who is edgar allan poe short biography

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a writer and critic famous for his dark, mysterious poems and stories, including “The Raven,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart.”

• Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet , critic, and editor in the 19 th century best known for his evocative short stories and poems that captured the interest of readers worldwide. His imaginative storytelling and tales of mystery and horror gave birth to the modern detective story. Many of Poe’s works, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Raven,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” became literary classics. Some aspects of Poe’s life, like his literature, are shrouded in mystery, and the lines between fact and fiction have been blurred substantially since his death in 1849 at age 40.

Quick Facts

Army and west point, writing career as a critic and poet, poems: “the raven” and “annabel lee”, short stories, legacy and museum.

FULL NAME: Edgar Allan Poe BORN: January 19, 1809 DIED: October 7, 1849 BIRTHPLACE: Boston, Massachusetts SPOUSE: Virginia Clemm Poe (1836-1847) ASTROLOGICAL SIGN: Capricorn

Edgar Allan Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Edgar never really knew his biological parents: Elizabeth Arnold Poe, a British actor, and David Poe Jr., an actor who was born in Baltimore. His father left the family early in Edgar’s life, and his mother died from tuberculosis when he was only 2.

Separated from his brother, William, and sister, Rosalie, Poe went to live with his foster parents, John and Frances Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. John was a successful tobacco merchant there. Edgar and Frances seemed to form a bond, but he had a more difficult relationship with John.

By age 13, Poe was a prolific poet, but his literary talents were discouraged by his headmaster and by John, who preferred that young Edgar follow him in the family business. Preferring poetry over profits, Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of Allan’s business papers.

Money was also an issue between Poe and John. Poe went to the University of Virginia in 1826, where he excelled in his classes. However, he didn’t receive enough money from John to cover all of his costs. Poe turned to gambling to cover the difference but ended up in debt.

He returned home only to face another personal setback—his neighbor and fiancée Sarah Elmira Royster had become engaged to someone else. Heartbroken and frustrated, Poe moved to Boston.

In 1827, around the time he published his first book, Poe joined the U.S. Army. Two years later, he learned that his mother, Frances, was dying of tuberculosis, but by the time he returned to Richmond, she had already died.

While in Virginia, Poe and his father briefly made peace with each other, and John helped Poe get an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point. Poe excelled at his studies at West Point, but he was kicked out after a year for his poor handling of his duties.

During his time at West Point, Poe had fought with John, who had remarried without telling him. Some have speculated that Poe intentionally sought to be expelled to spite his father, who eventually cut ties with Poe.

After leaving West Point, Poe published his third book and focused on writing full-time. He traveled around in search of opportunity, living in New York City, Baltimore, Philadelphia, and Richmond. In 1834, John Allan died, leaving Poe out of his will, but providing for an illegitimate child Allan had never met.

Poe, who continued to struggle living in poverty, got a break when one of his short stories won a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . He began to publish more short stories and, in 1835, landed an editorial position with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic, writing vicious reviews of his contemporaries. His scathing critiques earned him the nickname the “Tomahawk Man.”

His tenure at the magazine proved short, however. Poe’s aggressive reviewing style and sometimes combative personality strained his relationship with the publication, and he left the magazine in 1837. His problems with alcohol also played a role in his departure, according to some reports.

Poe went on to brief stints at Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine , Graham’s Magazine , as well as The Broadway Journal , and he also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger , among other journals.

In 1844, Poe moved to New York City. There, he published a news story in The New York Sun about a balloon trip across the Atlantic Ocean that he later revealed to be a hoax. His stunt grabbed attention, but it was his publication of “The Raven,” in 1845, that made Poe a literary sensation.

That same year, Poe found himself under attack for his stinging criticisms of fellow poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow . Poe claimed that Longfellow, a widely popular literary figure, was a plagiarist, which resulted in a backlash against Poe.

Despite his success and popularity as a writer, Poe continued to struggle financially, and he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law.

Poe self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , in 1827. His second poetry collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published in 1829.

As a critic at the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond from 1835 to 1837, Poe published some of his own works in the magazine, including two parts of his only novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . Later on came poems such as “Ulalume” and “The Bells.”

“The Raven”

Poe’s poem “The Raven,” published in 1845 in the New York Evening Mirror , is considered among the best-known poems in American literature and one of the best of Poe’s career. An unknown narrator laments the demise of his great love Lenore and is visited by a raven, who insistently repeats one word: “Nevermore.” In the work, which consists of 18 six-line stanzas, Poe explored some of his common themes: death and loss.

“Annabel Lee”

This lyric poem again explores Poe’s themes of death and loss and might have been written in memory of his beloved wife, Virginia, who died two years prior its publication. The poem was published on October 9, 1849, two days after Poe’s death, in the New York Tribune .

In late 1830s, Poe published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , a collection of short stories. It contained several of his most spine-tingling tales, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “Ligeia,” and “William Wilson.”

In 1841, Poe launched the new genre of detective fiction with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” His literary innovations earned him the nickname “Father of the Detective Story.” A writer on the rise, he won a literary prize in 1843 for “The Gold Bug,” a suspenseful tale of secret codes and hunting treasure.

“The Black Cat”

Poe’s short story “The Black Cat” was published in 1843 in The Saturday Evening Post . In it, the narrator, a one-time animal lover, becomes an alcoholic who begins abusing his wife and black cat. By the macabre story’s end, the narrator observes his own descent into madness as he kills his wife, a crime his black cat reports to the police. The story was later included in the 1845 short story collection, Tales by Edgar Allan Poe .

Later in his career, Poe continued to work in different forms, examining his own methodology and writing in general in several essays, including “The Philosophy of Composition,” “The Poetic Principle,” and “The Rationale of Verse.” He also produced the thrilling tale, “The Cask of Amontillado.”

From 1831 to 1835, Poe lived in Baltimore, where his father was born, with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. He began to devote his attention to Virginia; his cousin became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836 when she was only 13 years old and he was 27.

In 1847, at the age of 24—the same age when Poe’s mother and brother also died—Virginia passed away from tuberculosis. Poe was overcome by grief following her death, and although he continued to work, he suffered from poor health and struggled financially until his death in 1849.

Poe died on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore at age 40.

His final days remain somewhat of a mystery. Poe left Richmond on ten days earlier, on September 27, and was supposedly on his way to Philadelphia. On October 3, he was found in Baltimore in great distress. Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, where he died four days later. His last words were “Lord, help my poor soul.”

At the time, it was said that Poe died of “congestion of the brain.” But his actual cause of death has been the subject of endless speculation. Some experts believe that alcoholism led to his demise while others offer up alternative theories. Rabies, epilepsy, and carbon monoxide poisoning are just some of the conditions thought to have led to the great writer’s death.

Shortly after his passing, Poe’s reputation was badly damaged by his literary adversary Rufus Griswold. Griswold, who had been sharply criticized by Poe, took his revenge in his obituary of Poe, portraying the gifted yet troubled writer as a mentally deranged drunkard and womanizer. He also penned the first biography of Poe, which helped cement some of these misconceptions in the public’s minds.

Although Poe never had financial success in his lifetime, he has become one of America’s most enduring writers. His works are as compelling today as they were more than a century ago. An innovative and imaginative thinker, Poe crafted stories and poems that still shock, surprise, and move modern readers. His dark work influenced writers including Charles Baudelaire , Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Stephane Mallarme.

The Baltimore home where Poe stayed from 1831 to 1835 with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Poe’s cousin and future wife Virginia, is now a museum. The Edgar Allan Poe House offers a self-guided tour featuring exhibits on Poe’s foster parents, his life and death in Baltimore, and the poems and short stories he wrote while living there, as well as memorabilia including his chair and desk.

• The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world.
• Lord, help my poor soul.
• Sound loves to revel near a summer night.
• But as, in ethics, evil is a consequence of good, so, in fact, out of joy is sorrow born. Either the memory of past bliss is the anguish of to-day, or the agonies which are have their origin in the ecstasies which might have been.
• They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.
• The boundaries which divide life from death are at best shadowy and vague. Who shall say where the one ends, and where the other begins?
• With me poetry has been not a purpose, but a passion; and the passions should be held in reverence; they must not—they cannot at will be excited, with an eye to the paltry compensations, or the more paltry commendations, of mankind.
• And now—have I not told you that what you mistake for madness is but over-acuteness of the senses?—now, I say, there came to my ears a low, dull, quick sound, such as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I knew that sound well, too. It was the beating of the old man’s heart.
• All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.
• I have no faith in human perfectibility. I think that human exertion will have no appreciable effect upon humanity. Man is now only more active—not more happy—nor more wise, than he was 6000 years ago.
• [I]f you wish to forget anything upon the spot, make a note that this thing is to be remembered.
• Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears.

Watch “The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe” on HISTORY Vault

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Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

by Robert Giordano , 27 June 2005 This is a short biography. Unlike many biographies that just seem to go on and on, I've tried to compose one short enough to read in a single sitting.

Poe's Childhood

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. That makes him Capricorn, on the cusp of Aquarius. His parents were David and Elizabeth Poe. David was born in Baltimore on July 18, 1784. Elizabeth Arnold came to the U.S. from England in 1796 and married David Poe after her first husband died in 1805. They had three children, Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie. Elizabeth Poe died in 1811, when Edgar was 2 years old. She had separated from her husband and had taken her three kids with her. Henry went to live with his grandparents while Edgar was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan and Rosalie was taken in by another family. John Allan was a successful merchant, so Edgar grew up in good surroundings and went to good schools. When Poe was 6, he went to school in England for 5 years. He learned Latin and French, as well as math and history. He later returned to school in America and continued his studies. Edgar Allan went to the University of Virginia in 1826. He was 17. Even though John Allan had plenty of money, he only gave Edgar about a third of what he needed. Although Edgar had done well in Latin and French, he started to drink heavily and quickly became in debt. He had to quit school less than a year later.

Poe in the Army

Edgar Allan had no money, no job skills, and had been shunned by John Allan. Edgar went to Boston and joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He was 18. He did reasonably well in the Army and attained the rank of sergeant major. In 1829, Mrs. Allan died and John Allan tried to be friendly towards Edgar and signed Edgar's application to West Point. While waiting to enter West Point, Edgar lived with his grandmother and his aunt, Mrs. Clemm. Also living there was his brother, Henry, and young cousin, Virginia. In 1830, Edgar Allan entered West Point as a cadet. He didn't stay long because John Allan refused to send him any money. It is thought that Edgar purposely broke the rules and ignored his duties so he would be dismissed.

A Struggling Writer

In 1831, Edgar Allan Poe went to New York City where he had some of his poetry published. He submitted stories to a number of magazines and they were all rejected. Poe had no friends, no job, and was in financial trouble. He sent a letter to John Allan begging for help but none came. John Allan died in 1834 and did not mention Edgar in his will. In 1835, Edgar finally got a job as an editor of a newspaper because of a contest he won with his story, " The Manuscript Found in a Bottle ". Edgar missed Mrs. Clemm and Virginia and brought them to Richmond to live with him. In 1836, Edgar married his cousin, Virginia. He was 27 and she was 13. Many sources say Virginia was 14, but this is incorrect. Virginia Clemm was born on August 22, 1822. They were married before her 14th birthday, in May of 1836. In case you didn't figure it out already, Virginia was Virgo. As the editor for the Southern Literary Messenger , Poe successfully managed the paper and increased its circulation from 500 to 3500 copies. Despite this, Poe left the paper in early 1836, complaining of the poor salary. In 1837, Edgar went to New York. He wrote "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" but he could not find any financial success. He moved to Philadelphia in 1838 where he wrote " Ligeia " and " The Haunted Palace ". His first volume of short stories, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" was published in 1839. Poe received the copyright and 20 copies of the book, but no money. Sometime in 1840, Edgar Poe joined George R. Graham as an editor for Graham's Magazine . During the two years that Poe worked for Graham's, he published his first detective story, " The Murders in the Rue Morgue " and challenged readers to send in cryptograms, which he always solved. During the time Poe was editor, the circulation of the magazine rose from 5000 to 35,000 copies. Poe left Graham's in 1842 because he wanted to start his own magazine. Poe found himself without a regular job once again. He tried to start a magazine called The Stylus and failed. In 1843, he published some booklets containing a few of his short stories but they didn't sell well enough. He won a hundred dollars for his story, " The Gold Bug " and sold a few other stories to magazines but he barely had enough money to support his family. Often, Mrs. Clemm had to contribute financially. In 1844, Poe moved back to New York. Even though " The Gold Bug " had a circulation of around 300,000 copies, he could barely make a living. In 1845, Edgar Poe became an editor at The Broadway Journal . A year later, the Journal ran out of money and Poe was out of a job again. He and his family moved to a small cottage near what is now East 192nd Street. Virginia's health was fading away and Edgar was deeply distressed by it. Virginia died in 1847, 10 days after Edgar's birthday. After losing his wife, Poe collapsed from stress but gradually returned to health later that year.

In June of 1849, Poe left New York and went to Philadelphia, where he visited his friend John Sartain. Poe left Philadelphia in July and came to Richmond. He stayed at the Swan Tavern Hotel but joined "The Sons of Temperance" in an effort to stop drinking. He renewed a boyhood romance with Sarah Royster Shelton and planned to marry her in October. On September 27, Poe left Richmond for New York. He went to Philadelphia and stayed with a friend named James P. Moss. On September 30, he meant to go to New York but supposedly took the wrong train to Baltimore. On October 3, Poe was found at Gunner's Hall, a public house at 44 East Lombard Street, and was taken to the hospital. He lapsed in and out of consciousness but was never able to explain exactly what happened to him. Edgar Allan Poe died in the hospital on Sunday, October 7, 1849. The mystery surrounding Poe's death has led to many myths and urban legends. The reality is that no one knows for sure what happened during the last few days of his life. Did Poe die from alcoholism? Was he mugged? Did he have rabies? A more detailed exploration of Poe's death can be found here .

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe’s father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems  (George Redway), was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems  (Hatch & Dunning). Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Raven.” After Virginia’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe’s lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of “acute congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s work as an editor, poet, and critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement. French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Charles  Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

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Poems & Poets

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe’s father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe’s relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection,  Tamerlane, and Other Poems.  The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection,  Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems,  received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where  Poems,  his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe’s first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia  Saturday Courier  and his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore  Saturday Visitor.  Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan’s death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at  The Southern Literary Messenger  in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836.  The Southern Literary Messenger  was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe’s writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing  Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine  and  Graham’s Magazine  in Philadelphia and the  Broadway Journal  in New York City. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe’s most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the “heresy of the Didactic.” While Poe’s position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe’s theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocination” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.”

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia” an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and  Herman Melville . The influence of Poe’s tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall” and “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe’s three tales of ratiocination—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe’s particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as  Lord Byron ,  John Keats , and  Percy Bysshe Shelley , yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” exemplify Poe’s evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems—“ To Helen ,” “Lenore,” and “ The Raven ” in particular—Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved.  “ To Helen” is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. “Lenore” presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven’s ominous repetition of “Nevermore” in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover.  Charles Baudelaire  noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven” : “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible.” Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In “The Bells,” for example, the repetition of the word “bells” in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of “ The Raven .” After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe’s one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the  New York Tribune  bearing the byline “Ludwig,” attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe’s fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold’s vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe’s name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author’s life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men”), was the question of the value of Poe’s works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe’s detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe’s works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and  William Carlos Williams . Complementing Poe’s erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe’s works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe’s transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe’s bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe’s theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe’s works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America. Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as  Yvor Winters  wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled “Edgar Poe’s Tradition”: “While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.”

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Edgar Allan Poe

His name conjures up images of premature burial, black cats, forbidden crypts, and crumbling old houses where terrifying secrets dwell. Almost one hundred and fifty years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe’s prose and poetry continue to frighten, influence and inspire writers, composers, artists, poets, and readers all over the world.

Edgar Allan Poe biography

His name conjures up images of premature burial, black cats, forbidden crypts, and crumbling old houses where terrifying secrets dwell., almost one hundred and fifty years after his death, edgar allan poe ’s prose and poetry continue to frighten, influence and inspire writers, composers, artists, poets, and readers all over the world. despite a mixed reputation during his lifetime, poe is today considered one of america’s greatest writers..

After running up gambling debts, and becoming estranged from the Allans, Poe left college and enlisted in the United States Army. There he progressed rapidly, becoming a sergeant major. It was then that he self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems . After his discharge from the Army, Poe briefly attended West Point and then moved to Baltimore where he attempted to launch his career as a writer. In 1833, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and moved her and her mother to Richmond, Virginia.

Throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, Poe wrote much of his best work, including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the stories “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Gold Bug.” While other writers of the time were writing straight forward realistic representations of life in America, Poe was concerning himself with the subconscious— dreams, nightmares, and the unspoken. His work plumbed the depths of human fears and desires, often allowing the “reality” of the stories to fade away and make room for a reality only found within the mind. Though he had many admirers, the harsh conditions of the literary marketplace made it impossible for Poe to make a decent living through writing.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December, And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor. Eagerly I wished the morrow; — vainly I had sought to borrow From my books surcease of sorrow — sorrow for the lost Lenore — For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore — Nameless here for evermore.

— from “the raven”.

To support his new wife and mother-in-law, Poe moved to Philadelphia, then New York, and took a number of jobs as a magazine editor, working at publications including New York Mirror, Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine, and Godey’s Lady’s Book. Though his skill as both an editor and critic were exceptional, he often found himself at odds with others in the literary world. He had repeated bouts of alcoholism and rarely lasted more than a year and a half at any one job. In 1844 Poe received enormous attention for his masterful poem “The Raven.” But with the advances in his career during the mid-1840s also came the setbacks of his continued feuds with other literary figures, drinking problems, employment problems, and most of all, the ill health of his wife, Virginia – who, like Poe’s mother, suffered from tuberculosis.

In January of 1847 his wife died. After a period of mourning, Poe began once again to write, producing one of his masterpieces, “Eureka.” He undertook a lecture tour to raise money for a new magazine, and eventually landed back in Richmond, where he hoped to marry his childhood sweetheart. On a trip back north to New York in 1849, Poe stopped in Baltimore where he was found on October 3rd, passed out on a street outside a bar. He died four days later. Though some have suggested foul play, no one is certain of the circumstances of his death. Sadly, it was not until years later, with the help of French poets such as Baudelaire, that Poe’s rank as a great artist became solidified. A man profoundly ahead of his time, Edgar Allan Poe pointed to the mysteries of the psyche, to the dark truths that float in our dreams, to our unredeemable fears; and for this, generations of readers remain eternally grateful.

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• American Literature: Biographies

Poe, Edgar Allan

Poe, edgar allan.

Nationality: American. Born: Boston, Massachusetts, 19 January 1809; orphaned, and given a home by John Allan, 1812. Education: The Dubourg sisters' boarding school, Chelsea, London, 1816-17; Manor House School, Stoke Newington, London, 1817-20; Joseph H. Clarke's School, Richmond, 1820-23; William Burke's School, Richmond, 1823-25; University of Virginia , Charlottesville, 1826; U.S. Military Academy, West Point , New York , 1830-31 (court-martialled and dismissed). Military Service: Served in the U.S. Army, 1827-29: sergeant-major. Family: Married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836 (died 1847). Career: Lived in Baltimore, 1831-35; assistant editor, Southern Literary Messenger , Richmond, 1835; editor, Southern Literary Messenger, 1836-37; lived in New York , 1837; lived in Philadelphia, 1838-43; assistant editor, Gentleman's Magazine, Philadelphia, 1839-40; editor, Graham's Magazine, Philadelphia, 1841-42; sub-editor, New York Evening Mirror, 1844; lecturer after 1844; editor and proprietor, Broadway Journal, New York, 1845-46. Died: 7 October 1849.

Publications

Collections.

Complete Works , edited by James A. Harrison. 17 vols., 1902.

Poems, edited by Floyd Stovall. 1965.

Collected Works, edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols., 1969-78.

Short Fiction, edited by Stuart and Susan Levine. 1976.

Collected Writings, edited by Burton R. Pollin. 1981—.

Poetry and Tales , edited by Patrick F. Quinn. 1984.

Essays and Reviews , edited by G. R. Thompson. 1984.

Poems and Essays on Poetry, edited by C. H. Sisson . 1995.

Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (Library of America). 1996.

Short Stories

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. 1840.

The Prose Romances 1: The Murders in the Rue Morgue, and The Man That Was Used Up. 1843.

Tales. 1845.

Forgotten Tales. 1997.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket. 1838.

The Literati: Some Honest Opinions about Autorial Merits and Demerits. 1850.

Tamerlane and Other Poems. 1827.

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. 1829.

Poems. 1831.

The Raven and Other Poems. 1845.

Politian: An Unfinished Tragedy, edited by Thomas OlliveMabbott. 1923.

The Conchologist's First Book ; or, A System of Testaceous Malacology (textbook; revised by Poe). 1839; revised edition, 1840.

Eureka: A Prose Poem. 1848; edited by Richard P. Benton, 1973(?).

Letters, edited by John Ward Ostrom. 2 vols., 1948; revised edition, 2 vols., 1966.

Literary Criticism, edited by Robert L. Hough. 1965.

The Unknown Poe: An Anthology of Fugitive Writings, edited by Raymond Foye. 1980.

The Annotated Poe, edited by Stephen Peithman. 1981.

The Other Poe: Comedies and Satires, edited by David Galloway. 1983.

Bibliography:

Bibliography of the Writings of Poe by John W. Robertson, 1934; A Bibliography of First Printings of the Writings of Poe by Charles F. Heartman and James R. Canny, 1940, revised edition, 1943; Poe: A Bibliography of Criticism 1827-1967 by J. Lesley Dameron and Irby B. Cauthen, Jr., 1974; Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English 1827-1973 by Esther F. Hyneman, 1974; in Bibliography of American Literature by Jacob Blanck, edited by Virginia L. Smyers and Michael Winship, 1983.

Critical Studies:

Poe: A Critical Biography by Arthur Hobson Quinn, 1941; Poe as a Literary Critic by John Esten Cooke, edited by N. Bryllion Fagin, 1946; Life of Poe by Thomas Holley Chivers, edited by Richard Beale Davis, 1952; Poe: A Critical Study by Edward H. Davidson, 1957; The French Face of Poe by Patrick F. Quinn, 1957; Poe by Vincent Buranelli, 1961, revised edition, 1977; Poe: A Biography by William Bittner, 1962; Poe: The Man Behind the Legend by Edward Wagenknecht, 1963; Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu by Sidney P. Moss, 1963; Poe as Literary Critic by Edd Winfield Parks, 1964; Poe by Geoffrey Rans, 1965; The Recognition of Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 edited by Eric W. Carlson, 1966; Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays edited by Robert Regan, 1967; Poe, Journalist and Critic by Robert D. Jacobs, 1969; Poe the Poet: Essays New and Old on the Man and His Work by Floyd Stovall, 1969; Plots and Characters in the Fiction and Poetry of Poe by Robert L. Gale, 1970; Twentieth-Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales edited by William L. Howarth, 1971; Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe Poe by Daniel Hoffman, 1972; Poe: A Phenomenological View by David Halliburton, 1973; Poe's Fiction: Romantic Irony in the Gothic Tales by G.R. Thompson, 1973; Poe by David Sinclair, 1977; Building Poe Biography by John Carl Miller, 1977; The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Poe by Julian Symons, 1978; The Extraordinary Mr. Poe by Wolf Mankowitz, 1978; The Rationale of Deception in Poe by David Ketterer, 1979; A Psychology of Fear: The Nightmare Formula of Poe by David R. Saliba, 1980; A Poe Companion: A Guide to the Short Stories, Romances, and Essays by J.R. Hammond, 1981; Poe by Bettina L. Knapp, 1984; The Genius of Poe by Georges Zayed, 1985; Poe: The Critical Heritage edited by I.M. Walker, 1986; Poe, Death and the Life of Writing by J. Gerald Kennedy, 1987; Fables of Mind: An Inquiry into Poe's Fiction by Joan Dayan, 1987; The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Poe 1809-1849 by Dwight Thomas and David Jackson, 1987; Poe: The Design of Order by A. Robert Lee, 1987; A World of Words: Language and Displacement in the Fiction of Poe by Michael J.S. Williams, 1988; Poe: His Life and Legacy by Jeffrey Meyers, 1992; Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance by Kenneth Silverman, 1992; Reading at the Social Limit: Affect, Mass Culture, and Edgar Allan Poe by Jonathan Elmer, 1995; Perspectives on Poe edited by D. Ramakrishna, 1996; The Peculiarity of Literature: An Allegorical Approach to Poe's Fiction by Jeffrey DeShell, 1997.

In the history of the short story Edgar Allan Poe 's position is secure. Not only did he author a remarkable number of excellent stories, he also wrote what is considered to be the first theoretical statement on the short story itself. Moreover, many literary historians assigned to Poe the honor of having been the so-called "father" of the genre. There were, it is true, several other short story writers more or less contemporary with Poe, like Nikolai Gogol in Russia and Nathaniel Hawthorne in the United States , who are also considered to have produced the "first" short story. Perhaps more important than who was first is the setting down of definition that served to distinguish what came to be called the short story from the "tale," a kind of short fiction that includes such forms as fairy tales, parables, loosely constructed narratives, and sketches. The reader should not be confused by Poe's use of "tale" as nomenclature. It was some 40 years after Poe's definition was published that "the short story" was actually named by another American writer named Brander Matthews.

Poe's definition appears in his review of Hawthorne's Twice Told Tales . The most relevant paragraph in the review is important enough to be quoted here:

A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents; but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents—he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect. If his very initial sentence tends not to the outbringing of this effect, then he has failed in his first step. In the whole composition there should be no word written, of which the tendency, direct or indirect, is not to the one pre-established design. And by such means, with such care and skill, a picture is at length painted which leaves in the mind of him who contemplates it with a kindred art, a sense of the fullest satisfaction.

In insisting upon absolute unity and coherence Poe emphasizes the tightness of the form, the texture of the fabric, as it were. Just as important as the fabric, however, is Poe's insistence on the active participation of the reader who becomes a kind of co-creator to interpret symbolic substructures that provide for the story complex meanings, thus allowing depth as well as breadth.

Poe was one of the few American writers able to make a living from his writing and a dismal living it was. It did, however, encourage him to write in a tremendous variety of forms—both fiction and nonfiction. In the latter category few readers know of his editing capabilities, the range of his essays, the extent of his reviews, or the depth of his metaphysical probings. Of his fiction, it is said that he is probably the most popular American author; most every schoolchild has read one or another of his stories. Unfortunately in the past some literary historians and critics, mistakenly confusing "popular" with simple, denigrated Poe's achievements. Few such scholars exist today.

Poe's stories are of several kinds: the tales of terror, sometimes classified as "arabesque"; mysteries, sometimes classified as "tales of ratiocination"; satires; and tales of the future, sometimes referred to as flights and fancies. Poe's stories most often read are the ones most often anthologized, and those most often anthologized are selections from his tales of the arabesque, tales of ratiocination, and very occasionally, satires.

"Mask of the Red Death" is plainly arabesque. Most who read it are mesmerized by it to the extent that they often fail to notice the absence of the point of view most often used by Poe, a first-person narrator who is the central character in the story. A moment of consideration will explain the need for a different kind of point of view. At the end of the story no one is alive in Prince Prospero's group to recount the tale. Often Poe's stories contain little dialogue; but this one contains less than others—one sentence—a question: "Who dares?"

Many critics have attempted to attach allegoric significance to the various colors of each of the rooms or to the precise movements of the chase through the rooms. What is generally agreed upon is the tale's mesmerizing effect and the surreal setting with its dreamlike and lyrical elements that suffuse the story.

This is not to say the story is without allegoric meaning. Prince Prospero takes a group of knights and ladies of his court to the deep seclusion of one of his abbeys. The abbey is well protected by lofty walls and gates of iron. Once inside, Prospero's courtiers weld the bolts so that they cannot get out and, they think, nothing can get in. Their fear is the "Red Death," a plague that has devastated the country. The masque that Prospero devises to celebrate his safety becomes instead a dance macabre whose choreography climaxes when the Red Death chases Prospero from room to room and catches him in the ebony room. The clock ticks for the last time; the unnamed detached narrator says, "Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all."

Poe's most famous contribution to "double" literature is "William Wilson." In "double" stories one person seems to be a reflected image of another. Often images are counterparts, often in counterpoint. In "William Wilson" the double is an exact image of the narrator's corrupt, unscrupulous, and perverted self. The storyline exists on two levels. On the one hand the double is a real person interacting with others and being seen by them. On the other hand the double seems to be but a surreal projection arising from the mazes of the corridors and rooms and the house itself, incomprehensible in its windings and subdivisions that seem a reflection of the human mind in a labyrinth-like dream state.

"The Man of the Crowd" is often said to be in the style and thrust of a Hawthorne story rather than one typically Poe's. Hawthorne's "Wakefield," for example, is about a man who leaves his wife for some unaccountable reason and then just as unaccountably returns many years later expecting to be welcomed as usual by a faithful wife. There are, however, important differences between the stories. One is point of view. In Poe's story the narrator is a character who is recovering from a recent illness and who is mesmerized by the behavior of the man of the crowd. The narrator follows the old man like a shadow through the whole of night and a day until he is "wearied onto death"; but the narrator still is unable to fathom the old man's behavior and he concludes with a quotation in German: " Er lässt sich nicht lesen " ("It does not permit itself to be read"). But the story can be read if the narrator is realized to be an image of the old man, a double. The narrator follows the man of the crowd who is unable to make commitments to a few but desires to be one among many and detached from all. This is the deep crime, a metaphor for ultimate isolation. The narrator sees his shadow self in the old man but cannot face the truth, so he turns to an excuse that what is there cannot be understood.

"Hop Frog" is sometimes characterized as one of the arabesque tales, but the story seems to fit best under the category satire or even, perhaps, under the category flights and fancies. Not so often read as Poe's most popular stories, "Hop Frog" is nevertheless a perfect gem of a story making use of a basic comic situation where the jokester is made the butt of the joke. In this story the king's prize fool makes a fool of the king. Hop Frog is a dwarf, in himself a comic contrast. Crippled, he walks between a "leap and a wriggle," but he has prodigious strength in his arms. His intellect and cunning are juxtaposed against his position as fool in the court. Like the dwarf, the king and his ministers are described in comic terms. The very idea that a ruling monarch and his ministers should have practical jokes as their main interest is incongruous with their positions. Hop Frog is willing to accept his ill treatment, but when the king insults the female dwarf, Trippetta, Hop Frog uses his intellect and great strength to concoct a situation where a masquerade becomes the occasion for a frenzied scene. The king and his ministers, costumed as apes, face one another chained together while the ape-like dwarf taunts them and finally sets them on fire; the reader watches, horrified and yet somehow understanding the dwarf's satisfaction as he makes his last jest for the doomed king.

Poe's influence on psychoanalytic approaches to thematic materials is clear; so is his influence on the modern detective story of the Sherlock Holmes variety. Poe's brilliant detective is C. Auguste Dupin. Dupin's Watson is the narrator of the Dupin mysteries, the one who makes it possible for the detective to explain his inductive leaps. Another essential ingredient is a representative of the police, in "The Purloined Letter," for example, the prefect who heads up a competent group whose major fault is they are simply competent. In fact, the police can make use of reason; but they have no imagination and consequently can make no inductive leaps. When "The Purloined Letter" begins, the crime has been committed; the guilty one is already known. The problem involves the question of where a purloined letter is hidden after it is stolen. The greater part of the story functions to show the great detective at work and in his glory as he reveals the solution to the mystery and the superiority of his own mind.

—Mary Rohrberger

See the essays on " The Cask of Amontillado ," " The Fall of the House of Usher ," " The Murders in the Rue Morgue ," and " The Purloined Letter ."

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Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849)

Edgar allan poe (1809-1849).

Poet, author, and journalist

Career. The son of two impoverished actors and whose father abandoned the family, Edgar Allan Poe was raised as a foster child by the wealthy Allan family in Richmond, Virginia, following his mother ’ s death and his father ’ s disappearance. He briefly attended the University of Virginia and West Point , never graduating from either institution, and served in the army from 1827 to 1829, when he was discharged. He drifted for several years, publishing volumes of poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), and Poems (1831). In December 1835 Poe became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger , a position he was asked to leave in 1837 because of excessive drinking and differences with the magazine ’ s publisher. In 1839 he worked in Philadelphia as editor of Burton ’ s Gentleman ’ s Magazine , leaving in 1840 in order to begin his own periodical, to be called the Penn Magazine . Instead in 1841 he became editor of Graham ’ s Magazine , leaving a year later, still hoping to establish his own journal (now to be called The Stylus ). Poe then moved to New York , where he would live for the rest of his life. In 1845 he published his best-known poem, “ The Raven ” (in The Raven and Other Poems ), which became an overnight success. He edited the Broadway Journal until it folded in 1846. He died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849. The circumstances of Poe ’ s death have always been unclear; he was found semi-conscious and was taken by acquaintances to Washington Medical College. John J. Moran, the physician who attended Poe, reported symptoms of delirium tremens , and others who knew him attributed his death to alcohol. Moran later disputed this, and some Baltimore newspapers attributed his death to “ congestion of the brain ” or “ cerebral inflammation, ” perhaps caused by exposure to the cold and rainy weather.

Literary Style. Poe was both a romantic and a rationalist. Influenced by the works of George Gordon, Lord Byron and Samuel Taylor Coleridge as well as by German Gothic writers Ludwig Tieck and E. T. A. Hoffmann, Poe ’ s own work presented unsettling images of death, madness, and terror in carefully produced and arranged forms. Fascinated with the world of dreams, trances, madness, and horror, Poe at the same time was strongly interested in scientific analysis and thought and sought-in his short stories to draw realistic portraits of particular mental states in ways that would appeal to mass audiences. Stories such as “ The Pit and the Pendulum, ” “ The Black Cat, ” “ The Tell-Tale Heart ” “ The Masque of the Red Death, ” and “ The Fall of the House of Usher ” all reflected Poe ’ s ability to portray the mind ’ s experience of terror and horror and his use of symbolism to carry those themes. Other stories focused on the world of crime: “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue, ” published in Graham ’ s Magazine in April 1841, was the first American detective story, and its crime-solving C. Auguste Dupin was a forerunner of Sherlock Holmes . Poe published several other detective stories, some featuring Dupin, including the prizewinning “ The Gold-Bug, ” “ The Mystery of Marie Roget, ” “ The Purloined Letter, ” and “ Thou Art the Man. ” By focusing on the mental work involved in crime-solving, Poe emphasized the way intuition and logic worked together in the mind to form conclusions.

Art for Art ’ s Sake. Significantly, Poe avoided any hint of moralism in these often disturbing stories, believing that art ’ s chief responsibility lay in the transmission of beauty. In his lecture “ The Poetic Principle ” (delivered in 1848 and published posthumously) Poe warned against “ the heresy of The Didactic ” in art, arguing that art should not be expected to carry moral messages but should be pursued for its own sake. This belief in art for art ’ s sake sharply separated Poe from the majority of nineteenth-century artists; Poe ’ s theories would later be embraced by the French Symbolists, particularly Charles Baudelaire .

Philosophy. Poe theorized more about poetry than about prose, and in addition to “ The Poetic Principle ” he published two essays explicitly about poetic composition, “ The Philosophy of Composition ” (1846) and “ Rationale of Verse ” (1848). In “ The Philosophy of Composition ” Poe explained how he had gone about composing “ The Raven, ” paying close attention to the musical and emotional effects he had determined the poem should have on its readers and how he composed with those effects always in mind. In this essay Poe famously asserted that since the most poetical feeling was melancholia, and the most melancholy of subjects was death, “ the death … of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world, ” a sentiment which may, perhaps, have reflected Poe ’ s own long-standing grief over the loss of his young mother and the wasting illness of his young wife, Virginia Clemm. With a similar emphasis on effect Poe argued that the best poetry should be short, in order to be an easily comprehended whole, and as closely imitative of music as possible since both music and poetry sought to capture an all but inexpressible eternal beauty. Ralph Waldo Emerson referred to Poe as the Jingle Man, reflecting Emerson ’ s resistance to Poe ’ s belief in art for art ’ s sake and his sense of Poe ’ s poetry as being more rhythmic than meaningful. Many of Poe ’ s poems do carry a strongly marked rhythm and an attentiveness to sound — for example, his “ Ulalume, ” whose rhythmic force can be felt even in its title, and “ The Raven. ”

Editor and Critic. As an editor Poe published a significant amount of literary criticism, most of it sharply critical. Poe understood the critic ’ s task to be an examination of a work in terms of a particular set of standards; the critic would read, analyze, and judge the work before him. His attacks on New York writers in a series of reviews published in Godey ’ s Lady ’ s Book in 1846 earned him the nickname “ The Man with the Tomahawk. ” He was also hostile toward New England writers, often referring to Boston as Frogpondium and to the Transcendentalists as Frogpondian Euphuists. Poe accused Henry Wadsworth Longfellow on several different occasions of plagiarism, and in his review of Longfellow ’ s Ballads and Other Poems (1842) Poe attacked Longfellow for his didacticism. In return, literary critic Margaret Fuller in 1845 remarked that “ A large band … must be on the watch for a volume of ‘ Poems by Edgar A. Poe, ’ ready to cut, rend, and slash in turn. ” Not all of Poe ’ s reviews were hostile, however; he praised William Cullen Bryant ’ s Poems in 1846 and Nathaniel Hawthorne ’ s Twice-Told Tales in 1837. In 1842 he wrote a long review of Charles Dickens ’ s Barnaby Rudge (1841), whose murder-mystery theme made it a story after Poe ’ s own heart. In this review Poe prefigured his most famous poem in suggesting how Dickens might have done more with the figure of a raven that appears in the story:

Its croakings might have been prophetically heard in the course of the drama. Its character might have performed, in regard to that of the idiot [character] much the same part as does, in music, the accompaniment in respect to the air. Each might have been distinct. Each might have differed remarkably from the other. Yet between them there might have been wrought an analogical resemblance, and although each might have existed apart, they might have formed together a whole which would have been imperfect in the absence of the either.

Kenneth Silverman, Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance ( New York : HarperCollins, 1991).

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Edgar Allan Poe

Unquestionably one of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience—the "inner world" of dream, hallucination, and imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and was a magazine editor.

Edgar Allan Poe was best known to his own generation as an editor and critic; his poems and short stories commanded only a small audience. But to some extent in his poems, and to an impressive degree in his tales, he pioneered in opening up areas of human experience for artistic treatment at which his contemporaries only hinted. His vision asserts that reality for the human being is essentially subterranean, contradictory to surface reality, and profoundly irrational in character. Two generations later he was hailed by the symbolist movement as the prophet of the modern sensibility.

Poe was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809, the son of professional actors. By the time he was 3, Edgar, his older brother, and younger sister had lost their mother to consumption and their father through desertion. The children were split up, going to various families to live. Edgar went to the charitable Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name.

A New Family

The Allans were wealthy then and were to become more so later, and though they never adopted Poe, for many years it appeared that he was to be their heir. They treated him like an adopted son, saw to his education in private academies, and took him to England for a 5-year stay; and at least Mrs. Allan bestowed considerable affection upon him.

As Edgar entered adolescence, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of his ward's literary inclinations, thought him surly and ungrateful, and gradually seems to have decided that Poe was not to be his heir after all. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia , Allan's allowance was so meager that Poe turned to gambling to supplement his income. In 8 months he lost $2, 000. Allan's refusal to help him led to total estrangement, and in March 1827 Poe stormed out on his own.

Poe managed to get to Boston, where he signed up for a 5-year enlistment in the U.S. Army. In 1827, as well, he had his Tamerlane and Other Poems published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the highest noncommissioned rank in the Army, sergeant major . He was reluctant to serve out the full enlistment, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the Army on the understanding that he would seek an appointment at West Point . He thought that such a move might cause a reconciliation with his guardian. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore and received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal. Armed with these new credentials, Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but another violent quarrel forced him to leave in May 1830.

The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long as a cadet. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." His guardian, long widowed, had taken a young wife who might well give him an heir, and Poe realized that his hopes of a legacy were without foundation.

Marriage and the Search for a Place

During his early years of exile Poe had lived in Baltimore for a while with his aunt Maria Clemm and her 7-year-old daughter, Virginia. He returned to his aunt's home in 1831, publishing Poems by Edgar Allan Poe and beginning to place short stories in magazines. In 1833 he received a prize for "MS. Found in a Bottle, " and John Pendleton Kennedy got him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 Poe married his cousin Virginia—now 13 years old—and moved to Richmond with his bride and mother-in-law. Excessive drinking lost him his job in 1837, but he had produced prolifically for the journal. He had contributed his Politian, as well as 83 reviews, 6 poems, 4 essays, and 3 short stories. He had also quintupled the magazine's circulation. Rejection in the face of such accomplishment was extremely distressing to him, and his state of mind from then on, as one biographer put it, "was never very far from panic."

The panic accelerated after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York , where he did hack work and managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Then they moved to Philadelphia, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In 2 years he boosted its circulation from 5, 000 to 20, 000 and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840, furthermore, he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left for the literary editorship of Graham's Magazine.

It was becoming clear that 2 years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and his stay at Graham's confirmed this principle. Though he contributed skillfully wrought fiction and unquestionably developed as a critic, his endless literary feuding, his alcoholism, and his inability to get along very well with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and Crisis

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a $100 prize for his "The Gold Bug, " but Poe was now facing a kind of psychological adversity against which he was virtually helpless. His wife, who had been an absolutely crucial source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption that would eventually kill her. When his burden became too great, he tried to relieve it with alcohol, which made him ill.

After great struggle Poe got a job on the New York Mirror in 1844. He lasted, characteristically, into 1845, switching then to the editorship of the Broadway Journal. Although he was now deep in public literary feuds, things seemed to be breaking in his favor. The 1844 publication of the poem "The Raven" finally brought him some fame, and in 1845 the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales, both containing some of his best work, did in fact move him into fashionable literary society. But his wife's health continued to deteriorate, and he was not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to sustain steady employment, and amid the din of plagiarism charges and libel suits, his fortunes sank to the point that he and his family almost starved in their Fordham cottage in the winter of 1846. Then, on Jan. 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died.

The wonder is not that Poe began totally to disintegrate but that he nevertheless continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the brilliantly ambitious Eureka, and he was even to make a final, heart-wrenching attempt at rehabilitation. He returned to Richmond in 1849, there to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore. Nobody knows exactly what happened, and there is no real proof that he was picked up by a gang who used him to "repeat" votes, but he was found on October 3 in a stupor near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital 4 days later.

World of His Work

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. Behind a screen of sometimes substantial, sometimes flimsy "reality, " his fictional work resembles the dreams of a distressed individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

Poe's critics interpret this pattern to represent the search of the individual for himself by going deep into himself and his ultimate arrival at the unplumbed mystery of his inner self. This search has come, of course, to characterize much of 20th-century art, and it is the distinguished accomplishment of Poe as an artist that his work looks forward with such startling precision to the work of the century that followed.

Further Reading

Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), is extremely reliable. Two very readable treatments are Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (1934), and William R. Bittner, Poe: A Biography (1962). A thorough study is Edward C. Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend (1963). Two critical studies which supplement each other are Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1957), which concentrates on the fiction, and Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (1957), which emphasizes the poetry. See also Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe (1933); Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe (1953); and Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (1958). Perry Miller , The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (1956), and Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (1963), discuss Poe in the context of his times. For a full list of Poe's works see Robert E. Spiller and others, eds., Literary History of the United States , vol. 3 (1948; 3d rev. ed. 1963). □

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Born: January 19, 1809 Boston, Massachusetts Died: October 7, 1849 Baltimore , Maryland American poet and writer

One of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience — the "inner world" of dreams and the imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and also worked as a magazine editor.

Orphaned at three

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both professional actors. By the time he was three, Edgar, his older brother, and his younger sister were orphans; their father deserted the family, and then their mother died. The children were each sent to different families to live. Edgar went to the Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name. The Allans were wealthy, and though they never adopted Poe, they treated him like a son, made sure he was educated in private academies, and took him to England for a five-year stay. Mrs. Allan, at least, showed considerable affection toward him.

As Edgar entered his teenage years, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of Edgar's ambition to become a writer, thought he was ungrateful, and seems to have decided to cut Poe out of his will. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia , he had so little money that he turned to gambling in an attempt to make money. In eight months he lost two thousand dollars. Allan's refusal to help him led to a final break between the two, and in March 1827 Poe went out on his own.

Enlists in the army

Poe then signed up for a five-year term in the U.S. Army. In 1827 his Tamerlane and Other Poems was published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major . He did not want to serve out the full five years, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the army on the condition that he would seek an appointment at West Point Academy. He thought such a move might please John Allan. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore, Maryland, and it received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal.

Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but he left in May 1830 after he and Allan had another violent quarrel. The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." Poe realized that he would never receive financial help from Allan.

Marriage and editing jobs

Poe lived in Baltimore for a while with his aunt Maria Clemm and her seven-yearold daughter, Virginia. In 1831 he published Poems by Edgar Allan Poe and began to place short stories in magazines. In 1833 he received a prize for "Ms. Found in a Bottle," and his friend John Pendleton Kennedy, a lawyer and writer, got him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 Poe married his cousin Virginia — now thirteen years old — and moved to Richmond with her and her mother. Although excessive drinking caused him to lose his job in 1837, he had written eighty-three reviews, six poems, four essays, and three short stories for the journal. He had also greatly increased its sales. Losing this job was extremely distressing to him, and his state of mind from then on, as one biographer put it, "was never very far from panic."

The panic increased after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York City, where he managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long work of fiction. The family then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In two years he boosted its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840 he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left to work as the editor of Graham's Magazine. It was becoming clear that two years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and though he contributed quality fiction and criticism to the magazine, his drinking, his feuding with other writers, and his inability to get along with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and crisis

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Man That Was Used Up" emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for his story "The Gold Bug," but Poe's problems were increasing. His wife, who had been a vital source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption (or tuberculosis, an infection of the lungs) that would eventually kill her. When his troubles became too great, Poe tried to relieve them by drinking, which made him ill. Things seemed to improve slightly in 1844; the publication of the poem "The Raven" brought him some fame, and this success was followed in 1845 by the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales. But his wife's health continued to worsen, and he was still not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to keep steady employment, and things got so bad that he and his family almost starved in the winter of 1846. Then, on January 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died. Somehow Poe continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the ambitious Eureka, and he returned to Richmond in 1849 to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York City at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore, Maryland. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was found unconscious on October 3, 1849, near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital four days later.

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. His fictional work resembles the dreams of a troubled individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, or a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

For More Information

Bittner, William R. Poe: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York : Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York : Appleton-Century, 1941. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick , NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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Edgar Allan Poe was a master of the gothic tale, a style of fiction characterized by eerie settings and gloomy, violent, and horrifying atmospheres. He is also remembered as the inventor of the modern detective story.

Poe was born on January 19, 1809, the son of professional actors. When he was three, his mother died of tuberculosis (known then as consumption, a disease of the lungs) and his father had already abandoned the family. Poe was sent to live in Richmond, Virginia , at the home of a wealthy and childless couple, John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his middle name. Frances Allan loved Poe like a son, but the relationship with John Allan was strained.

Early years

Poe was educated in private academies. He did well in all subjects, but literature absorbed his attention. By age fourteen, he was writing poetry. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826, where he took up more than studying; drinking large quantities of alcohol and gambling became new habits. This soon led to an estrangement with John Allan; Poe was cut off from all funds in 1827.

The young man set off for Boston, Massachusetts , determined to become a great writer. There he published a book of poems, but they attracted little attention. In desperate need of an income, Poe decided to join the U.S. Army . Surprisingly, he adapted well to military discipline and quickly rose to the rank of sergeant major , the highest noncommissioned grade in the Army. After receiving an appointment to West Point Military Academy in New York , Poe discovered that the life of an officer-in-training was not at all what he had expected. Frustrated, he began drinking heavily and stopped attending his classes. He was kicked out of the academy in 1831.

Writer and editor

Poe eventually went to stay in Baltimore, Maryland , with an impoverished aunt and her family and spent most of his time writing. In 1831, he published a book of poems and placed a few short stories in magazines. In 1833, he got a job as an assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger . A hard worker and a brilliant literary critic, Poe contributed greatly to the literary journal. It is estimated that he quintupled the magazine's readership. He also offended many writers with his sharp criticism and infuriated his boss with his bouts of heavy drinking. He was fired in 1837.

In 1836, Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia. He and his wife and mother-inlaw moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania , where he joined the staff of Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine in 1839.

Productive years

Poe's longest work, his novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket , was published in 1838. The novel, which is actually a series of stories strung together, tells the story of Arthur Gordon Pym's ocean voyages, which take him ever closer to the South Pole . Begun as a high seas adventure tale, the stories soon turn to the fantastic and supernatural.

During Poe's days at Burton's , he published many of his best stories, including “Ligeia” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In “Ligeia,” a man recounts the death of his beloved wife, his remarriage to a woman he grows to hate, and his first wife's resurrection in the dead body of the second wife. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is the tale of the last descendants, a twin brother and sister, of a cursed family doomed to live in a haunted mansion that seems to be alive with evil. The struggles between life and death and reason and insanity eventually bring the mansion toppling in on itself, killing those inside.

In 1839, he published all his existing stories in a two-volume set titled Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . It sold very few copies. In 1840, Poe attempted to establish his own literary magazine called the Penn , but he failed to find backers. He took a job with Graham's Magazine , remaining there until 1842.

Detective stories

Before joining Graham's , Poe had begun writing “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” which is considered one of the first modern detective stories. Featuring a brilliant detective named C. Auguste Dupin and his dimwitted assistant, the story solved its crime through a process of rational thought and detection. For four years, between 1841 and 1845, Poe wrote more detective stories, such as “The Mystery of Marie Roget,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Gold Bug.” Scottish writer Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859–1930), creator of fiction's most famous detective, Sherlock Holmes , proclaimed Poe the father of the detective tale. These stories earned Poe an improved reputation and more money than he had ever earned before.

“The Raven”

In January 1845, Poe published the poem that would bring him his greatest fame, “The Raven.” In the poem, a depressed man asks a raven perched upon his windowsill if he will meet his dead lover, Lenore, in the afterlife. The poem created an immediate sensation and made Poe a minor celebrity.

Poe's fame soon fell prey to his drunkenness and despair. His wife, Virginia, was dying slowly and painfully of tuberculosis. Poe was frequently seen wandering drunkenly through the streets of New York . Virginia died on January 30, 1847, leaving Poe in a deep depression for nearly a year.

Death and reputation

In July 1849, Poe traveled by train to call on a former childhood sweetheart, and on the way back he stopped in Baltimore. No one knows what happened to him there. A few days later, he was found unconscious in a gutter and was taken to a hospital. Already too far gone to recover, he died several days later.

Poe's reputation has undergone many twists since his death. His literary executor (the person who takes care of the works of an author after his or her death) was jealous of Poe and did all he could to paint him as a vicious drunk who lacked moral principle. In 1874, a biographer published a well-researched and positive portrait of Poe that began to set the record straight. Gradually, writers and critics recognized the late horror writer's talent. His works began to be issued anew. By the second half of the twentieth century, Poe was recognized as one of the great geniuses of American literature . He retains a popular audience rare among so-called “classic” authors, for his tales of terror contain a fascination and a mystery that appeals to many readers.

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger , Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe’s death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe’s poetry and prose, however, have endured.

Early Years

Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, to traveling actors David Poe Jr. (a Baltimore, Maryland, native) and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (an emigrant from England). Poe was the couple’s second of three children. His brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, was born in 1807, and his sister, Rosalie Poe, was born in 1810. On December 8, 1811, when Poe was just two years old, his mother died in Richmond. His father, who had left the family in 1810, died of unknown circumstances. Henry, as William Henry Leonard was known, lived with his grandparents in Baltimore, while Rosalie and Edgar remained in Richmond. William and Jane Mackenzie adopted Rosalie, and Edgar became the foster son of John and Frances Allan. Poe received his middle name from his foster parents.

In 1815 Allan, a tobacco merchant, moved with his wife and foster son to England in an attempt to improve his business interests there. Poe attended school in Chelsea until 1820, when the family returned to Richmond. John Allan had always hoped that Poe would join his own mercantile firm, but Poe was determined to become a writer and, in particular, a poet. In 1826, he attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Although he distinguished himself academically, Allan denied him financial support after less than a year because of Poe’s gambling debts and what Allan perceived to be his ward’s lack of direction. Without money, Poe returned briefly to Richmond, only to find that his fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster, under the direction of her family, had married an older and wealthier suitor, Alexander Shelton.

Disheartened and penniless, Poe left Richmond for Boston where, using the name “A Bostonian,” he authored Tamerlane and other Poems (1827), a collection of seven brief, lyrical poems. In particular, “The Lake” employs what would become typical Poe-esque symbolism, with calm waters representing the speaker’s repressed emotions, always threatening to dangerously swell. The book’s sales were negligible.

Still unable to support himself, Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the pseudonym “Edgar A. Perry.” (He was eighteen at the time but claimed to be twenty-two.) During his military service, he was stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston, South Carolina—a site he would later appropriate as the setting for his story, “The Gold Bug”—and then at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. On February 28, 1829, while Poe was in Virginia, his foster mother, Frances Allan, died.

Despite having been promoted to sergeant major, Poe became dissatisfied with army life and appealed to his foster father for help in releasing him from his five-year commitment. In a December 1, 1828, letter to Allan, Poe worried that “the prime of my life would be wasted” in the army and threatened “more decided measures if you refuse to assist me.” During this tumultuous period, Poe compiled a second collection of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829), but it, too, received little attention. Critics described the poems in terms ranging from “incoherent” to “beautiful and enduring.”

With Allan’s help, Poe left the army and was admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he attended from 1830 until 1831. Poe thrived academically, but again experienced financial problems, this time running afoul of both his foster father and school officials. Expelled from West Point and disowned by Allan, Poe traveled to Baltimore to reside with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her young daughter, Virginia. The events of Poe’s life from 1831 until 1833 remain relatively obscure.

Out of Obscurity

While living in Baltimore, Poe turned in earnest to his literary efforts. His third volume of verse, Poems (1831), hints at the Gothic sensibility—in particular, a preoccupation with death and psychological instability—that would become his trademark. For instance, “Irene” (revised as “The Sleeper”) features a distraught young man who, at midnight, mourns over his lover’s corpse: “Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress, / Strange above all, thy length of tress, / And this all solemn silentness!” Poe received some help and encouragement from the literary editor and critic John Neal, but his poems continued to attract scant notice.

In an effort to improve his financial position, Poe turned to fiction. Because they sold the best, he wrote mostly Gothic-style horror and suspense stories and, in 1831, entered five of them in a contest sponsored by the weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia Saturday Courier . Although he won no prize, the tales were published anonymously during 1832. In October 1833, Poe’s story “MS. Found in a Bottle”—about a midnight accident at sea and a mysterious ship that appears out of the “watery hell”—won a competition sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . His poem “The Coliseum” would have been awarded best poem, as well, but the judges preferred not to offer both prizes to a single author.

One of the competition’s judges was John Pendleton Kennedy, a Whig Party politician, literary editor, and author of Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). In 1835, Kennedy encouraged Poe to apply for an assistant editor position at the Southern Literary Messenger , a Richmond-based magazine founded the previous year by Thomas Willis White. Poe received the job and was soon promoted to editor despite clashing with White over his—Poe’s—excessive drinking.

In May 1836, for the first time feeling financially secure enough to marry, Poe wed his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Historians disagree over whether they consummated their marriage. Virginia’s mother, Poe’s aunt, kept house for the couple and continued to do so for Poe after Virginia’s death.

Poe’s work at the Messenger helped him climb out of literary obscurity. Under his direction, the journal’s circulation increased and Poe began to develop contacts with the northern literary establishment. He turned these successes to his advantage, publishing revised versions of his own stories and poems. Still, he became best known for his caustic literary criticism, such as a December 1835 review of Theodore S. Fay’s novel, Norman Leslie : “We do not mean to say that there is positively nothing in Mr. Fay’s novel to commend—but there is indeed very little.” And about Morris Mattson’s Paul Ulric , he wrote, in February 1836: “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric .”

That Fay was a darling of the New York literary establishment helped provoke a long-running feud between Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of New York City’s Knickerbocker Magazine and an ardent defender of northern literary sensibilities. Poe and Clark insulted one another in print for years, with Clark, in 1845, calling Poe “‘nothing if not critical,’ and even less than nothing at that.”

A New Literary Sensibility

Poe’s sharp-tongued criticisms may have won him lifelong enemies, but they also served to articulate an important new literary sensibility. Poems should be short, he argued, and poems should be beautiful. In his “Letter to Mr. B—,” published in the Messenger (July 1836), Poe mocks William Wordsworth for his “long wordy discussions by which he tries to reason us into admiration of his poetry,” and then, after quoting the poet on the subject of a “snow-white mountain lamb,” sarcastically rejoinders: “Now, we have no doubt this is all true: we will believe it, indeed we will, Mr. W. Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart.”

True literature, meanwhile, should celebrate beauty for its own sake and not be burdened with the sort of purposefulness one might find in a Sunday morning sermon. Here, Poe both echoes Nathaniel Hawthorne—who famously complained of those inclined “relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod”—and pokes fun at his Puritan sensibilities: “I see no reason, then, why our metaphysical poets should plume themselves so much on the utility of their works, unless indeed they refer to instruction with eternity in view; in which case, sincere respect for their piety would not allow me to express contempt for their judgment … ”

“The Tell-Tale Heart” Over the years, Poe also argued that the short story was the supreme form in fiction, meant to be tightly constructed and convey a single, unified impression. In Poe’s case, that impression was most often fear, foreboding, and dread, as evidenced in short stories like “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), which describes an excruciatingly slow plan of revenge. And for such unified impressions to take hold, brevity—a term Poe calculated to mean a work that took no longer than ninety minutes to read—was crucial. “As the novel cannot be read at one sitting,” he wrote in 1842 in an admiring review of a Hawthorne collection, “it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality . Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusals, modify, counteract and annul the impressions intended.”

Poe did not limit his fiction to Gothic tales, however. From 1833 until 1836, he attempted and failed to find a publisher for his collection of satirical stories, Tales of the Folio Club . In the book, club members meet monthly to critique each other’s stories, all of which turn out to be caricatures of the styles of popular writers from Poe’s day. His critical ax never dull, Poe still managed to place a number of the stories in journals such as the Messenger and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier .

After Richmond

After years of battling the northern literary elite, Poe left the Messenger in January 1837 and moved north himself, working in various editorial posts, most notably at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia. Sometime between November 1839 and January 1840, his two-volume collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published, providing a broader audience to many of his previously published stories. In stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe rebutted charges of “Germanism and gloom,” Germany being a preferred literary source for his Gothic sensibility. “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis,” he wrote, “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul—”

His famous opening to “Usher” suggests that he more than walked the walk of his literary philosophy, expertly compressing Teutonic gloom into a single storm cloud of a sentence: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

Graham’s , meanwhile, featured some of Poe’s most assertive original fiction. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (April 1841), for instance, Poe introduced the detective story prototype that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make so famous with his Sherlock Holmes episodes: an uncannily observant detective solves the crime while accompanied by his friend, who also narrates the events. In “The Masque of the Red Death” (May 1842), Poe traded the hyper-logic of detectives for the psychological horror of disease and inevitable death, describing a masquerade ball set in a plague-stricken Italian castle.

Later Years

By 1844, Poe had relocated to New York, home of any number of his most bitter literary enemies and where he became the editor and then owner of the literary weekly, Broadway Journal . In January 1845, the New York Evening Mirror published his poem, “The Raven,” a disturbing account of its grief-stricken narrator’s encounter with a bird that knows but one word: “Nevermore.” The poem’s opening lines— “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,”—are among the most famous in the English language and brought Poe wide and almost instant acclaim. Nevertheless, they failed to deliver him from his persistent financial troubles.

Nor did Poe’s unpredictable moods and pugilistic criticism help him make friends in literary circles. In October 1845, he annoyed a Boston audience prepared for a talk about poetry by instead reciting his long and obscure poem “Al Aaraaf.” He continued to lampoon in print his fellow writers, including Thomas Dunn English, whom he worked with in Philadelphia. Some critics have even suggested that Poe used his feud with English as motivation for his revenge fantasy in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

When Broadway Journal went under in January 1846, Poe lost the most reliable venue for his attacks. And having alienated so many of his fellow writers and editors, he found it difficult to publish and, therefore, to make money. Then, in January 1847, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis, sending Poe into bouts of depression and torturous grief, during which he reportedly sought the comforts of alcohol. Some historians have speculated that his alcohol use was complicated by either diabetes or hypoglycemia, which would have resulted in violent mood swings. This, in turn, might help to explain later portraits of Poe—in particular from the pen of Rufus W. Griswold, who had succeeded him as editor at Graham’s —as an irreclaimable alcoholic.

In 1849, Poe traveled to Richmond to read his poetry and lecture on “The Philosophy of Composition,” which had been published in the April 1846 issue of Graham’s as a critical explication of his writing of “The Raven.” While there, he reunited with his one-time fiancée, Elmira Shelton, who was now widowed and wealthy. Poe decided to marry her and move to Richmond, and late in September departed for Fordham, New York, where he would arrange to move his aunt Maria to Virginia.

Edgar Allan Poe (Audio) The move never happened, however. A few weeks later, Poe was found unconscious and dangerously ill outside a Baltimore tavern. He died in the hospital on October 7, 1849, and received a swift burial in his grandfather Poe’s cemetery lot in the Westminster Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Baltimore. Historians have long disagreed about the exact cause of his death, suggesting everything from rabies to alcoholism.

Poe had given Griswold a memorandum from which to write a biography of him, but the editor’s use of this work was distinctly unflattering—even treacherous. Griswold quickly produced a polemic obituary and soon after undertook to publish a multivolume edition of Poe’s writings, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850–1856) , as well as an unjust and inflammatory fifty-page memoir detailing Poe’s life. This sketch, subsequently used by many later biographers, helped in part to create the caricature of Poe that has survived in American literary legend—as a death-obsessed, drug-addled debaucher.

Poe’s room on the West Range at the University of Virginia is open for viewing by the public. In Richmond, the Poe Museum, which first opened in 1922, features a large collection of the writer’s manuscripts, letters, first editions, and personal belongings.

Major Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems: By a Bostonian (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems, By Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (short novel, 1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• Prose Romances: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up (1843)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
• The Literati (1850)
• Politan: An Unfinished Tragedy (1923)

The Poe Museum

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center

The Poe Studies Association

• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Fisher, Benjamin F. Ed. Poe and His Times: The Artist in His Milieu. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990.
• Hayes, Kevin J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . New York: Appleton-Century, 1941; reprinted with a new foreword by Shawn Rosenheim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849 . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
• Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar allan poe biography.

E dgar Allan Poe's life story makes it easy to see where the author got his ideas and how his work relates to his experience. First, his father abandoned the family; then his mother died when he was very young, and his foster father, John Allen, erratically swung between lenience and extreme discipline; finally, Poe married his much younger cousin Virginia, who died at an early age. Is it any wonder, then, that Poe's work focused on the macabre, the bizarre, and the outcast? No. The wonder is that he found a way to make such striking art from his suffering. Before his death at age forty, Edgar Allan Poe raised the American short story to a new level, writing works that completely modernized detective fiction, science fiction, and, of course, the horror story.

Facts and Trivia

• Poe attended the University of Virginia—until he had to drop out due to lack of money. It seems that Poe had a gambling problem, and his foster father got tired of bailing him out.
• Broke, Poe lied about his age and joined the army. He served two years before getting himself dismissed by court martial.
• Poe’s short stories featuring C. Auguste Dupin shaped the modern mystery story so much that Arthur Conan Doyle compared Sherlock Holmes to Dupin, and the Mystery Writers of America give an award named the Edgar—after Poe, of course.
• Bizarre events related to Poe didn’t stop just because he died in 1849. He was buried in an unmarked grave, and when gossip finally led to a stone being ordered, it was destroyed in a train accident.
• Ever since 1949, someone has left a bottle of cognac and some roses on Poe’s grave. Who is leaving these things? And why?

Edgar Allan Poe Study Tools

Edgar Allan Poe was born January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold Poe, was a talented actress from an English theatrical family. Because Poe’s father, David Poe, Jr., a traveling actor of Irish descent, was neither talented nor responsible, the family suffered financially. After apparently separating from David Poe, Elizabeth died in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811. The young Edgar, though not legally adopted, was taken in by a wealthy Scottish tobacco exporter, John Allan, from whom Poe took his middle name.

For most of his early life, Poe lived in Richmond with the Allans, with the exception of a five-year period between 1815 and 1820 which he spent in England, where he attended Manor House School, near London. Back in America, he attended an academy until 1826, when he entered the University of Virginia. He withdrew less than a year later, however, because of various debts, many of them from gambling; Poe did not have the money to pay, and his foster-father refused to help. After quarreling with Allan about these debts, Poe left for Boston in the spring of 1827; shortly thereafter, perhaps because he was short of money, he enrolled in the United States Army under the name “Edgar A. Perry.”

In the summer of 1827, Poe’s first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems , published under the anonym “A Bostonian,” appeared, but it was little noticed by the reading public or by the critics. In January, 1829, he was promoted to the rank of sergeant major and was honorably discharged at his own request three months later. In December, 1829, Poe’s second book, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems , was published, and it was well received by the critics. Shortly thereafter, Poe entered West Point Military Academy, possibly as a way to get into his foster-father’s good graces.

After less than a year in school, Poe was discharged from West Point by court-martial for neglecting his military duties. Most biographers agree that Poe deliberately provoked his discharge because he had tired of West Point. Others suggest that he could not stay because John Allan refused to pay Poe’s bills any longer, although he would not permit Poe to resign. After West Point, Poe went to New York, where, with the help of some money raised by his West Point friends, he published Poems by Edgar A. Poe, Second Edition . After moving to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, Poe entered five short stories in a contest sponsored by the Philadelphia Saturday Courier . Although he did not win the prize, the newspaper published all five of his pieces. In June, 1833, he entered another contest sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter and this time won the prize of fifty dollars for his story “Ms. Found in a Bottle.” From this point until his death in 1849, Poe was very much involved in the world of American magazine publishing.

Life’s Work

During the next two years, Poe continued writing stories and trying to get them published. Even with the help of a new and influential friend, John Pendleton Kennedy, a lawyer and writer, he was mostly unsuccessful. Poe’s financial situation became even more desperate when, in 1834, John Allan died and left Poe out of his will. Kennedy finally persuaded the Southern Literary Messenger to publish several of Poe’s stories and to offer Poe the job of editor, a position which he kept from 1835 to 1837. During this time, Poe published stories and poems in the Messenger , but it was with his extensive publication of criticism that he began to make his mark in American letters.

Although much of Poe’s early criticism is routine review work, he began in his reviews to consider the basic nature of poetry and short fiction and to develop theoretical analyses of these two genres, drawing upon the criticism of A. W. Schlegel, in Germany, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in England. Poe’s most important contribution to criticism is his discussion of the distinctive generic characteristics of short fiction, in a famous review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales (1837). Poe makes such a convincing case for the organic unity of short fiction, argues so strongly for its dependence on a unified effect, and so clearly shows how the form is more closely allied to the poem than to the novel that his ideas have influenced literary critics ever since.

In 1836, Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, a decision which, because of her age and relationship to Poe, has made him the subject of much adverse criticism and psychological speculation. In 1837, after disagreements with the owner of the Messenger , Poe moved to New York to look for editorial work. There he completed the writing of The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long fiction, a novella-length metaphysical adventure. Unable to find work in New York, Poe moved to Philadelphia and published his first important short story, a Platonic romance titled “Ligeia.” In 1839, he joined the editorial staff of Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine , where he published two of his greatest stories, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson.”

In 1840, Poe left Burton’s and tried, unsuccessfully, to establish his own literary magazine. He did, however, publish a collection of his stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840), as well as become an editor of Graham’s Magazine , where he published his first tale of ratiocination, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” In this landmark story, he created the famous detective Auguste Dupin, the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes and thus of countless other private detectives in literature and film. A biographical sketch published at that time described Poe as short, slender, and well-proportioned, with a fair complexion, gray eyes, black hair, and an extremely broad forehead.

In 1842, Poe left Graham’s to try once again to establish his own literary magazine, but not before publishing two important pieces of criticism: a long review of the poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, in which he established his definition of poetry as being the “Rhythmical Creation of Beauty,” and his review of Hawthorne, in which he defined the short tale as the creation of a unified effect. Between 1842 and 1844, after Poe moved to New York to join the editorial staff of the New York Mirror , he published many of his most important stories, including “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” “The Black Cat,” and two more ratiocinative stories, “The Mystery of Marie Roget” and “The Gold Bug.” It was with the publication of his most famous poem, “The Raven,” in 1845, however, that he finally achieved popular success.

Poe left the New York Mirror to join a new weekly periodical, the Broadway Journal , in February of 1845, where he continued the literary war against Longfellow begun in a review written for the Mirror . The series of accusations, attacks, and counterattacks that ensued damaged Poe’s reputation as a critic at the very point in his career when he had established his critical genius. Poe’s collection of stories, Tales , was published in July, 1845, to good reviews. Soon after, Poe became the sole editor and then proprietor of the Broadway Journal . In November, he published his collection, The Raven and Other Poems .

The year 1846 marked the beginning of Poe’s decline. In January, the Broadway Journal ceased publication, and soon after, Poe was involved in both a personal scandal with two female literary admirers and a bitter battle with the literary establishment. Moreover, Poe’s wife was quite ill, a fact which necessitated Poe’s moving his family some thirteen miles outside the city to a rural cottage at Fordham. When Virginia died on January 30, 1847, Poe collapsed. Although he never fully recovered from this series of assaults on his already nervous condition, in the following year he published what he considered to be the capstone of his career, Eureka: A Prose Poem , which he presented as an examination of the origin of all things.

In the summer of 1849, Poe left for Richmond, Virginia, in the hope, once more, of starting a literary magazine. On September 24, he delivered a lecture, “The Poetic Principle,” at Richmond, in what was to be his last public appearance. From that time until he was found semiconscious on the streets of Baltimore, Maryland, little is known of his activities. He never recovered, and he died on Sunday morning, October 7, in Washington College Hospital.

Edgar Allan Poe is important in the history of American literature and American culture in two significant ways. First, he developed short fiction as a genre that was to have a major impact on American literature and publishing throughout the nineteenth century. His stories and criticism have been models and guides for writers in this characteristically American genre up to the present time. No one interested in the short-story form can afford to ignore his ideas or his fiction. Poe was influential in making American literature more philosophical and metaphysical than it had been before.

Second, and perhaps most important, Poe helped to make periodical publishing more important in American literary culture. American writers in the mid-nineteenth century were often discouraged by the easy accessibility of British novels. Lack of copyright laws made the works of the great English writers readily available at low cost. Thus, American writers could not compete in this genre. Periodical publishing, and the short story as the favored genre of this medium, was the United States’ way of fighting back. Poe was an important figure in this battle to make the United States a literary force in world culture.

The problem with Poe, however, is that he is too often thought of as the author of some vivid yet insignificant horror stories. Moreover, Poe’s personality is often erroneously maligned: He has been called a drunk, a drug-addict, a hack, a sex pervert, and an exploiter. As a result of these errors, myths, and oversimplifications, it is often difficult for readers to take his works seriously. The truth is, however, that Edgar Allan Poe, both in his criticism and in his dark, metaphysically mysterious stories, helped create a literature that made America a cultural force not to be ignored.

Bibliography

Allen, Hervey. Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe . 2 vols. New York: George H. Doran Co., 1926. Reprint. New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1956. A romantic narrative of Poe’s life, valuable for the information drawn from letters between Poe and John Allan.

Buranelli, Vincent. Edgar Allan Poe . 2d ed. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1977. A somewhat sketchy study of Poe’s fiction, poetry, and criticism, but still a good introduction to his work.

Carlson, Eric W., ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism Since 1829 . Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966. A valuable collection of some of the most influential critical remarks about Poe by artists, writers, and critics.

Hoffman, Daniel. PoePoePoePoePoePoePoe . Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Co., 1972. An idiosyncratic and highly personal account of one critic’s fascination with Poe that echoes the fascination of countless readers. Often Freudian and sometimes farfetched, the book provides stimulating reading and suggestive criticism.

Jacobs, Robert D. Poe: Journalist and Critic . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. An extensive study of Poe’s career as editor, reviewer, and critic. Shows how Poe’s critical ideas derived from and influenced periodical publishing in the mid-nineteenth century.

Moss, Sidney P. Poe’s Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu . Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1963. A well-researched study of Poe’s controversial battles with Longfellow and the many literary cliques of nineteenth century American publishing.

Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . New York: D. Appleton-Century Co., 1941. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square Publishers, 1969. Although this book is somewhat outdated in its critical analysis of Poe’s works, it is the best and most complete biography, informed by Quinn’s knowledge of Poe’s literary milieu and his extensive research into Poe’s correspondence.

Quinn, Patrick F. The French Face of Edgar Poe . Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1957. Ironically, Poe’s fiction, poetry, and criticism had more influence on French literature in the nineteenth century than on American literature. Quinn’s book explains why.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Introduction.

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. His mother died when he was 2, and he went to live with John Allan, a successful merchant in Richmond, Virginia. Allan’s wife, who had no children of her own, raised the boy. Poe later took Allan as his middle name.

At age 17 Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia. However, he did not do well there. He gambled so much that he was soon in debt. Allan became angry and withdrew Poe from the school. Poe returned to Richmond, but when he found the woman he loved engaged to another man, he left.

By 1827 Poe was living in Boston. There he wrote some poems, which were published in a booklet as Tamerlane and Other Poems . Without a source of steady income, he joined the Army. Poe remained in the service until 1829, when Allan helped him win entrance to the United States Military Academy at West Point, New York. Once again Poe did not do well in school. He disliked the strict discipline of the school and paid no attention to his classes. Poe was soon expelled.

After West Point, Poe struggled to make a living as a writer. His first success came in 1833 when he entered a short-story contest and won a prize for his “MS. Found in a Bottle.” He also sold several stories.

As he moved from one job to the next, Poe wrote the tales he became famous for, including “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Fall of the House of Usher,” and “The Murders in the Rue Morgue.” This last story is considered the first modern detective story because it inspired a whole new kind of fiction. By 1844 Poe was a well-known writer, but he was still having a hard time making money. In 1845, Poe wrote his most famous poem, “The Raven.”

Mysterious Death

In 1849 Poe was traveling from Richmond to New York City. He only made it as far as Baltimore, Maryland. There he died mysteriously on October 7. There are many theories about the cause of his death, but the answer is still unclear.

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AT THE SMITHSONIAN

Edgar allan poe: pioneer, genius, oddity.

On this day in 1849, America lost an innovative, unique and utterly strange literary giant

Joseph Stromberg

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore in disarray.

“He’s muttering a variety of things that are indecipherable. Nobody really knows who he is, and he’s not wearing his own clothes,” says David C. Ward, a historian at the National Portrait Gallery . “It seems pretty clear that he was suffering from some sort of alcohol or drug overdose.”

By age 40, Poe had written reams of poetry, attempted to start his own literary journal and become one of the first Americans to support oneself strictly as a writer. But eventually, his mental illnesses and alcohol abuse caught up with him. “He’s wandering around and they put him in the charity hospital, and he suffers four days of what must have been fairly awful trouble,” Ward says. On this day in 1849, America lost one of its most innovative and unusual literary figures to a death as mysterious as his life and works.

He was born to David and Elizabeth Poe, both Boston actors, in 1809, but his father abandoned the family when Edgar was just a year old, and his mother died soon thereafter of tuberculosis. He was taken into the home of the Allans, a wealthy Virginia family, but things continued going downhill for little Edgar from there. “He had a very tempestuous relationship with his surrogate father,” says Ward. After spending an uneasy childhood in both Virginia and Britain, Poe left home to attend the University of Virginia, where he only lasted a year.

“He ran up large gambling debts, and Mr. Allan refused to pay them, so Poe drops out,” says Ward. “Ultimately, Allan rejects Poe, so there’s this element of double rejection in his life.”

After a stint as a cadet at West Point, Poe decided to devote his life to becoming a writer. “He is the first American who tried to make a living just simply by writing,” says Ward. “At the time, the other writers were usually ministers, or professors.” Over the next two decades, he obsessively crafted dark, mysterious poetry, then turned to short stories in a similar vein.

Deeply critical of contemporary literature, he held posts at various literary journals and discussed plans to start his own. Transcendentalism was one of the most prominent literary and philosophical concepts of the day, and held that individual spirituality and a connection to nature could provide meaning and insight to anyone. “He hated transcendentalism—he thought that it was just moonshine and propaganda,” Ward says. “He hated Longfellow, the preeminent poet of the day, who he saw as a fraud.”

During this time, he secretly married his first cousin, Virginia Clem. “He marries his 13-year-old cousin, which is, to be blunt, a little bit creepy,” says Ward. Soon, she too would suffer from tuberculosis, leading many to speculate that the presence of even more misery in his life further contributed to the nightmarish focus of his work.

Poe’s fixation with the macabre and gruesome cut completely against the grain of 19th-century American literature. His stories typically featured death, corpses and mourning. “Poe is totally against everything that America seemed to stand for. He’s dark, inward-turning and cerebral. Death-obsessed instead of life-obsessed,” Ward notes. “If Whitman is the poet of the open road, Poe is the poet of the closed room, of the grave.”

Poe became a household name with the publication of the poem “The Raven” in 1845, but his lasting influence is evident in a number of genres. “In 1841, be basically invents the detective story, with The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,’ Ward says. “His detective, Dupin, is the forerunner of Sherlock Holmes: he’s a cerebral, brainiac detective who solves problems by his brain powers.” Other stories influenced Jules Verne, leading to the emergence of the genre of science fiction.

The 1847 death of Virginia, coupled with Poe’s increasingly heavy drinking, pushed him ever further into despair. But even in his final moments, he handed over a mystery, one that his fans have puzzled over for more than a century.

“The kicker to all this is that Poe supposedly left a large trunk of his archives, and that has disappeared,” Ward says. “Poe, the inventor of the mystery story, leaves this trunk behind that we would think might provide a clue to his life, but disappears. It’s this final tantalizing mystery.”

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Joseph Stromberg | | READ MORE

Joseph Stromberg was previously a digital reporter for Smithsonian .

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Edgar allan poe.

Library of Congress

Pioneering author, editor, poet, literary critic, husband, son...Edgar Allan Poe lived just to the age of 40 but his works continue to captivate readers around the globe today.

The three children were separated and raised by different families. Edgar was taken in by the successful Richmond merchant John Allan, and his frail wife Frances. The Allans had no children of their own. They raised Edgar as part of the family and gave him their middle name, but never legally adopted him.

From University of Virginia to West Point

Shortly after his quarrel with his foster father, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond for Boston where he hoped to pursue a literary career. His first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems was published there. Unable to support himself, and receiving little assistance from his foster father, Poe enlisted as a private in the US Army on May 26, 1827 for a five year term. He entered under an assumed name and lied about his age, claiming to be 22 years old when he was only 18. Poe was assigned to Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. On October 31, 1827 Battery H was ordered to Fort Moultrie to protect Charleston Harbor. He sailed on the Brigantine  Waltham , arriving for duty in Charleston on November 18. 

At Fort Moultrie, Poe was promoted to artificer, the rank of a noncommissioned officer or enlisted man who had a mechanical specialty. On December 11, 1828, Poe’s battery sailed for duty at Fortress Monroe, Virginia where he attained the rank of Sergeant-Major, the highest possible rank for a non-commissioned officer. His quick progress up the ranks can be attributed to his education, high social standing, and competence. Despite his accomplishments, Poe left military service in April 1829 and hired a substitute to complete his obligation. 

Editor and Author

Professional and personal loss.

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site , Fort Sumter and Fort Moultrie National Historical Park

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Edgar Allan Poe’s Biography

Reading comprehension – edgar allan poe’s biography, edgar allan poe: master of mystery and macabre, comprehension.

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Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

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Poe’s work owes much to the concern of Romanticism with the occult and the satanic. It owes much also to his own feverish dreams, to which he applied a rare faculty of shaping plausible fabrics out of impalpable materials. With an air of objectivity and spontaneity, his productions are closely dependent on his own powers of imagination and an elaborate technique. His keen and sound judgment as an appraiser of contemporary literature , his idealism and musical gift as a poet, his dramatic art as a storyteller, considerably appreciated in his lifetime, secured him a prominent place among universally known men of letters.

The outstanding fact in Poe’s character is a strange duality. The wide divergence of contemporary judgments on the man seems almost to point to the coexistence of two persons in him. With those he loved he was gentle and devoted. Others, who were the butt of his sharp criticism , found him irritable and self-centred and went so far as to accuse him of lack of principle. Was it, it has been asked, a double of the man rising from harrowing nightmares or from the haggard inner vision of dark crimes or from appalling graveyard fantasies that loomed in Poe’s unstable being?

Much of Poe’s best work is concerned with terror and sadness, but in ordinary circumstances the poet was a pleasant companion. He talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and read his own poetry and that of others in a voice of surpassing beauty. He admired Shakespeare and Alexander Pope . He had a sense of humour, apologizing to a visitor for not keeping a pet raven. If the mind of Poe is considered, the duality is still more striking. On one side, he was an idealist and a visionary. His yearning for the ideal was both of the heart and of the imagination. His sensitivity to the beauty and sweetness of women inspired his most touching lyrics (“ To Helen ,” “Annabel Lee,” “Eulalie,” “ To One in Paradise”) and the full-toned prose hymns to beauty and love in “Ligeia” and “ Eleonora.” In “Israfel” his imagination carried him away from the material world into a dreamland. This Pythian mood was especially characteristic of the later years of his life.

More generally, in such verses as “ The Valley of Unrest,” “ Lenore,” “The Raven,” “For Annie,” and “Ulalume” and in his prose tales, his familiar mode of evasion from the universe of common experience was through eerie thoughts, impulses, or fears. From these materials he drew the startling effects of his tales of death (“The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Oval Portrait,” “Shadow”), his tales of wickedness and crime (“Berenice,” “The Black Cat,” “William Wilson,” “The Imp of the Perverse,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Tell-Tale Heart” ), his tales of survival after dissolution (“ Ligeia,” “ Morella,” “ Metzengerstein”), and his tales of fatality (“ The Assignation,” “ The Man of the Crowd”). Even when he does not hurl his characters into the clutch of mysterious forces or onto the untrodden paths of the beyond, he uses the anguish of imminent death as the means of causing the nerves to quiver ( “The Pit and the Pendulum” ), and his grotesque invention deals with corpses and decay in an uncanny play with the aftermath of death.

On the other side, Poe is conspicuous for a close observation of minute details, as in the long narratives and in many of the descriptions that introduce the tales or constitute their settings. Closely connected with this is his power of ratiocination. He prided himself on his logic and carefully handled this real accomplishment so as to impress the public with his possessing still more of it than he had; hence the would-be feats of thought reading, problem unraveling, and cryptography that he attributed to his characters William Legrand and C. Auguste Dupin . This suggested to him the analytical tales, which created the detective story , and his science fiction tales.

The same duality is evinced in his art. He was capable of writing angelic or weird poetry, with a supreme sense of rhythm and word appeal, or prose of sumptuous beauty and suggestiveness, with the apparent abandon of compelling inspiration; yet he would write down a problem of morbid psychology or the outlines of an unrelenting plot in a hard and dry style. In Poe’s masterpieces the double contents of his temper, of his mind, and of his art are fused into a oneness of tone, structure, and movement, the more effective, perhaps, as it is compounded of various elements.

As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure. He formulated rules for the short story , in which he sought the ancient unities : i.e., the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place. To these unities he added that of mood or effect. He was not extreme in these views, however. He praised longer works and sometimes thought allegories and morals admirable if not crudely presented. Poe admired originality, often in work very different from his own, and was sometimes an unexpectedly generous critic of decidedly minor writers.

Poe’s genius was early recognized abroad. No one did more to persuade the world and, in the long run, the United States , of Poe’s greatness than the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé . Indeed his role in French literature was that of a poetic master model and guide to criticism. French Symbolism relied on his “The Philosophy of Composition,” borrowed from his imagery, and used his examples to generate the theory of pure poetry .

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Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Born: January 19, 1809 Boston, Massachusetts Died: October 7, 1849 Baltimore, Maryland American poet and writer

One of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience—the "inner world" of dreams and the imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and also worked as a magazine editor.

Orphaned at three

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both professional actors. By the time he was three, Edgar, his older brother, and his younger sister were orphans; their father deserted the family, and then their mother died. The children were each sent to different families to live. Edgar went to the Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name. The Allans were wealthy, and though they never adopted Poe, they treated him like a son, made sure he was educated in private academies, and took him to England for a five-year stay. Mrs. Allan, at least, showed considerable affection toward him.

As Edgar entered his teenage years, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of Edgar's ambition to become a writer, thought he was ungrateful, and seems to have decided to cut Poe out of his will. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia, he had so little money that he turned to gambling in an attempt to make money. In eight months he lost two thousand dollars. Allan's refusal to help him led to a final break between the two, and in March 1827 Poe went out on his own.

Enlists in the army

Poe then signed up for a five-year term in the U.S. Army. In 1827 his Tamerlane and Other Poems was published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major. He did not want to serve out the full five years, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the army on the condition that he would seek an appointment at West Point Academy. He thought such a move might please John Allan. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore, Maryland, and it received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal.

Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but he left in May 1830 after he and Allan had another violent quarrel. The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." Poe realized that he would never receive financial help from Allan.

Marriage and editing jobs

The panic increased after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York City, where he managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long work of fiction. The family then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In two years he boosted its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840 he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left to work as the editor of Graham's Magazine. It was becoming clear that two years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and though he contributed quality fiction and criticism to the magazine, his drinking, his feuding with other writers, and his inability to get along with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and crisis

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Man That Was Used Up" emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for his story "The Gold Bug," but Poe's problems were increasing. His wife, who had been a vital source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption (or tuberculosis, an infection of the lungs) that would eventually kill her. When his troubles became too great, Poe tried to relieve them by drinking, which made him ill. Things seemed to improve slightly in 1844; the publication of the poem "The Raven" brought him some fame, and this success was followed in 1845 by the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales. But his wife's health continued to worsen, and he was still not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to keep steady employment, and things got so bad that he and his family almost starved in the winter of 1846. Then, on January 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died. Somehow Poe continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the ambitious Eureka, and he returned to Richmond in 1849 to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York City at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore, Maryland. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was found unconscious on October 3, 1849, near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital four days later.

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. His fictional work resembles the dreams of a troubled individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, or a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

For More Information

Bittner, William R. Poe: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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Edgar Allan Poe

A short biography of edgar allan poe, edgar allan poe’s writing style, literary theory.

Along with the satanic and occult , the works of Edger Allan Poe is concerned with Romanticism . His works are also inspired by his intense dreams. He shaped his dreams with his distinctive imagery and use of language. His works have unique imaginations, elaborated techniques, objectivity, and spontaneity . He was appreciated even in his life for his clear and comprehensive criticism as an evaluator of the literature of his time, his poetic idealism and melodic gift, and his dramatic storytelling art. With his distinguished writing style; he secured an imminent position among the well-known men of letters.

The stories, “Ligeia,” “Metzengerstein,” and “Morella” deal with the themes of survival after desolation . Lastly, he also has the theme of fatality in the short stories “The man of Crowd and The Assignation.

Works Of Edgar Allan Poe

Short stories.

Edgar Allan Poe

Married life and tragedy, some important facts of his life, writing career, poe’s works, poe’s impacts on future literature, edgar allan  poe’s famous quotes, related posts:, post navigation.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), une histoire extra-ordinaire : épisode /10 du podcast Polar, SF, Noir : Les Maîtres américains

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849), une histoire extra-ordinaire

Écrivain américain du 19e siècle, qui était edgar allan poe quelle a été sa vie en quoi était-il à part, comment son œuvre a-t-elle été perçue à l’époque et quelle est son influence éléments de réponse avec quatre spécialistes au micro d’arnaud laporte..

Le lien entre la vie et l'œuvre d'Edgar Allan Poe a fait couler beaucoup d'encre depuis sa mort en 1849. La réputation de l'écrivain américain, traîné dans la boue de son vivant, est toujours entachée de nombreuses légendes : on le présente volontiers comme un alcoolique, voire un opiomane aux goûts morbides. Est-ce vrai ?

Reste son œuvre, immense : dans cette Amérique des lettres balbutiante, le poète invente une modernité dépassant le genre pour créer des contes, des nouvelles et des poèmes hantés par les figures de la disparition et du double. Mort à 40 ans, Edgar Allan Poe fait figure aujourd'hui de phare éblouissant dans l’histoire de la littérature moderne.

Poe ne ressemble à personne

Claude-Michel Cluny qualifie Poe de "drôle de bonhomme." Et de continuer :  "Il est assez unique dans la littérature américaine parce qu’il ne ressemble à personne de son temps. Il est à la fois en avance sur les conceptions poétiques de l’époque, il rompt complètement avec la tradition, il n’est plus dans la note si l’on pense à ce qui va arriver, c’est-à-dire un renversement complet du lyrisme américain." Un poète, Poe ? Poète lui-même, Cluny répond : " C'est un merveilleux prosateur, un imaginatif, un homme à concepts ; tout cela ne va pas très bien avec le lyrisme poétique. C’est peut-être ce qui explique qu’il a été si bien traduit."

Dupin, l'ancêtre des détectives

Pour Maryse Ducreu-Petit, enseignante à l'université de Lille,  "le personnage de Dupin va engendrer tous les grands détectives " raisonnables " de la littérature policière, son descendant le plus célèbre étant évidemment Sherlock Holmes. Il se réapproprie le monde, le fonctionnement des choses ; en fait, il reprend la main d'une certaine manière, sur ce monde toujours fluctuant, toujours fuyant, puisqu'on ne sait jamais très bien où on est en fin de compte."

Poe, un alcoolique ?

L'écrivain et journaliste Georges Walter remet les pendules à l'heure à propos des problèmes d'alcoolisme de Poe : "Je suis désolé de dire du mal de Baudelaire, mais on n'a pas le droit de dire que l'alcool était pour Poe un moyen de travail, une technique pour travailler. Ce n'est pas vrai parce que quand il buvait un verre, il était malade, il était à moitié idiot pendant plusieurs jours."

Il remonte la biographie de Poe :  Déjà à l'université, lorsque les autres buvaient, ils étaient saouls de la manière la plus banale, tandis que lui, il avalait les choses d'un seul coup. Il était immédiatement dans un état quasiment hallucinatoire. Il y avait quelque chose dans son sang, probablement, chez ses ancêtres. Il y avait quelque chose entre l'alcool et lui qui était très dangereux, c'est certain, mais il le savait."

Enquête policière et mathématiques

Françoise Sammarcelli trouve extraordinaire, chez Poe, le rapport entre le discours sur les mathématiques et l'enquête policière, par exemple dans Double assassinat dans la rue Morgue :   "Tout ce que pose Dupin sur la raison mathématique, ses limites, le champ d'action des mathématiques par rapport à autre chose et par rapport à la faculté d'analyse, tout cela, bien sûr, dépasse complètement son pauvre acolyte, mais dépasse aussi vraisemblablement un certain nombre de lecteurs : c'est une pensée extrêmement critique du côté de l'épistémologie. Je pense que là, il y a quelque chose d'extrêmement fertile et inspirant, avec un jeu, je dirais, sur les limites de la compréhension."

Ce documentaire est construit par des entretiens avec Maryse Ducreu Petit, enseignante à l’université de Lille, auteure de Edgar Allan Poe ou le livre des bords  (éd. PUL), Françoise Sammarcelli, américainiste, professeure à l’université Paris Sorbonne, Georges Walter, auteur de  Enquête sur Edgar Allan Poe : Poète américain  (éd. Phébus) et Claude-Michel Cluny, auteur du  Livre des quatre corbeaux : Poe, Baudelaire, Mallarmé, Pessoa  (éd. La Différence). Les textes d'Edgar Allan Poe sont ici lus par Yvan Dautin.

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