Poe on religion.

[Quoth-the-Raven]

Hello everybody,

I've just signed up to the Literature Network, so let me say hello to you all!

Here goes my first question. Recently, I came across this quotation, allegedly by Edgar Allan Poe: "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry."

Now, one of my pet peeves is quotations without a source. I spent quite some time googling and browsing to no avail; nobody on the net seems to bother citing the source of the quote. One site mentioned that Poe said it on his death bed (although I've thought his last words were "Reynolds! Reynolds!") and refers to a book named 2000 Years of Disbelief by James A. Haught, but I won't buy a book only to look up a quote. So I was wondering whether any of you knew where the quote is coming from and whether it's actually by Poe.

Thanks a lot for any hints,

Raven.

[mono]

Hello, Quoth-the-Raven, welcome to the forum!
I can guarantee that the quote did, indeed, come from Edgar Allan Poe, but from where . . . ugh, I searched and searched, and know I have read it somewhere, but it may only seem a quotation he spoke rather than wrote. I will continue searching, but surely can tell you that the quote came from Poe.
Good luck!

[Quoth-the-Raven]

Thank you, mono! My initial guess was that the quote is from his letters, but I couldn't find it there, neither at gutenberg.org nor at eapoe.org. To be honest, I think it's a hoax. Unfortunately, I don't know enough about Poe's stance on religion to judge whether the quote's in tandem with the rest of his beliefs. I have to investigate!

Thanks again,

Raven.

[rachel]

hullo,
all I could find for you is this:

"The pioneers and missionaries of religion have been the real cause of more trouble and war than all other classes of mankind." [ Ira D. Cardiff, What Great Men Think of Religion, quoted from James A. Haught, ed., 2000 Years of Disbelief]

"

[Tis]

Raven...

I have read this quote many times on the internet as being attributed to Mr. Poe and, without exception, in the absence of any corrobrative tag to any recognized publication or his correspondence. In my forty five years of studying Poe, his life or any his works, I have never once come across a reproduction of this quote with the single exception of the internet.

There seems a common misconception that Poe was an atheist or harbored some deeply held distrust toward religion. This is simply not the case. Poe was raised in the Allan family by Frances Valentine Allan, his foster mother. Frances was a devoutly religious woman who attented church regularly and insisted that young Poe accompany her. If I recall correctly they attended Episcopalian services, though John Allan, Poe's foster father, was Presbyterian (I think).

At best, Poe was ambivalent toward religion itself but at times would invoke the name of God when it provided some desired effect he wished to convey.

I would suggest you visit the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore at http://www.eapoe.org for some additional insight.

Regards,

[Quoth-the-Raven]

Excellent, Tis, your answer was exactly what I was looking for. Thank you very much.

Regards,

Raven.

[caesar]

If Poe really did say so, I admire him all the more.

Welcome! Raven.

[rachel]

Raven...

I have read this quote many times on the internet as being attributed to Mr. Poe and, without exception, in the absence of any corrobrative tag to any recognized publication or his correspondence. In my forty five years of studying Poe, his life or any his works, I have never once come across a reproduction of this quote with the single exception of the internet.

There seems a common misconception that Poe was an atheist or harbored some deeply held distrust toward religion. This is simply not the case. Poe was raised in the Allan family by Frances Valentine Allan, his foster mother. Frances was a devoutly religious woman who attented church regularly and insisted that young Poe accompany her. If I recall correctly they attended Episcopalian services, though John Allan, Poe's foster father, was Presbyterian (I think)

At best, Poe was ambivalent toward religion itself but at times would invoke the name of God when it provided some desired effect he wished to convey.

I would suggest you visit the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore at http://www.eapoe.org for some additional insight.

Regards,

Absolutely right Tis,
hullo to you.
I was grieved when I realized that , like so much 'information' out there you could only go in circles looking for it but never see him actually in any of his own works saying any such thing.
And that is true that he attended religious services and had his own feelings toward God. I am pleased to see the truth of this expanded upon

[behindblueeyes]

I don't know where it came from or if he even said it but it would be kind of ironic because wasn't poe really afraid of death and dying...

yeah that wasn't very helpful.. lol

[Tis]

First, your question presupposes Poe wrote autobiographically and there is an excellent article at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website that, quite appropriately, addresses this misconception. It can be found at http://www.eapoe.org/geninfo/poeautob.htm and I would encourage you to review it.

This question is among the more frequently asked and would probably warrant its own category listing were it not asked in different form. Why was Poe obsessed with tragedy? Why did he write such depressing stories? Why are all his works about death and dying? Was his work influenced by the tragedy of his life, his abuse of alcohol. Each, interesting in their own way, but with the fundamental question… Why?

Generally, I do not subscribe to the notion that Poe was obsessed with death, nor that he was possessed of any exaggerated fear of death, or even that he was disproportionately consumed with being buried alive. After all, imagination is not equivalent with mania. Neither does it find equivalence in obsession or madness. Fiction is, after all, fantasy, make believe and illusion. We are simply the beneficiaries of Poe’s complete mastery of the English language, his passion for literature and his robust intellect and vivid imagination.

Absent a face to face interview with Mr. Poe, any answers must come from what we know of Poe himself and the time in which he lived. At least, what we think we know. While Poe could be considered well ahead of his time in many respects, in others he was incredibly naïve and guileless. He could be remarkably adept at analytical thinking, decipher complex puzzles, analyze and resolve the deception behind Maelzel’s Mechanical Chess Player and yet, Poe had substantial difficulty with simple character judgments.

Of course, to suggest that Poe’s life experiences had no impact on his writing is as absurd as is the contrary, but when most suggested parallels are examined in detail, they almost inevitably fall apart. While any particular Poe biography may speak to specific instances that could have provided some essence for cause and effect, it raises the question of the “chicken and the egg”. Which came first, the tale or the life experience? It is amusing and interesting to note that one of Poe’s most effective techniques with his tales of mystery was to first determine a conclusion and then build events that most effectively supported that conclusion. In effect, writing the story “backwards” as he called it.

Curiously, there are often more people murdered, maimed or assaulted in a single television or movie script than in the all volumes of Poe’s poems and prose. Are the directors, screenwriters, actors or producers to be considered obsessed or insane? If not, why not? Ask them and they will tell you, “We give the public what they want.” Hmmm… if accurate, what does that say about us? I don’t mean to appear flippant here, but from a purely entertainment perspective, I feel the analogy is justified as long as Hollywood insists theirs is an artistic form of expression.

A common response to aspiring writers is often, “Write what you know.” And, perhaps, for good reason. Presuming a subject is outside one’s sphere of knowledge or experience, how could they possibly be imaginatively and creatively engaged. If they remain insistent, ultimately, they will surely be compelled to research the necessary subject matter, assuming of course that their object is to keep the reader engaged. I would suggest that Poe wrote of what he knew, experienced and felt he understood best, perhaps, better than most.

Yet, great care must be exercised when attempting to understand Poe, the man, through reading the pages of his fiction. His stories and poems should not be viewed as a mirror reflection of his life but of a clever and perpetually engaged imagination. After all, is it not reasonable to assume that Jules Verne never once journeyed to the center of the earth or sailed on a nuclear submarine. Isn’t it, at least, somewhat unlikely that H. G. Wells actually traveled to the future or that Mary Shelly, at the tender age of 18, was an expert in human reanimation when she wrote Frankenstein; the Modern Prometheus. While I am confident that Poe’s experiences flavored his work and even inspired some of it, so did other works and other authors. Poe was a voracious reader and much of his work comes from subjects that piqued his interest at the time and from reading books, newspapers and magazines.

What were the prevailing conditions and social circumstances of Poe’s time? To begin to understand Poe, clearly, we must understand the times in which he lived.

The United States in the beginning of the 19th century was still in revolutionary flux and things did not begin to settle until about 1815. Political posturing and maneuvering, the rapid spread of religious fervor, the emergence of a powerful agricultural south, an accelerating industrialized north and the increasingly visceral debate over slavery; all these issues and more only served to separate and polarize American citizens regionally. The birth rate in The United States was accelerating faster than anywhere else in the world and the 1800 population of about 5.3 million exploded in twenty years to 9.6 million, of which, only twenty percent was attributed to immigration. The 1803 purchase of the Louisiana Territory from France, more than 800,000 square miles, for $15 million opened a vast range of cheap land for settlement and by 1816, immigration began to accelerate with an appalling lack of control. “In the five years up to 1820, some 100,000 people arrived in America without having to show a single piece of paper.” Harsh European winters, resulting starvation, religious persecution, poor pay and heavy taxation contrasted America with its broadening open spaces, cheap land ($1.25 to $2.00 an acre), absence of legalized class distinctions, no tithing to a state church, no conscription, no state police and no censorship. Add to this an incredibly low cost voyage and your decision was not difficult to make. (Paul Johnson, “A History of the American People”).

The natural life expectancy for an American citizen in the early 19th century was about 45 years or less and it had increased by only 19 years since the time of the Roman empire. In fact, according to the National Center for Health Statistics, the life expectancy as late as 1900 was only 47 years. It was even worse in industrialized England in the early 1800s and varied from 45 years for those living in Surrey to 26 years for those unfortunate enough to live in early 19th century Liverpool.

With this free flowing immigration to America came epidemics of disastrous proportions. From 1800 to 1850, there were no less than 15 epidemics that included Yellow Fever, Scarlet Fever, Asiatic Cholera, Cholera, Typhus and Influenza and they affected cities from New England in the north to New Orleans in the South. As late as 1870 in Chicago, an infant had only a 50% chance of reaching the age of 5 years old. Add to this the pernicious effects and spread of the “White Plague” or tuberculosis (consumption) and you begin to get a rather vivid vision of early 19th century concerns. It wasn’t until 1865 that Jean-Antoine Villemin, a French military doctor demonstrated how tuberculosis was transmitted and was not, as originally thought, spontaneously acquired. Not until 1882 was Robert Koch able to isolate the bacterium that causes tuberculosis.

So… death and dying was neither a stranger or a strange circumstance to our American ancestors. Few families were left unaffected in some fashion or other and even a brief reading of Poe’s biography will reveal his own burdens in this respect. In December 1811, his mother died in Richmond of an unknown disease suspected to be pneumonia. There is no credible evidence that she succumbed to tuberculosis (consumption). His Father died shortly after in 1812, allegedly in Norfolk, Virginia presumably from pneumonia as well but this has no basis in fact. His childhood infatuation, Ms. Jane Stanard died in Richmond in April 1824 from an unknown brain disease (perhaps cancer) and was known to have been mentally impaired well before she died. His foster Mother, Frances Keeling Allan died in February 1829 in Richmond following “a long and painful illness.” Poe’s brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, died in Baltimore in August 1831, possibly from tuberculosis, but most likely from cholera. John Allan, Poe’s foster Father died in Richmond in March 1834 from dropsy, a swelling caused by kidney or congestive heart failure. Poe’s Grandmother, Elizabeth Cairnes Poe died in Baltimore in July 1835 following years as an invalid from paralysis. His beloved wife, Virginia Eliza (Clemm) Poe died in January 1847 in Fordham, New York from tuberculosis. Each of these losses burdened him greatly and from the early age of three, Poe was constantly reminded of the fragility of life and Poe’s familiarity with these events of pestilence can be seen in his tale, “The Masque of the Red Death”.

It cannot be denied that these heartfelt losses throughout his life had an impact on Poe’s psyche and could certainly serve as the genesis for a tendency toward depression and melancholy in any reasonable man or woman. However, depression is not necessarily associative with a fear of death. I would certainly concede to a fear of loss typically attendant with death but not necessarily for his own demise. There is an interpretive suggestion to this personal anxiety in his poem, “A Dream Within A Dream” where he wrote:

Continued next post...

[Tis]

Continued from previous post...

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand –
How few! Yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep – while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! Can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

This little stanza speaks loudly to his anguish over the loss of his loved ones. As he pleads with God to understand the cause of his agony, he concludes with the question... is life real or is it all really just a dream.

So… why did Poe write about death so much? Well… strictly speaking, death in many of the tales is really incidental to the story and serve only to emphasize a primary theme of retribution, madness, inevitability or the perverseness of man. In others it simply serves as a starting point for some supernatural conclusion or some esoteric science experiment. His story “The Premature Burial” is especially interesting because it is less about the fear of dying than it is about the fear of not dying.

Of course one cannot speak of Poe's motives with first hand knowledge and his use of this theme (premature burial) differs somewhat from story to story. In the tale "The Premature Burial", Poe begins by reciting several actual accounts that had been noted in local newspapers of the time. This is consistent with his technique of using a general truth or facts, however incidental, to support or enhance the fictional elements in the story. This is a very effective technique and is used even today, especially in mystery and science-fiction stories. How many times have we heard the line, "Stranger than fiction" while watching advertisements for some up-coming mystery show on television.

Add to this the fact that a general fear of "accidental burial" did actually exist in the early 19th century and your readership is all but assured. Medicine was advancing but slowly, epidemics were frequent by today's standards and autopsies were rare if required at all. According to Kenneth Silverman in his book, Edgar Allan Poe - Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance, he mentions two works dealing with this fear during the period. One was, On the Signs of Death in 1834 that went through numerous re-printings and discussed how specific afflictions could mimic death. The other was The Dangers of Premature Burial in 1816 by Joseph Taylor. This work opened the subject to public discussion and knowledge by the time Poe's story appeared, but it was poorly understood. This made a good recipe for a horrific tale and there is little doubt Poe recognized this. Think about it. If you were unfortunate enough to find yourself in a coma or catatonic state, in the public mind of the period, there was no assurance your heart beat or breathing would or could be detected nor your condition recognized as anything other than your, shall we say... "final departure". Scary isn’t it?

There can be no question Poe understood the fundamental attraction of incidental truths when artistically blended with fantasy. He did the same with mesmerism in his tale “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar which was actually accepted in England as a true instance of arresting the progress of death by hypnotizing a man just prior to expiration. That he did it so brilliantly speaks only to his imaginative genius. That we perceive him, personally, as surely having some obsession with premature burials merely speaks to our own dullness.

It seems that Poe wrote primarily from things he read and subjects in which he had developed an interest. Poe maintained a broad scope of interests that ranged from the fascinating to the mundane. His curiosity in mesmerism certainly precipitated some of his tales such as “Tale of the Ragged Mountains”, “Mesmeric Revelation” and “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar”. His interests in cryptography helped in “The Gold Bug”, one of his tales of ratiocination and deductive reasoning and “The Purloined Letter”. Another curious interest was his seeming fascination with phrenology for a time that, by some measure, appears connected with his tales of madness. Phrenology was a science of the time, since discredited, that taught that all human behavior, moods and emotions were governed by specific regions of the brain. See his tale “The Imp of the Perverse.”

In April 1840, Poe wrote a short piece for Alexander’s Weekly Messenger titled “The Trial of James Wood”. It was a commentary piece that spoke to the actual trial of a local man that had murdered his daughter and, upon return of the jury from deliberation, was judged “Not guilty on the reason of insanity.” Poe goes on to illustrate an alternate view in light of the curious behavior of Mr. Wood prior to the murder that would imply pre-meditated action and, thus, guilt. He ends the piece with the observation that although society was safe from Mr. Wood for a time during his rehabilitation in an asylum, once satisfied of his return to lucidity, the Court would set him free. Poe’s final observation reads, “His monomania is essentially periodical; and a perfect sanity for months, or even for years, would scarcely be a sufficient guaranty for his subsequent conduct. A time would still come when there would be laid to his charge another--although hardly a more horrible deed of sudden violence and bloodshed.”

I do not suggest that this single piece was the genesis of all his tales of madness or murder but I do believe it is an singular indication of his thoughts on the subject and his interest in the psychosis of man. Poe was a master at and seemed to love mixing known or accepted facts with partial truths and fantasy to generate a good story. The reprint in England of Poe’s strange tale of arresting the progress of death by hypnotizing a dying man, and headlined as documentation of an actual case seems to provide some evidence for the gullibility of the general public of the time.

It appears Poe could also be quite the prankster and I have always been rather amused at the generalized characterization of Poe by most biographers as a perpetually melancholy figure of tragedy completely lacking in humor. The real tragedy of Edgar Allan Poe was his early death at the age of forty years and the unrecoverable loss of his literary genius. This loss to American literature remains our tragedy.

[behindblueeyes]

I read the biography from the link and see that it states that Poe's tragic short stories were not autobiographical, as To Kill a Mockingbird, Angela's Ashes were. It's not my opinion that Poe was recounting any personal experience in his short stories or works, but that his preoccupation with death and tragedy led him to write almost entirely on these topics.

I thought that his works displayed that he DID mistrust religion.

The part of the quote, "All religion, my friend, is simply evolved out of fraud, fear, greed, imagination, and poetry," that I found ironic was was that, while he revealed fear and imagination in his stories, he would denounce religion because it comes from these very sources.

Maybe the quote was sort of explaining the people in his stories, if not himself, I don't know.

[hegesaurus]

Hi,

I see mentioned here 'The Dangers of Premature Burial' (1816) by Joseph Taylor, does anybody know where I could find this text? I'm writing a masters thesis on the tales of terror in Blackwood's Magazine and it would be immensely helpful to have a look at this text.

Thank you!

[isidro]

Welcome to the forum!

[hegesaurus]

Thank you