Questions to Ask Edgar Allan Poe
For a student writing an imagined interview with Poe for an English class, a book club that wants to put one author in the chair, or a reader working through the tales alone. Every question starts from something he wrote or something that happened to him, so a reply can be checked against the poems, the tales, the essays and the letters. They run in the order such a conversation would: his early years, the poems, the tales, the magazine trade and what it paid, the household he kept with Virginia and her mother, and the unexplained last days in Baltimore.
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The questions
Each question, and why to ask it
Beginnings
You were not yet three when your mother, an actress, died in Richmond. What do you actually remember of her, and what were you only told?
Why ask it
Very little is the honest reply, which is why the second half matters. Eliza Poe had been on the stage since she was a girl, and by the usual account she left him a miniature of herself and a watercolor of Boston Harbor inscribed to him, so build the answer from those two objects and not from a memory a toddler could not have kept.
John Allan raised you and never adopted you. What did you expect from him, and when did you stop expecting it?
Why ask it
Their letters survive and swing between pleading and fury, nearly always over money. Allan died in 1834 and left him out of the will, so fix the date of your interview before you write this one: a Poe of 1827 still hopes, and a Poe after 1834 has nothing left to hope for.
You boarded at a school outside London as a boy. How much of that place went into "William Wilson"?
Why ask it
The Allans lived in Britain from 1815 to 1820, and the headmaster of his school at Stoke Newington, a Reverend Bransby, turns up in the tale under his own name. Read the opening pages on the old schoolhouse, then have him say which rooms he remembered and which he built.
You left the University of Virginia after a single year, owing money at cards. Whose fault was that?
Why ask it
He said Allan had sent him with too little to cover his fees and board, and Allan said the gambling was the whole story. The size of the debt is reported differently from one biography to the next, so give his version, label it as his, and let the interviewer push back once.
In 1827 you joined the army as Edgar A. Perry and printed your first book as "a Bostonian." Why hide your name twice in one year?
Why ask it
"Tamerlane and Other Poems" came out in Boston with no author's name within weeks of his enlisting under a false one. A full answer has to separate the runaway avoiding a guardian and his creditors from the young poet who wanted the verse judged without him, and it can admit to being both.
You got yourself thrown out of West Point on purpose. What did you believe you were choosing instead?
Why ask it
Early in 1831 he stopped turning up for drill, class and chapel until a court-martial dismissed him. The detail worth using is that his fellow cadets had paid in advance for his next book of poems, so one decision ended a career and funded a volume.
Sketches of your life printed while you were alive have you fighting for the Greeks and stranded in St. Petersburg. Why improve on a life that was already strange?
Why ask it
Army records put him in an American uniform during the years those adventures supposedly happened. It is a question about self-invention, and it is a useful warning to place early: your imagined Poe is allowed to embroider, as long as your notes say where he does.
Poems
In "The Philosophy of Composition" you claim "The Raven" was worked out step by step, like a problem in mathematics. Was it?
Why ask it
The essay came out in 1846, a year after the poem, and readers have never agreed on whether it is an honest account, a tidying-up after the fact or a joke told with a straight face. Let him defend it in full first. Then ask where the early drafts went.
You wrote that a parrot came to mind before a raven did. What would the parrot have ruined?
Why ask it
The parrot is in his own essay, as the first creature he thought of that could repeat a word without understanding it. His reply is really about tone: the same refrain from a parrot is a joke, and from a bird of ill omen it is a sentence passed. Younger classes can answer this one with no background at all.
Why "Nevermore"? Did you pick it for the sound or for the grief?
Why ask it
In print he gave the sound: a one-word refrain built on a long o and an r. Press him on whether anyone chooses a word about permanent loss for its vowels alone, given that Virginia had been ill for three years when the poem appeared.
You had already buried a Lenore in a poem of her own two years before "The Raven." Why did you bring the name back?
Why ask it
"Lenore" was printed in 1843 and grew out of an 1831 funeral poem called "A Paean," so the mourned young woman is older than Virginia's illness even if the name is not. After his reply, ask why the speaker in "The Raven" keeps questioning a bird he knows has only one word. The essay's phrase for it is "the human thirst for self-torture."
You called the death of a beautiful woman the most poetical topic in the world. Who were you thinking of?
Why ask it
By 1846, when he wrote that, he had lost his mother, his foster mother Frances Allan and Jane Stanard, the friend's mother he linked to "To Helen," and his wife was dying. A sharper follow-up is why the mourning man always gets the poem while the woman gets no lines of her own.
You said a long poem does not exist. Then what is "Paradise Lost"?
Why ask it
His own reply, in "The Poetic Principle," is that an epic is a run of short poems with flat stretches between them. Anyone in the room who loves a long poem can argue the other side, so the question turns into a class debate without any help.
You held that a poem exists for beauty and called teaching through verse a heresy. Does none of your own poetry carry a moral?
Why ask it
"The heresy of The Didactic" is his phrase, aimed largely at the New England poets. Test him with "The Haunted Palace" or "The Conqueror Worm," both of which read a good deal like allegories with a point, and see whether he wriggles.
"The Bells" is nearly all sound. Did you want it to mean anything beyond the ringing?
Why ask it
Have somebody read a stanza aloud before he answers, because the case for the poem is in the ear. Under the noise there is a plain arc, from sleigh bells and wedding bells to alarm bells and a funeral toll, and that is his best defense against the charge of mere jingling.
"Annabel Lee" reached print only after you were dead. Who was she?
Why ask it
Most readers say Virginia, and more than one woman who knew him later claimed the poem for herself. An imagined Poe who declines to name anyone may be the most faithful version, since the poem is about a love that outlasts a death and not about a particular address.
You wrote "Alone" at twenty, in a friend's album, and never put it in a book. Why keep that one back?
Why ask it
The poem, about not seeing as others saw since childhood, stayed unpublished until 1875. It is the nearest thing to a self-portrait in his verse, so the interesting part is that he was the one who left it out.
James Russell Lowell called you three-fifths genius and two-fifths sheer fudge. Which of your poems are the fudge?
Why ask it
The line is from Lowell's "A Fable for Critics" of 1848, written by a man who had printed his work and praised him. Naming his own weakest poems is harder for him than naming his best, and it is fair play, because he spent a career doing it to everyone else.
In the preface to your 1845 poems you wrote that poetry had been a passion with you and not a purpose. What kept it from being the purpose?
Why ask it
The same preface blames events he could not control for keeping him from "the field of my choice." Money is the follow-up he will not enjoy: tales, reviews and editing paid, however badly, and verse paid less. Use it as the hinge when your interview turns from the poems to the prose.
Tales
The killers in "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat" insist they are sane and then confess everything. Why hand them the telling?
Why ask it
Both tales date from 1843, and both are told by men explaining how calm and careful they were. The narrator of "The Black Cat" says he is writing on the night before his execution, while the one in "The Tell-Tale Heart" never says who is listening. Have Poe name that listener (a jailer, a doctor, a court), because each choice makes a different story.
Why does Montresor never say what Fortunato did to him?
Why ask it
"The Cask of Amontillado" opens on a thousand injuries and one insult and describes none of them. Ask whether he left the offense out to keep the tale tight, or so a reader could wonder if there was ever an offense at all, and note that Montresor is telling it fifty years later.
Is Madeline Usher's return a haunting, or the last stage of her brother's illness? Did you ever decide?
Why ask it
The tale supplies evidence for both: the visitor sees her too, yet he has spent weeks shut in that house reading aloud to a frightened man during a storm. Whichever reading your Poe picks, he owes an account of the evidence on the other side, and that account is an essay paragraph already written.
Prince Prospero bolts the abbey gates and the Red Death walks in anyway. Is that a tale about plague, or about people who think wealth exempts them?
Why ask it
"The Masque of the Red Death" was printed in 1842, a decade after cholera had gone through American cities and a few months after Virginia first fell ill. He attacked allegory in his criticism, so the fun is in watching him deny that this is one.
The prisoner in "The Pit and the Pendulum" is pulled back from the edge in the last lines. Almost nobody else in your tales gets out. Why did he?
Why ask it
The tale was printed late in 1842, and the hand that catches him belongs to General Lasalle, a real general of Napoleon's, which dates the scene to the French war in Spain. Ask whether the rescue is mercy or only the quickest way to stop. A class that has read "The Cask of Amontillado" can then argue over why Fortunato got no such arm.
Reviewing Hawthorne, you said every word of a tale should serve one effect chosen in advance. Which of your own tales keeps that rule best?
Why ask it
The 1842 review of "Twice-Told Tales" is the plainest statement of his method. In letters he more than once put "Ligeia" first, which surprises readers expecting "Usher," so whichever tale he names, pick one odd detail in it and make him say what it does for the effect.
You defended "Berenice" to your editor as the kind of tale magazines need, and admitted it went too far. Did you write horror for the market or for yourself?
Why ask it
His 1835 letter to Thomas White of the Southern Literary Messenger is the nearest thing to a business plan he left, arguing that the tales readers remember are the extreme ones. Set it beside the later preface where he says his terror "is not of Germany, but of the soul," and make him choose.
People are walled up or buried alive in tale after tale of yours. What were you afraid of?
Why ask it
Count them before the interview: "The Premature Burial," "Usher," "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado." Resist turning the reply into a diagnosis. Live burial was a common dread of the period, and he may answer as an editor who knew what readers could not stop thinking about.
You invented C. Auguste Dupin before anyone spoke of detective stories. Where did he come from?
Why ask it
"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" appeared in 1841, and his own name for the kind was the tale of ratiocination. Two follow-ups work well: why set it in Paris, a city he never saw, and why the friend who narrates has to be slower than Dupin.
In "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt" you set Dupin on a real New York death, working only from newspapers. Did you solve it?
Why ask it
The real victim was Mary Rogers, found in the Hudson in 1841, and the case was never closed. He revised the story and added footnotes when it was collected in 1845, so compare the two versions and ask what the changes concede. It is the one place where Dupin's method was tried on facts.
You dared magazine readers to send a cipher you could not break, then built "The Gold-Bug" around one. What did code-breaking and story-writing have in common for you?
Why ask it
The challenge ran in a Philadelphia weekly, and "The Gold-Bug" won a hundred-dollar newspaper prize in 1843. Expect an answer about working backward from the solution, which is how he said he plotted. The cipher in the story is a simple substitution, and solving it yourself first is good preparation.
You once had New York believing a balloon had crossed the Atlantic in three days. What separates a hoax from a tale?
Why ask it
"The Balloon-Hoax" ran in the New York Sun in 1844 dressed as news. How many readers were taken in is known mostly from his own boasting, so the interviewer is free to doubt the crowd. Since some readers take even his essay on "The Raven" for a hoax, how he draws the line tells your audience how far to trust everything else he says in the interview.
"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" is your only finished novel, and it stops instead of ending. What is the white figure in the last lines?
Why ask it
No reading of that shrouded shape has ever won out, and he is on record dismissing the book in a later letter. One reply in character is that he lost patience with length itself, which would fit a man who thought a story should be read at one sitting.
Magazines and money
They called you the tomahawk man for your reviews. What did a book have to do to earn the hatchet?
Why ask it
At the Southern Literary Messenger from 1835 he made his name by taking fashionable novels apart in public, most famously a heavily promoted one called "Norman Leslie." Circulation grew while he was there, though the figures he gave for it are disputed, so quote them as his claim. Then ask what the enemies he made cost him ten years on.
You accused Longfellow of plagiarism in print for months. Did you believe it, or did you need the fight?
Why ask it
The quarrel of 1845 ran through the New York papers while Longfellow stayed silent, and after Poe's death Longfellow wrote of him with charity. A hard follow-up is whether he would withdraw the charge now. Longfellow outsold him many times over, and it is fair to ask how much of the quarrel was about that.
The book of yours that did best while you lived was a school text on seashells. How do you feel about that?
Why ask it
"The Conchologist's First Book" of 1839 carried his name, drew heavily on another man's work and is commonly said to be his only book to reach a second edition in his lifetime. It is comic relief with a sting in it: the man who charged Longfellow with plagiarism was later charged with it himself over this book, so put the two questions side by side.
In Boston you were asked for a new poem, read the long and early "Al Aaraaf" instead, then boasted you had fooled the audience. Why pick a fight with the city where you were born?
Why ask it
The reading was at the Boston Lyceum in October 1845, and afterward he mocked the local literary set as Frogpondians. Remind him that his first book was signed "a Bostonian," and see whether the answer is about poetry or about never having been let in.
"The Raven" was reprinted across the country within weeks. What did it pay you, and what did the fame buy?
Why ask it
Nine dollars is the figure most often repeated for the poem, and other papers could reprint it without paying him anything, but check the sum in a biography before you put it in his mouth. Fame did bring lecture invitations and a place in the New York salons, so have him weigh those against the rent.
American publishers could reprint British novels without paying their authors. What did that do to someone trying to live by writing here?
Why ask it
There was no international copyright in his lifetime, and he argued in print for one. He is often described as among the first American writers to attempt a living from the pen alone, so let him do the arithmetic aloud: why pay for an American manuscript when Dickens costs nothing?
For ten years you planned a magazine of your own, first The Penn and then The Stylus. What would it have printed that nobody else would?
Why ask it
He wrote prospectuses for it and lectured to raise subscribers, and his last trip south in 1849 was partly for that purpose. No issue ever appeared. The answer gives you his idea of honest criticism, and asking why it never launched brings the money in: he had edited for salaries while the owners kept the profits.
You asked for fifty thousand copies of "Eureka" and your publisher printed five hundred. Who misjudged the book?
Why ask it
The request comes from his publisher's later recollection, and the gap is the whole question. "Eureka," his 1848 prose poem on the origin and end of the universe, was the work he valued most at the close of his life. Hold him to what he argued in it, not to the later science admirers have read back into it.
Virginia and home
You married your cousin Virginia Clemm when she was thirteen and you were twenty-seven. What do you say to readers who cannot get past that?
Why ask it
The marriage bond of 1836 gave her age as twenty-one, so someone at the time thought the truth needed covering. Do not let your Poe wave it away as custom, and do not claim to know more than the record holds: biographers disagree about what kind of marriage it was, and your write-up should say so.
Your aunt Maria Clemm kept the household running for years. What did she do that the story of the poet leaves out?
Why ask it
He called her Muddy and addressed the sonnet "To My Mother" to her. Accounts from visitors have her carrying manuscripts to editors and asking for loans on his behalf, so this is where the interview can give a paragraph to someone other than him.
Virginia first coughed blood in January 1842 and lived five more years. What did that long swing between hope and relapse do to the work?
Why ask it
His own account is in an 1848 letter, where he ties his worst drinking to the cycle of her recoveries and collapses. Present that as his explanation and not as a medical finding, then lay the dates side by side: "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Raven" and "The Cask of Amontillado" all fall inside those five years.
You wrote a fond magazine piece about a black cat of yours that had taught herself to work a door latch. Three years later came "The Black Cat." What did the household say?
Why ask it
"Instinct vs Reason: A Black Cat" ran unsigned in a Philadelphia weekly in 1840 and is credited to him by later editors. His letters name a family cat, Catterina, and a visitor to the cottage at Fordham described a large tortoiseshell cat lying on the sick Virginia for warmth. It starts as the lightest question about his home and ends in the worst winter of the marriage.
In the winter she was dying, the newspapers printed that your family was in want and asked for help. What was it like to read your poverty in the paper?
Why ask it
The notices ran in December 1846 and donations followed. He answered with a public letter that thanked his friends and bristled at the pity in nearly the same breath, and that mixture of need and pride is the tone to write this answer in.
After Virginia died you were engaged to Sarah Helen Whitman, and later to Elmira Shelton, your sweetheart from Richmond. Were you looking for love or for a home?
Why ask it
The engagement to Whitman, a poet in Providence, was broken off at the end of 1848, and Shelton was by then a widow whom he had courted before he went to university. Ask it kindly. Virginia had been dead less than two years when the first engagement began, and both replies can be true.
Last days
You joined the Sons of Temperance in Richmond in the late summer of 1849, weeks before you died. What had drink cost you by then?
Why ask it
Thomas White's letter of 1835, taking him back at the Messenger only if he stayed sober, survives, and so do letters of his own that admit to sprees and deny he drank steadily. Quote each with its name attached and offer no diagnosis. The opium of the legend has thinner support still: a physician who knew him and disliked him wrote that he never saw a sign of it.
You left Richmond on September 27, 1849, and were found in Baltimore six days later. Where had you been?
Why ask it
Nobody knows, and no reliable record covers those days. He was found on an election day at a tavern being used as a polling place, reportedly in clothes that were not his. The careful way to write this is to have him not know either: inventing an answer is the one thing this exercise should not do.
Which of the explanations for your death do you find most insulting?
Why ask it
Drink, a beating, illness and cooping (being dragged from poll to poll to vote repeatedly) have all been proposed, and the hospital records have not survived to settle it. Asked this way, the question lets you list each theory with what supports it and still stop short of choosing.
Your doctor said you called out the name Reynolds on your last night. Who is Reynolds?
Why ask it
The only source is Dr. John Moran, whose story grew with each retelling, and many biographers doubt the detail. One candidate is Jeremiah Reynolds, a promoter of polar exploration whose writing fed "Pym." Use it as a small lesson in weighing a lone witness who kept changing his account.
Rufus Griswold announced your death by saying few would grieve, then took charge of your works. Did you choose him?
Why ask it
Griswold wrote the obituary signed "Ludwig" and a memoir that painted him as a drunk and a madman, using letters since shown to have been altered. Whether Poe ever named him executor is itself in doubt. Much of the legend people still repeat started with this one man, so ask what Poe would correct first.
You never saw detective fiction fill its own shelves, Baudelaire's French translations or a football team named for your poem. Which would please you most?
Why ask it
Baudelaire spent years putting him into French, with the main volumes appearing in the 1850s, the mystery writers' annual awards are called the Edgars, and Baltimore's team took its name from "The Raven." Save it for last, and consider ending on the contrast with how little any of it paid him while he lived.
Writing an imagined interview with Poe that holds up
Practical guidance for the conversation itself
Before you write his answers
Read one poem, one tale and one essay
Take "The Raven," whichever tale you plan to ask about, and "The Philosophy of Composition." The essay is short, and it is Poe explaining himself in his own manner: exact, confident and a little theatrical. An hour with those three gives you more of his voice than a biography chapter does.
Choose the year of the interview
A Poe of early 1845, newly famous for "The Raven," answers differently from the widower of 1848. He cannot discuss "Annabel Lee" in print, Griswold's memoir or his own death unless you interview him afterward, as a ghost. That is a fair choice for the Last days questions, but state it in your first line and keep to it.
Take eight to twelve questions
A page or two of interview has room for about that many with answers of real length. Pick one or two from each group so the conversation moves through a life, then add extra from the group your assignment is about. If the class has only read "The Tell-Tale Heart," most of your picks should come from Tales, and the questions about tales nobody has opened can wait.
Check the fact inside the question
Every question here rests on a date, a title or an event, and the notes say where a figure is disputed. Before you build an answer on one, confirm it in a full biography or in the collected letters and texts that the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore publishes. Where two books disagree, say so in a line under the answer.
Making the answers sound like him
Let him be proud
Poe rated his own intellect highly and wrote as if the matter were settled. A modest, apologetic Poe is the wrong man. He is likelier to correct the premise of your question than to thank you for it, so let some answers open with an objection.
Three moves for one answer
Start from the position he took in print, such as the claim that "Nevermore" was chosen for its sound. Have the interviewer press once with a fact, here his wife's illness. Then decide whether he gives ground, repeats himself more coldly or changes the subject to meter. Position, pressure and response make a better exchange than one long speech.
Quote little, and mark what you quote
A short phrase of his in quotation marks, with the essay or letter it comes from, carries more weight than a paragraph of imitation. Everything else you write for him is invention, and a line under your title should say that: the answers are imagined and the quoted phrases are his.
Write the dodge
On Virginia's age and on the week in Baltimore, the record gives no confession, and on the drinking it gives a few letters that admit a little and deny the rest. An answer that turns aside, bristles or goes quiet is closer to the evidence than a frank one, and a stage direction such as "he does not answer" is allowed.
Where Poe interviews go wrong
The madman from the legend
The haunted wreck most people picture owes a great deal to Griswold's hostile memoir. The Poe of the record was a working editor who met deadlines, wrote comic pieces and hoaxes as well as horror, and fussed in print over punctuation. If your interview has him raving, you are interviewing the caricature.
Taking the narrators for the author
The man who buries the old man under the floorboards is a character, and so is Montresor. Asking Poe why he did those things gets you nowhere. Ask why he built the speaker that way, and what he wanted the reader to feel when the voice stayed so calm.
Solving the death
It is tempting to end with a revelation about Baltimore. Any single cause you give him is a guess presented as a fact, and the reader who knows the subject will stop trusting the pages before it. List the theories, give each its evidence, and leave the gap open.
Diagnosing him
Labels for his moods or his drinking, applied from this distance, are opinion and should not appear in your interview as findings. Report what he wrote about himself and what named witnesses said, and attribute each one.
For a class, a book club or your own notebook
A graded assignment
Requirements differ from one class to the next, so ask your teacher how many questions are expected, whether the answers must cite the texts and what form the citations take. A short list of what you read, placed after the last answer, usually satisfies the request for sources without breaking up the dialogue.
A book club evening
Give one member the notes ahead of time and have that person answer as Poe while the others ask. Change the person in the chair halfway through. If the club has read a single tale, use only its questions and spend the saved time on the passage in dispute, read aloud.
Two voices on one question
Pairs can split the work: one plays Poe and the other plays Lowell, Griswold or Maria Clemm answering the same question about him. The two replies will not agree, and the disagreement is the part to keep: set side by side, the two answers show that you weighed one source against another.
Reading alone
Write his answer before you look anything up, then check it against the tale or the letter. The distance between your guess and the record is a fair measure of how much of your Poe came from the legend.