ellauri146.html on line 648: But it is dangerous to attempt to separate any historical figure from his setting. No individual can ever be understood fully until the subtle influences of his formal education, his reading, his associates, and his time and country (with his heredity) are traced and synthesized. Too much has been said, perhaps, about Poe’s “detachment” from his environment and too little about his background—his heritage from Europe and the influences of his early life in Virginia. Elizabeth Arnold, Poe’s mother, was born in England in 1787 and was brought to this country when she was a girl of nine. “In speaking of my mother,” Poe wrote years later to Beverley Tucker of Virginia, “you have touched a string to which my heart fully responds.” Judging from his spirited defense of Elizabeth Poe, it appears that Poe never became unmindful of his immediate English origins on the maternal side.
ellauri146.html on line 650: Poe’s ancestry on his father’s side was Scotch-Irish and has been traced through County Cavon to Ayrshire, Scotland. The fact that Poe’s Presbyterian Scottish ancestors dwelled for a time in the north of Ireland has caused even so good a scholar as Arthur Hobson Quinn to engage in surprising speculation about an “Irish strain” in Poe and about a “Celtic” trait of perverseness which he had “discovered” in the Poe family.
ellauri146.html on line 652: In evaluating Poe’s ethnic heritage it is enough to say that his forbears were English and Scottish and, quite likely, predominantly Anglo-Saxon, the strain which, as Poe himself wrote, animated the American heart.
ellauri146.html on line 658: Poe’s foster father, John Allan, was himself born and bred in Irvine, Ayrshire, and was a member of the class of English and Scottish merchants of Richmond, Virginia-to which city he had emigrated as a youth around 1795. Scottish merchants represented a very considerable element in the commercial life of Richmond in those years, and many of them, to a considerable extent, maintained themselves aloof from the life of the city. The Scottish influences of Allan and his associates and friends could not have been lost upon Poe.
ellauri146.html on line 662: “I am a Virginian,” declared Poe; and “the distinguishing features of Virginian character at present-features of a marked nature—not elsewhere to be met with in America-and evidently akin to that chivalry which denoted the Cavalier—can be in no manner so well accounted for as by considering them the debris of a devoted loyalty.” Poe’s Virginia background may or may not have rendered him typically American, but it seems reasonable to think that it fostered in him a Virginian Anglo-American attitude as opposed to an Anglophobic Americanism so common at that time in New England.
ellauri146.html on line 672: Though fully a third of Poe’s critical reviews deal with American authors, almost two-thirds of the reviews treat British or European books. Only about half of Poe’s tales have reference to contemporary matters, and only a small number of these reflect the American scene. Three times as many of the tales have designated European settings as have American settings.
ellauri146.html on line 676: Poe’s first great champion and biographer was the Englishman Ingram. So strong was Poe’s affinity with the life of Europe that legend has carried him there in spite of reality, and it is with some ineffectuality that his biographers explain that he at no time visited Ireland, Greece, France or Russia.
ellauri146.html on line 678: As a critic, Poe often expressed national sentiments. He urged Americans to build their own literature, to avoid a blind adulation of, or slavish imitation of, Europeans simply because they were Europeans. But at the same time, Poe warned against literary chauvanism, which tended to overpraise every dull American writer simply because he happened to be American. Poe’s detached and objective attitude could become, and often did become, highly critical of American society and America
ellauri146.html on line 690: Indeed, Poe seems much more the Southerner than the Yankee American, and it is not hard to guess which path he would have chosen had he lived into the 1860’s. One may be very sure that Edgar Poe, though born, almost by accident, in Boston, would have proved one of the Confederacy’s most eloquent and committed partisans. In reviewing the various factors which we may believe shaped Poe’s youthful mind, we would expect to find in Poe, and in re-examining his opinions we do find, a cosmopolitan rather than a parochial outlook. And yet, at the same time, we know Poe was serious when he proclaimed, “I am a Virginian!” We may be justified in looking upon the general influences of his formative years as contributing factors in the development of strong inclinations to Europe, Britain and the American South, rather than to the American Union.
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