The Dreamquest of Edgar Allan Poe

“…several critics agree that Poe only has one endlessly repeated main character- himself. He is pictured as appearing and reappearing as his melancholic, hallucinated, mad and half-mad creations again and again.”

-free online research papers.com

On Sullivan’s Island Edgar Allan Poe made the acquaintance of a naturalist, William Legrand, and his black servant, Jupiter. Edgar joined the pair in a search for Captain Kidd’s treasure that Edgar recorded as a story he titled “The Gold-Bug” first published in 1842. Edgar received his share of the fortune in July 1831, around the time his brother Henry died.

With nothing to keep him in the United States, Edgar used the money to travel to Europe.


In Paris, Edgar met the greatest detective of his generation, the Chevalier C. Auguste Dupin.


Edgar and Dupin met at a library on Rue de Montparnasse, when they both reached for the same book, a treatise on mesmerism. The two became fast friends, and were eerily similar in appearance. Though Edgar is convinced that he and Dupin are not related, save distantly, through their “Celtic strain,” Dupin thinks there may be a closer relationship. At the time of their meeting Edgar is 22 and Dupin is 39. Dupin has been a consultant for the Paris police for about twenty years. (Poe; 1841) (Poe/Hatvary; 1997)

Edgar, poor throughout his short life, is this one time flush with cash and in better financial shape than Dupin, whose once rich family has been much reduced in fortune as of late. Edgar and Dupin decide to share a room. Their very first case is in August of 1831. Even though Edgar’s story based on the event, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” gives all credit in solving the case to Dupin’s genius, Dupin himself states that Edgar was equally brilliant and an equal partner. The events, recorded by Edgar in 1841, concern a double homicide committed by an orangutan. (Poe; 1841) The fame Edgar and especially Dupin received due to this case made Dupin a household name in Paris, and Dupin found himself consulting on at least twenty recorded cases, and many more unrecorded.

Though Edgar only composes stories based on three cases investigated in the company of Dupin, author Michael Harrison in 1965 discovered notes kept by Edgar concerning seven other cases, and duly edited them into stories.

It is very likely that Edgar met, in the course of his dealings with Dupin, the famous chief of the Sûreté, Francois Vidocq. Vidocq was a career criminal who decided at one point to become a policeman, and developed many of the procedures used for generations of police work. He was a master of disguise, and a brilliant detective in his own right. His memoirs had a profound effect on the way Edgar depicted Dupin though Dupin describes Vidocq as “…a good guesser, and a persevering man.” Edgar met Vidocq in the summer of 1832. He realized upon being introduced that he had met Vidocq several times before in Dupin’s company, but had not realized it was the same man. Vidocq had keen night vision, a phosphorescence of the eye that he shared with cats and owls.

In November 1831 Edgar and Dupin unraveled the mystery of the disappearance of the plans to a super weapon developed by Robert Fulton 25 years earlier. These plans were considered so dangerous they were kept under lock and key by the French authorities. (“The Mystery of the Fulton Documents” Poe/Harrison; 1968) In this story it is revealed that Dupin’s fame as an investigator has allowed Dupin to begin to rebuild his squandered family fortune, and Edgar and Dupin hire a manservant, a discreet gentleman named Hyacinthe.

Their next recorded case is in the spring of 1832, known as “The Vanished Treasure” (Poe/Harrison; 1965). Edgar and Dupin meet Simon Bolivar, South American revolutionary leader, and help him to understand what happened to a large treasure he was unable to put his hands on. Bolivar had recently faked his death to travel to France, but did not survive long past the events of this story.

In “The Mystery of the Gilded Cheval-Glass” Edgar and Dupin solve a murder mystery in March 1832. In this story, based on notes by Edgar and completed in 1966 by Michael Harrison, Edgar is introduced by Dupin as “Mr. Carter Randolphe, of Richmond Virginia.” This use of a pseudonym by Edgar, and adopted by Harrison, is very interesting.

Writer H. P. Lovecraft in six stories or poems uses the name “Randolph Carter” for what most have seen as a thinly disguised alter ego of Lovecraft himself. Carter is described as an uncelebrated author, whose literature has frequently gone unnoticed. A melancholy figure, Carter is depicted as a quiet, contemplative artist and dreamer with a sensitive disposition, prone to fainting during times of emotional stress. What is interesting is that this description can be applied as easily to Edgar Allan Poe as to Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Lovecraft’s first story about Randolph Carter is “The Statement of Randolph Carter,” based on a dream.

However, there is much evidence that Randolph Carter is not based on Lovecraft at all, but on a writer who lived nearly a century before and with whom Lovecraft surly felt some real affinity.

S. T. Joshi, arguably the greatest authority on Lovecraft who ever lived, has this to say about the relationship between Lovecraft and his character Randolph Carter:

“Although HPL clearly identified with Carter on many different levels, Carter is not as autobiographical a character as many others in HPL’s fiction; he is, instead, a construct representing various of HPL’s philosophical and aesthetic view..'

(Joshi; 2001)

Edgar Allan Poe is Lovecraft’s hero. (Shreffler; 1977) In 1916 Lovecraft called Poe “…my God of Fiction.” It is well known that Lovecraft borrowed some ideas from Poe, doing a homage to him in “The Hound.” (1922) Fritz Lieber called the story “The Statement of Randolph Carter” a story “…in the vein of Poe.”

The question now becomes: Could Lovecraft have been dreaming supernatural biographical details of Edgar’s life?

Sometime in 1826 Edgar began to abuse opium, in the form of Laudanum, at the University of Virginia. That he had a lifelong addiction to this drug is very probable. His suicide attempt in 1847 was an attempt to overdose on the drug. Dupin mentions also that he and Poe experimented with cannabis, and is it improbable, at a school founded by Thomas Jefferson, that cannabis was available? It is well known that the founding fathers enjoyed marijuana. The soporific effects of both drugs, as well as the vivid, otherworldly dreams that one experiences while under the effects, are well know. With these drugs and his acknowledged understanding of the occult, Edgar would have become an accomplished magician/dreamer. Poe expert Launcelot Canning has said “…no one has ever equaled (Edgar’s) knowledge of the secrets that lie beyond the grave.” (Bloch 1965)

One last point: No matter how much Lovecraft would like to imagine himself a southern gentleman, he was not. Lovecraft was a New Englander, a Yankee with conservative pretensions. Poe, on the other hand, Like Randolph Carter, is actually from Richmond Virginia, and was raised as a southern gentleman.

If Edgar Allan Poe is Randolph Carter, then some surprising clues about Edgar’s ancestry can be surmised. First of all, the Randolph Carter of Lovecraft’s stories had an ancestor referred to as Sir Randolph Carter, a magician in the days of Elizabeth I a contemporary of the infamous Dr. Dee. Looking into Edgar’s ancestry, we might find a Randolph Carter, and learn why this particular name became so important that first Poe and later Lovecraft used it to identify the protagonist of occult dreamland stories.

The events in Lovecraft’s stories all take place in the 1920’s and 30’s, but if the events occurred in Poe’s lifetime, we must move the stories back in time nearly one hundred years. Moving the stories of Randolph Carter back in time means that some events must be fictionalized as Lovecraft wrote them. Edgar would have had no access to a telephone, for instance, as Randolph Carter uses in “The Statement of Randolph Carter.” Since Lovecraft gained all his information on Edgar’s occult adventures and journeys through dreams, and in the dreams details were added or subtracted in such a way as to convince Lovecraft that the dreams he was having were his own, it is only natural that Lovecraft contemporized the events. Only over time did Lovecraft begin to understand that he was dreaming true events in the occult and dream life of his “God of Fiction.”

We know that Edgar first experimented with opium while a student at the University of Virginia. It was here, as stated in "The Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath," that he attempted three times to enter the sunset city, and was snatched away before entering. This would have been in 1826.
In 1833, upon Edgar’s return to the United States, Edgar met occultist “Harley Warren,” who appreciated Edgar’s facility with language, and taught Edgar some Arabic and bits of other ancient languages. Along the way, “Warren” would instruct Edgar in the mysteries of the occult. It was in 1838 the events described in Lovecraft’s “The Statement of Randolph Carter” occurred, though without the use of a telephone.

In 1846 Edgar visited his friend “Joel Manton” in Arkham Massachusetts, and was attacked by an otherworldly, gelatinous monster in a graveyard. Lovecraft describes the event in his short story, “The Unnameable.”
The Case of Charles Dexter Ward, a novel by Lovecraft, mentions Randolph Carter as a friend of Marinus Bicknell Willett, as sort of an expert on the occult. Though written in 1928 the events described occurred in the mid 1840’s, and did not directly concern Edgar.

The last two Randolph Carter stories written by Lovecraft are “The Silver Key” and “Through the Gates of the Silver Key.” The occult events of the first story came near the end of Edgar’s life, based as they are on a life lived and reconsidered. The second story concerns Carter’s disappearance, dressing as a swami, and having an occult revelation that allowed him to transcend earthly concerns forever. In this way did Edgar somehow escape the final ravages of death?

Alan Moore revealed a previously unknown chapter in Randolph Carter’s life, an adventure with the Time Traveler of H.G. Wells novel The Time Machine, Allan Quatermain, the hero of several H. Ryder Haggard novels, and John Carter of Mars, from the Edgar Rice Burroughs series. This story, a meditation on dream, time and astral travel, works on several opium infused levels, as both Edgar, as Randolph Carter, and Quatermain are given to adventures in dreams. The story is a serialized back up to Moore’s The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, and is called “Allan and the Sundered Veil.” Since in the story it is revealed that Randolph Carter is a descendent of John Carter, we can now confidently assert that Edgar Allan Poe and John Carter are somehow related. (However, rather than a descendent John Carter would be an ancestor.)

This aspect of Edgar’s life is perforce one of the most mysterious and impenetrable, but the clues are all there, we just need to follow where they lead.