According to Robert Morgan, his Fallen Angel: The Life of Edgar Allan Poe focuses “on some aspects of Poe’s work that have been less examined: his poetry of the natural world, his study of aesthetics through landscape gardening, his enduring guilt about women, his sustained obsession about marriage, and his covert speculations and hints about his mother’s ethnicity.” By doing so, Morgan, a Kappa Alpha Professor of English Emeritus at Cornell University, establishes that even with Poe’s odd proclivities, life-threating addictions, and precarious and incessant need to be loved, he will always be “one of the most deeply moral writers in our canon … [who] had courage to confront his demons and transmute them into living art.” By integrating Poe’s work, academic literary theory, and Poe’s personal musings, along with those of family members, friends, and acquaintances, Morgan provides a highly concentrated work that verifies not only how entertaining his stories and poems were, but also how deeply connected they were to his perceptions about love, matrimony, nature, and his own self-induced anxieties.
Morgan speculates that Poe was not unlike many creatives insofar as his anxieties stemmed from the guilt and grief he felt over his natural mother’s death to consumption in 1811. Eliza Arnold Poe, a prolific theater performer, had been abandoned by her husband, David Poe, Jr., while pregnant with Edgar’s sister, Rosalie. Eliza died soon after Rosalie’s birth, thus the two siblings became orphans until two separate wealthy homeowners in Richmond, Virginia took them in. Morgan claims Edgar’s relationship with his natural parents, who were constantly at odds with each other, “longed for the safety of a home, with a woman who loved him and take care of him in a tumultuous world.” In turn, he “would be unusually dependent on the support and affection of sympathetic women,” the first of whom was his foster mother, Fanny Allan.
Alongside John, her cold and distant husband, Fanny was a constant presence in Edgar’s life for decades; however, for unknown reasons, they never officially adopted him, while his sister (whom he visited regularly) would enjoy that luxury soon after moving in. Morgan places much of the blame at the feet of John, who saw Edgar as an unambitious freeloader rather than an eccentric talent. Edgar spent much of his college years attempting to be loved by John, but much of his literary inspiration would derive from his new mother figure, Fanny, as well as his friend’s mother, Jane Stanard (the subject of “To Helen”) and his neighbor, Sarah Elmira Royster (the subject of “Song” after she married another) who became a childhood sweetheart and a quasi-chronicler of Poe’s life.
That same romantic inspiration came later from multiple women in Poe’s short and sublime life. Morgan names a “dozen or so women who had the greatest impact on him.” the central figures being Maria Clemm (“Muddy”) and her daughter, the girl who became his bride at the age of 13, Virginia (“Sissy”). When Morgan writes about Poe’s marriage to Virginia, the inspiration for the writing of both “The Raven” and “Ligeia,” Poe is surprisingly represented as an empath and a naïve innocent suffering through guilt over his relationship with a sickly teenager. Towards the end of the book, when addressing Virginia’s last days, Morgan describes her vulnerability as unnerving for Poe: “Guilt for marrying her so young perhaps for the sexual demands he’d made before or even after her illness, drove him away from their home periodically on binges.” Virgina’s death to consumption in 1847 echoed the death of his mother, thus Poe could not save either of these great loves, a motif that haunted him until his own tragic death two years later. Morgan limns a melancholic man who adored so deeply, it hurt; his affections consumed him to the point of pure artistry, which included not only poems and short stories, but also literary essays, book reviews, and novellas.
Although Fallen Angel is based on how Poe’s obsessions influenced his masterpieces, Morgan’s work is also a well-rounded narrative about an influential figure in literature. Presenting readers with a timeline, Morgan speaks to Poe’s life as a student at West Point (one of the more enlightening chapters in the book is about his meticulousness as a cadet), his times as a journalist and literary magazine editor, his prowess as a speaker and entertainer, and as a celebrity who could not handle the fame that was thrust upon him after the success of “The Raven.” There is so much lore surrounding Poe that to know he lived a very thorough, fleshed out life in the span of his 40 years gives readers an opportunity to know him as a dimensional human rather than a black-and-white daguerreotype or the writer who coined the term “Nevermore.” Fallen Angel is about someone whom others did and did not care about, who had the same issues many of us are having now. While recognizing how unique and gifted Poe was, Morgan also made him relatable. Even if Poe’s genius placed him beyond the norm, we can all connect with his need for love, his pain and sorrow, and his need to express those things through the sonorities of story and lyric that appealed to so many readers and listeners.