tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post2771563602353563785..comments2024-01-26T21:38:25.924-08:00Comments on Duane's PoeTree: Nenad Trajković writesDuanesPoeTreehttp://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.comBlogger2125tag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post-11305346258062989052018-04-12T19:38:34.873-07:002018-04-12T19:38:34.873-07:00When Edgar Allan Poe was 27 he married his 13-year...When Edgar Allan Poe was 27 he married his 13-year-old 1st cousin Virginia Clemm (she claimed to be 21). She was named after a 2-year-old sister who had died 10 days before her own birth. When she was 7 she met Edgar 4 months after his 1st discharge from the army. (He had enlisted as "Edgar A. Perry" and claimed to be 22 though he was actually 18; in 2 years he had attained the highest noncommissioned rank but revealed the truth about his identity in order to get out of his 5-year enlistment and go to the West Point military academy instead. But after 6 months he pleaded not guilty to charges of gross neglect of duty and disobedience of orders for refusing to attend formations, classes, or church -- he knew he would be found guilty and be dismissed. But his court martial allowed him to pursue writing as a full-time career, the 1st American to do so successfully.) His publisher claimed that Poe's "love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty." However, after a decade of marriage, as Virginia's health failed, he began a flirtation with a 34-year-old poet, Frances Sargent Osgood who was at the time estranged from her husband. He temporarily gave up alcohol to curry Osgood's favor, and the 2 wrote poems to each other. They may have had a child together, who died when she was 4 months old. The affair led to a fistfight between the poet and Osgood's brother (which they both claimed to have won), and the relationship ended when the Osgoods reconciled. When Virginia's tuberculosis made her an invalid Edgar claimed, "Each time I felt all the agonies of her death -- and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive -- nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity." She died at 24 in 1847 after 5 years of illness and Poe began drinking again. He died 2 years later, 4 days after being found delirious on a street in Baltimore, Maryland.DuanesPoeTreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.comtag:blogger.com,1999:blog-3407624264627208128.post-46063930075648201222018-04-12T18:33:32.262-07:002018-04-12T18:33:32.262-07:00I asked myself — “Of all melancholy topics, what, ...I asked myself — “Of all melancholy topics, what, according to the universal understanding of mankind, is the most melancholy?” Death — was the obvious reply. “And when,” I said, “is this most melancholy of topics most poetical?” From what I have already explained at some length, the answer, here also, is obvious — “When it most closely allies itself to Beauty: the death, then, of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world — and equally is it beyond doubt that the lips best suited for such topic are those of a bereaved lover.” <br /><br />--Edgar Allan PoeDuanesPoeTreehttps://www.blogger.com/profile/17053093400086634552noreply@blogger.com