty with authority figures." He died in 1849 in Baltimore, at 40, under mysterious circumstances.

In the catalog, Ms. Tane tells of starting her collection in 1987 with a first edition of "The Raven and Other Poems" (1845), which "sat for a while by itself on a very empty bookshelf." Her prize acquisition, purchased at auction in 1991 for $143,000, was a copy of "Tamerlane and Other Poems." Only about 50 were printed, Mr. Kiely says, and most have disappeared, so the book is now considered the most valuable first edition in American literature.

In 2009, a "Tamerlane" sold at auction for $662,500. ("And mine is in better condition!" Ms. Tane exults in her catalog essay.) A copy in good condition today could fetch close to $1 million, Mr. Kiely says.

Two of the three copies of "Tamerlane" in the Morgan's Poe exhibition are from the Berg Collection. One of those surfaced in "absolutely immaculate condition," Mr. Kiely says, after publication of a 1925 Saturday Evening Post article titled "Is there a 'Tamerlane' in Your Attic?'" A woman named Ada S. Dodd discovered that there was.

Mr. Kiely says that among his favorite objects in the show is a "just perfect" 1843 letter Poe wrote to a farmer and aspiring poet, A.M. Ide, advising him to "Be bold—read much—publish little—keep aloof from the little wits and fear nothing."

"Of course," Mr. Kiely notes, "Poe was publishing all over the place just to stay afloat."

Ms. Klein is a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia.