Early 19th century writer Edgar Allan Poe was critically embraced by generations of U.S. radicals that followed, precisely because he was deemed vulgar and not respectable by the ruling class. Joseph E. Cohen acknowledges flaws and defends the artist, and all, who ‘die in the gutter.’

‘Edgar Allan Poe’ by Joseph E. Cohen from the New York Call. Vol. 2 No. 28. January 27, 1909.

There is no royal road to democracy.

Some men are born democrats. Others are born of democratic parents. They often make a poor end. Still others have to fight their way along, stumbling and blundering, but they finally arrive, and when they do they are heard from. Such was Lincoln. And others stumble and blunder, and fall before they arrive. Such was Edgar Allan Poe.

There is no royal road to democracy. There is no one democracy. The man who strikes a new note in art, who sounds a new chord in music, who attains a new height in literature, who discovers a new phenomenon in nature or records a new element or combination in chemistry or finds a new star in the skies–that man does as much for democracy, for the common man, as he who enrolls in the particular democratic movement of the day. And the man who does any of these things is as much a democrat, although he never hears of the Socialist movement, and is not a Socialist, as is the Socialist. “When the hurly burly’s done, when the battle’s fought and won.” then names will belong to history no less than those who are fighting in the Socialist movement.

There is not much to Poe’s life. His parents died when he was in his infancy. It takes a miracle for a child to become a grown man without the influence and guidance of paternal love. In Poe’s case the miracle did not happen. So he made about as many mistakes as a man in his situation could. Everything he did for others he seemed to do wrong. And he died in the gutter, sunk deep in depravity; so lost to reason that he was used as a tool by some politician to “repeat,” dragged about from polling place to polling place to prostitute his franchise. That’s what became of Poe.

Poe was not respectable. He could not help being what he was: And, being a democrat, he lived his life in the open. He belongs to Burns and Byron and Oscar Wilde. These are the men whom we all remember. The words they wrote, the death Byron died, will be remembered when their desecrators will long have been forgotten.

Poe was not respectable. He drank to excess. At least that is what they say, and so they who drink to excess–in private–and who are lascivious–in private–who purchase souls–in private–flaunted their respectability in public and hounded Poe to death. They had as much to do with Poe’s death as had the politicians who left Poe in the gutter.

And the ghouls who hounded Poe or, what is the same thing, their own selves reincarnate, now place a wreath upon the grave of the man whom all their villainy could not destroy. The very ghouls who are hounding the Poes of the present day. They, too, will be forgotten when democracy comes into its own.

Poe was not respectable. He could not be bought. And the man who cannot be bought is dangerous to the ruling class. It is only a question of time before he finds himself, before he takes his place in the democratic movement of his time and fights against the ruling class. That is why Poe was dangerous. His misfortune was to die before he found himself. Poe’s contemporaries will cut sorry figures in history. Longfellow, with his slimy psalms of life, whom the ruling class is trying to exalt, will be a stench in the nostrils of man. Lowell will fare better. He and Emerson belong to posterity, as do Darwin and Spencer, in spite of their shortcomings. Mitier did his best. “God made him for a man, so let him pass.” And Hawthorne was not born for democracy, he knew no better. He belonged to the cobwebbs of the Old Manse. Poe has been described, by the ghouls, as “Hawthorne and delirium tremens.”

Hawthorne accepted a position from the politicians in the custom house. The position paid well, was highly respectable, and one of those holes in which a little man with a little ability can be sunk so that he becomes “safe,” while he imagines he cannot be bought. When the Civil War came Hawthorne was too bewildered with respectability to take a stand with democracy, with the black man.

Not being “safe.” Poe was Hawthorne and delirium tremens. Let us be thankful for the delirium tremens.

And not being safe, Poe came to the end that all men who disobey the homilies of the old women in men’s pants come to-he died in the gutter…That was well. Emerson, who was eminently respectable, who lived a life that the old women term “irreproachable,” went mad and died in that condition. Let us be thankful to that grand old democrat, Death, for his sense of humor.

Poe died in the gutter. And so long as we have a gutter, physical or intellectual, it is certain that some men are going to die there. It is certain that some men are going to live there. And if we are to have democracy, it must embrace them.

The democracy of “educational qualifications” is a farce. The democracy of respectability is caste turned clean side out. If we have a gutter, democracy to be worth anything must be democracy of the gutter. The Christianity of the money changers is the Christianity that crucified Christ. Because Poe lived his life as well as he could; because he is the greatest poetical genius America has produced: because he died in the gutter: Poe belongs to democracy. Let no hand of a retainer of the ruling class desecrate his memory!

The New York Call was the first English-language Socialist daily paper in New York City and the second in the US after the Chicago Daily Socialist. The paper was the center of the Socialist Party and under the influence of Morris Hillquit, Charles Ervin, Julius Gerber, and William Butscher. The paper was opposed to World War One, and, unsurprising given the era’s fluidity, ambivalent on the Russian Revolution even after the expulsion of the SP’s Left Wing. The paper is an invaluable resource for information on the city’s workers movement and history and one of the most important papers in the history of US socialism. The paper ran from 1908 until 1923.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/the-new-york-call/1909/090127-newyorkcall-v02n023.pdf