Later Years
A Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance
As might be imagined, many of Poes' most popular works present a conflict between remembrance and forgetting. And, in his exploration of the horrific, dark and ghastly, regions of the human imagination, death plays a pivotal part. Many of his characters experience death in life, and Poe imagined that "death might not exist" at all. Poe was always drawn back to the surface of reality--if only for a few moments--before he was plunged into the depths once again.
With tenacity and hard work--often barely surviving--he was able to accomplish in a short time what others wouldn't have been able to accomplish in lifetimes. He not only brought the power of poetry to prose, but he revitalized or recreated the critical essay. Of course, his triumphs reached far beyond the magazine columns, editorial work, and other hack work that he often despised. He listened to the reading public and then managed to offer them just what they wanted. And, he made his stamp on literary history, revolutionizing genres in the process.
Unfortunately, those moments of genius and clarity became fewere and farther between as his days became fogged in a roller-coaster ride of alcholic binges and recoveries.
Devastating Silence
Poe's life was ended, but death is as controversial as his life. There's no real certainty as to the cause of his death, though many factors probably contributed: alcohol abuse, ill health and mental distress to name just a few. What is certain is that Poe left behind a substantial volume of works, even in his early death. He also left his Muddy, a woman who had become like a mother to him. And, she was in fact his mother-in-law and aunt. After Poe's death, Muddy wrote: "Oh memory, memory, how faithful it still is." It's a mournfully never-ending remembrance.
Silverman captures all of the devastating details of Poe's life and his death, without sinking into sentimentality or giving way to the almost soap-operish curiosity. So much of Poe's life was odd, and how can we really understand any life fully, what the motivations might have prompted his sometimes haphazard actions.
Here Silverman does a good job of picking up the pieces of Poe's life, and then putting a human face and a voice to the strange antics of his legend.
