Type “Edgar Allan Poe” into your preferred image search engine, brace for impact, and press Enter. Instantly you hit a wall of chalk-white faces, each conveying a mixture of despair, dyspepsia, grief, wonderment, and wounded pride. Some are actual daguerreotypes, while the rest are fan art or movie stills inspired by those antique likenesses. In every case, one has the distinct feeling that misery could not ask for better company. This is Poe.
Now try searching “Poe Osgood portrait” instead. What comes up this time is a face totally different from those in the previous set. It can’t be the same person. There is color in his cheeks and light in his eyes, and his brow looks quite unburdened. The expression registers as neither menacing nor miserable, but magnanimous. This too is Poe.
It is Samuel Stillman Osgood’s more human version of the poet, novelist, and critic that interests us here. That the portrait has become emblematic of a close friendship between Poe and Frances Osgood, the artist’s wife, makes it still more surprising, because Poe is not supposed to have had friends. Even granting that authors are not their works, it is hard to imagine chatting amicably with the man behind “The Pit and the Pendulum.” Yet evidence shows that plenty of people did. Poe formed many generative friendships through the years, even as time, circumstance, and his own complicated temperament conspired to deny him others. In the twilight of his short life, having survived or somehow alienated everyone he loved most, Poe seemed to feel the absence of friends as both a fate worse than death and a harbinger of it. He did not want to be alone with himself.
“I believe God granted me the spark of genius,” Poe told his acquaintance Thomas Morrison Alfriend a few weeks before his death, “but he quenched it in misery.” From the beginning, life certainly was not disposed to do him many favors. Born to stage actors David and Eliza Poe in 1809, he saw his tubercular father desert the family and his mother succumb slowly and painfully to the same disease before he was three years old. Wealthy, childless Frances Allan, visiting the Poe household in her Victorian capacity as a sympathetic woman of means, took pity on a resourceless boy and made him her foster son, complete with an expanded moniker: Edgar Allan Poe. As all his biographers have noted, for the rest of his life—and, remarkably, even after death—Poe would depend for his survival on the charity of others.