Suffering and Solace: Edgar Allan Poe’s Catholic Imagination
In his “Philosophy of Composition,” an essay written about the process of writing “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe famously claims that “the death . . . of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world.” He wrote these words in 1846, a year before his young wife, Virginia, died of tuberculosis and during the time she was struggling with her illness. Her symptoms first appeared four years earlier in 1842: Virginia began bleeding from her mouth while playing on the piano. Even though Poe was hopeful this first sign of disease was merely “a rupture of a blood-vessel,” his wife’s health declined rapidly. Blood-filled coughing, tiredness, swelling, weight loss, and fever plagued her for years. Poe related to a friend that fits of bleeding, like the one that first revealed Virginia’s disease, recurred often. The symptoms increased in frequency—and the terror they caused Poe—until the twenty-four-year-old woman died six years following that first bleeding episode.
Poe described experiencing his wife’s illness and death as “the greatest [evil] which can befall a man.” He wrote of the emotional upheaval he felt while witnessing his wife’s illness and demise: “Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly and 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.”[1] Poe was no stranger to the horrors of tuberculosis. His mother had died of the same disease when she was twenty-four years old and Poe only three, leaving him orphaned.[2] Likewise, his adoptive mother, Frances Allan, died when Poe was thirteen, again also of tuberculosis.
Even casual readers of Poe’s writings are likely to know that the writer struggled (rightly so) with how to handle grief and suffering, especially regarding the women he loved and who loved him. For Catholic readers of his work specifically, it may be of interest to consider that in 1846—the same year Poe uttered his famous quote about the death of a beautiful woman—Poe’s family moved to a small cottage within walking distance of St. John’s College, which we know today as Fordham University. According to Poe biographer, Arthur Hobson Quinn, “Poe found intellectual and spiritual companionship during his life at Fordham.”[3] He befriended the Jesuits on campus, including Fr. Edward Doucet, who became the college’s eighth president. In a history of Fordham, Raymond A. Schroth reveals that Poe would often imbibe “a glass of wine with the fathers” to “calm his nerves.”[4] Poe said of the Jesuits that they were “highly cultivated gentlemen and scholars.” “They smoked and drank and played cards,” he mused, “and never said a word about religion.”[5]
Despite this claim that they never talked about religion, scholars ought not dismiss that Poe found solace among the Jesuits as he slowly watched his wife die. I am not suggesting here that Poe considered conversion to the Catholic faith; rather, his seeking out of the faith during a period in the United States when anti-Catholic sentiment ruled the day matters when interpreting his writing. It bears mention here as well that Poe grew up in Baltimore, the site of the nation’s first diocese (1789) and first archdiocese (1808). If there were a city considered to be a haven for nineteenth-century US Catholics, Baltimore in the nineteenth century is probably the closest one could come to such identification. Thus, Poe’s time with the Jesuits was likely not the first time he encountered the Catholic faith: he would have recognized its particularities. His attraction to the faith, and those practicing it, set him apart from other thinkers and writers of his day.[6]
