edgar allan poe biography resume

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?

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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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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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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Poe, edgar allan.

• Thomas Wright
• https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
• Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka (1848)
• Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
• The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
• The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
• Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

Further Reading

• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: Selected Criticism since 1829 . Ann Arbor, Mich., 1966. Collection of all of the famous essays on Poe, including those by T. S. Eliot, W. H. Auden, and Walt Whitman.
• Carlson, Eric W. , ed. A Companion to Poe Studies . Westport, Conn., 1996. A comprehensive collection of modern appraisals of every aspect of Poe's life and work.
• Hayes, Kevin J. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge, 2002. Excellent and wide-ranging collection of late-twentieth-century Poe scholarship.
• Hyneman, Esther F. Edgar Allan Poe: An Annotated Bibliography of Books and Articles in English, 1827–1973 . Boston, 1974.
• Silverman, Kenneth . Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance . New York, 1991. Its psychoanalytic explanations are sometimes unconvincing, but it is easily the best biography available.
• Walker, I. M. , ed. Edgar Allan Poe: The Critical Heritage . New York, 1986. Anthology of contemporary reviews of Poe's work.

Related Articles

• American Detective Fiction
• Popular Fiction
• The Short Story in America

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Edgar Allan Poe: A Brief Biography

by Makenna Johnston, dramaturg  

Edgar Allan Poe was the second of three children born to traveling stage actors, David and Elizabeth (Eliza) Poe. When Edgar was almost two years old, his father abandoned the family leaving Eliza to fend for herself and their three small children. Eliza died of tuberculosis soon after. Edgar, who was not quite three years old, was charitably taken in by the wealthy, childless family of John and Frances Allan.

Under the Allans’ care, Edgar received a refined education and the undivided attention of his foster mother Frances. Though he was never officially adopted, Edgar was given the Allan name and was thenceforth known as “Edgar Allan Poe”.

When Edgar was about sixteen-years-old the Allans came into a sizable inheritance, which he assumed would be his eventually. This was not the case. Unbeknownst to Edgar and Frances, John Allan had multiple illegitimate children that required support. So, rather than give money to Edgar, the non-blood charity case, John guarded his money closely, saving it for his biological children. Eventually, Edgar discovered his foster father’s deceit which led to significant growth in mutual dislike each man had towards the other. Upset, Edgar was sent off to the University of Virginia where he racked up significant gambling debts. The miserly John refused to pay off the debts, so Edgar had to discontinue his college education.

After a particularly intense quarrel with his foster father, in which the two men cut all ties forever, Poe left the University of Virginia for good and headed north to Boston, where, in 1827 he published his first book. He lost money on the publication and decided to join the army. After two years in the army, a few months at the Military Academy at West Point, and the publication in 1829 of a second volume of poems, Poe moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt Maria Clemm and her nine-year-old daughter, Virginia.

In Baltimore, Poe published several short stories and won first prize in a literary contest. His success in the contest led to a job opportunity that brought him back to Richmond in 1835 as an assistant editor on the Southern Literary Messenger. A few years later, Poe married his now thirteen-year-old first cousin, Virginia. Edgar was twenty-seven at the time of their union.

Edgar’s relationship with his wife was described as cheerful, but childlike. To others, the pair seemed to be affectionate siblings rather than man and wife. Edgar and Virginia had no children.

The couple moved to New York and then Pennsylvania to seek better publishing opportunities. During this time in 1843, Edgar published Tell-Tale Heart in the Boston-based magazine “The Pioneer”. In 1847, after a long struggle with tuberculosis, Virginia Poe passed away. Distraught and alone, Edgar traveled between Richmond and Baltimore, giving lectures and readings, filling his time with distractions. Two years later in 1849, Edgar died of unknown causes. At the age of forty, Edgar Allan Poe had at last conquered the fever called “living”. Though he was sick the last two years of his life, his true cause of  death is a mystery.

Edgar Allan Poe was buried quickly and without a show in a Presbyterian cemetery. Very few were in attendance.  

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ARTS & CULTURE

How edgar allan poe became our era’s premier storyteller.

Fans of the mystery writer have no shortage of ways to pay homage to the scribe behind “The Raven” and so much more

Michael Capuzzo

Elisabeth Becker went all the way from Wisconsin to Philadelphia last July to introduce her two young children to America’s sacred text—not the Declaration of Independence, but Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Raven.” She walked the kids into one of the most important shrines of the Poe cult, a dark and dreary hallway in the Central Library, and sat them in front of a glass case holding Grip, the raven believed to have inspired Poe’s great poem, published in 1845. Becker, sitting on the floor with her charges, read aloud from a pop-up book of “The Raven.” Then she posted the photos on Facebook, where more than a million fans of some 100 Poe-themed Facebook pages lurk.

It was just another suitably weird tribute to the most influential American author ever, a literary brand beyond the considerable dreams of Twain, Melville, Wharton, Whitman, Hemingway and Fitzgerald. Like The Great Gatsby and Moby-Dick , Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher and The Cask of Amontillado are among the top 100 books assigned in American college English classes. But Poe is not confined to scholarly debate; each January 19 hundreds of Poe fans mark his birthday (1809) with pilgrimages to Poe sites in Philadelphia, Baltimore, New York and Richmond.

The stories and poems scribbled by the half-mad Romantic have shaped our national obsession with tales of chaos and darkness. Says Kirsten Mollegaard, an English professor at the University of Hawaii at Hilo who has examined Poe’s fame: “No other American writer has had as enduring and pervasive an influence on popular culture.”

Go to YouTube and you’ll find “The Raven,” about the ill-omened creature given to chanting “Nevermore,” read aloud by Christopher Walken, William Shatner, James Earl Jones and Lisa Simpson, Homer’s daughter. Poe’s tale has inspired actors such as Bela Lugosi, Boris Karloff, John Cusack and Huey, Dewey and Louie. The mathematician Mike Keith reworked the poem so the number of letters in each word corresponds to the first 740 digits of pi. And only Poe among the literary giants has an NFL football team named for one of his works, the Baltimore Ravens. (The team won the Super Bowl in January 2001 with a great defense; “Quoth the Ravens,” Chris Berman said on ESPN, “Never score!”)

Poe changed world literature with the first detective story, The Murders in the Rue Morgue , published in 1841. In other words, he “made possible about 80 percent of contemporary literature and television programming,” says J.W. Ocker, author of Poe-Land . With C. Auguste Dupin, a brilliant, eccentric outsider who outsmarts the bumbling constabulary with analytical reasoning, Poe created the forerunner of all fictional detectives to come. In 1901, Arthur Conan Doyle, who created Sherlock Holmes, called Poe the “father of the detective tale” and complained that Poe had “covered its limits so completely that I fail to see how his followers can find any fresh ground which they can confidently call their own.” Poe’s fictional “tales of ratiocination,” as Poe himself called them, also introduced a style of deduction that influenced real-world crime-solving.

Horror writers from Stephen King to H.P. Lovecraft to Justin Cronin, too, claim blood relations with Poe. Earlier European Gothic fiction emphasized the supernatural, castles and curses; Poe brought horror down to earth and made us fear the ordinary and everyday. The deranged narrator in The Tell-Tale Heart decides to murder his housemate because he has an evil eye—or maybe just because he wants to. It was the first story of sociopathic horror, says Stephen King, the predecessor of modern nightmares like Thomas Harris’ Hannibal Lecter. It may well be that Walt Whitman’s poetry and, as Ernest Hemingway would say, Mark Twain’s novel Huckleberry Finn created the American vernacular. But Poe gave us the stories we tell and retell.

Poe was tuned to the modern age and its rejection of religious taboos against exploring the realms of horror and death. There sits the imp of the perverse with the most entertaining ghastly tales ever told. But he is also the perfect fit for our postmodern age, when each person makes of the daemon of mystery and fright what he or she will. “Annabel Lee,” Poe’s ode to a woman loved so intensely the angels grew envious and killed her, is suggested as a reading at weddings, while on YouTube, “Goth Girl,” her eyelids the green of grave rot, reads the same tale aloud in a cemetery.

Poe has long had a reputation as a drunken mad genius, and bohemians, tormented artists, struggling writers and even drug addicts embrace him as their own. More recently, though, the 2017 PBS American Masters film, Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive , downplayed the tortured image. “He comes off instead as a smart guy who wanted to become famous, changed jobs all the time and was fascinated with technology,” the HuffPost wrote. “Maybe Edgar Allan Poe was the first millennial.”

Poe’s death in 1849 was something the author himself might have written. Missing for nearly a week, he was found incoherent on the streets of Baltimore in clothes that did not belong to him; he died four days later at the age of 40. But as Poe famously wrote in The Premature Burial , “the boundaries which divide Life from Death are at best shadowy and vague,” and his voice is still heard from beyond the grave. As Ocker puts it now, “Never RIP, Edgar Allan Poe.”

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From roses and cognac at Poe’s first resting place to Lincoln pennies on John Wilkes Booth’s grave, the strange tributes to the famed dead —Bianca Sánchez

The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe

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Bianca Sánchez | | READ MORE

Bianca Sánchez is an editorial intern at Smithsonian magazine, as well as a senior at Northwestern University, where she studies Journalism, Latino and Latina studies and Political Science.

Michael Capuzzo | READ MORE

Michael Capuzzo is a journalist and the bestselling author of The Murder Room and Close to Shore .

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 / Renowned Writers

Edgar Allen Poe – Early Life, Writing Career & Death

by World History Edu · July 26, 2019

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was one of the best poets and writers of the 19th century . Image source .

Edgar Allen Poe was a 19th century Boston-born writer and poet who penned down some of the most famous short stories and poems ever seen in English literature. He is largely considered the father of the detective genre in literature. Examples of some of his most critically praised works were “The Raven”, “The Haunted place”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The City in the Sea”.

Poe’s life was sometimes as chaotic and full of mystery as some of his darkest short stories. In spite of his numerous awards and praise, he spent virtually all his life facing financial difficulties and battling alcoholism. Edgar was also famed for his brutal criticism of his fellow writers’ works, thereby earning the nickname- “Tomhawk” (or the Tomhawk man ).

On October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe’s life was cut short under very mysterious circumstances. He died in a Baltimore hospital, four days after he was found in the streets. The cause of his death, to this day, remains unsolved. Below is a presentation of everything that you need to know about Edgar Allan Poe, including  some of his famous poems and short stories, and interesting facts:

Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Poe was born to parents David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Hopkins Arnold Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. It is believed that his parents were actors. Particularly, his mother, although briefly, achieved some level of fame in the acting business. Edgar had an elder brother called William Henry Loenard Poe. He also had a younger sister called Rosalie Poe.

The Poes were traumatized after David Poe Jr. abandoned his family in 1810. What this meant was that his family had to fend all by themselves.  Shortly after his father’s departure, Poe’s mother died in 1811. She suffered from pulmonary tuberculosis.

Edgar Poe and his siblings were taken to separate foster homes. Edgar was sent to Richmond, Virginia, to live with his foster parents- John Allan and Frances Allan. The Allans were a very wealthy business family whose line of business was in tobacco. He was given the name Allan. Therefore, his full name became Edgar Allan Poe .

The relationship between Poe and his foster mother was very tight-knit. However, the relationship he had with his foster father was cold at best.  The friction stemmed from his foster father wanting Edgar Poe to join the family business. However, Poe’s passion for writing and poetry was too great for him to ignore. As such, he paid no heed to his foster father’s request.

Historians believe that Poe successfully honed his talents in writing. Right from the age of 13, Edgar Poe’s skills in poetry and writing became very much evident.

Education and Military Spell

From 1816 to 1819, Edgar and his foster family lived in Britain. There, Edgar enrolled at an Irvine, Scotland grammar school. Shortly after that, he proceeded to a boarding school in Chelsea. This was followed by a brief period at Reverend John Bransby’s Manor House School located at Stoke Newington. All in all, the Allans spent about 3 years in Britain. In 1820, they returned to Richmond, Virginia.

At the age of 17, in 1826, Edgar Poe began his studies in Ancient and Modern Languages at the University of Virginia. He was a very hardworking and intelligent student. Unfortunately, the friction that he had with his foster father would again crop up. His foster father, perhaps still sour because of Poe’s career choice, decided not to provide any financial assistance to Poe’s education. To be fair to his foster father, the relationship was strained partly because of Poe’s excessive gambling and drinking. As a result, he ended up in debt. Eventually, he had no option than to call it quits on his education. That same year, Poe’s fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster, dumped him and married someone else.

Depressed and feeling very low-spirited, Edgar Poe relocated to Boston and worked several jobs to make ends meet. He had a few spells working as a clerk and a writer for a local newspaper. While working in the newspaper, he opted to use the alias Henri Le Rennet so as to mask his identity and family roots.

In 1827, Poe joined the United States Army as a Private at Fort Independence , Boston Harbor. With a meager monthly pay of $5, Edgar Poe’s financial woes continued. In just under 2 years, he rose to the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery. It was around this time that Edgar tried to patch things up with his foster father. However, the two men could not reconcile their differences. To make matters even worse, Edgar lost his dear foster mother in 1829. She suffered from tuberculosis.

Edgar’s commanding officer allowed him to leave the army prematurely in April 1829 provided he made an effort to patch things up with his foster father. The two briefly reconciled. Kind courtesy to his foster father’s help, he was able to secure admission into the United States Military Academy, West Point. After a series of poor conduct, Poe got dismissed from the academy. This infuriated his foster father, and their relationship went from bad to sour. Ultimately, his father disowned him and severed all assistance to him.

Writing and Editing Career

While in the academy, Edgar Allan Poe wrote down his first poem collection titled “ Tamerlane and Other Poems”. The book sold only about 50 copies. Similarly his second book, “ Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems ” proved very unsuccessful.

In 1831, he moved to New York. By now, Edgar’s sole dream was to become a writer. With the help from some of his friends at the academy, Edgar was able to publish his third book, titled “ Poems ”. This book, just like his previous two, received very little acclaim.

On August 1, 1831, Edgar lost his elder brother. 3 years later, Poe’s foster father died. To the disappointment of Poe, his foster father left him nothing in his will.

For the next couple of years, Poe lived in several cities such as Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York. While in Baltimore, Poe placed first in the Baltimore Saturday Visiter contest in 1831. The title of his winning story was “ Ms. Found in a Bottle. ”

Around the mid-1830s, Poe secured a the editor job at the Southern Literary Messenger, Richmond. Gradually, his reputation as a very critical reviewer was cemented. Due to his sharp, and sometimes brutal, criticism of his fellow writers, Poe was often called “Tomahawk Man”.

After just two years, Poe left Southern Literary Messenger. He left his post because of his excessive drinking behavior and unrelenting criticism of other people’s work. After brief spells with Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine, and The Broadway Journal , Poe relocated to New York to work at the The New York Sun.

Poe’s reputation skyrocketed with the publication of his 1845 “The Raven”. The poem proved very beneficial to Poe’s writing career, even though it came with very little financial rewards. His financial troubles persisted alongside his excessive drinking.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Wife

Virginia Clemm Eliza Poe (Born August 15, 1822; died January 30, 1847) was the wife of Edgar Allan Poe.

In 1831, Poe relocated to live with his aunt Maria Poe Clemm in Baltimore. From 1831 to 1835, Poe and Maria’s daughter, Virginia Clemm, developed an affinity towards each other. The two started dating and got married on May 16, 1836 in Richmond. Clemm was 13 years-old at the time, while Edgar Allan Poe was 27.

11 years later, at the age of 24, Virginia Clemm Poe died as a result of tuberculosis. Shortly after his wife’s death, Poe suffered from severe bouts of depression and alcoholism. His behavior became unbecoming, and his financial problems got even worse.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Death

On October 3, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe cast a very forlorn and disturbed look on the streets of Baltimore. An eye-witness by the name of Joseph W. Walker stated that Edgar was “in great distress, and,…in need of immediate assistance.” Edgar was whisked to the Washington Medical College.

For reasons still unknown to this day, Edgar Allan Poe passed away 4 days later, on October 7, 1849. He was 40 years old at the time of his death. He body was laid to rest at the Westminster Burial Ground in Baltimore, Maryland.

In spite of the huge public interest in finding out what exactly caused his death, doctors at the hospital could not come out with an explicit cause of death. Strangely, there exist no medical records of his admission, neither was there a record of his death certificate.

The newspapers were quick to come out with several theories explaining his untimely death. Some people claimed that Edgar Allan Poe suffered from “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation”. The most likely cause of his death is theorized as prolonged effect of the excessive alcohol that he consumed throughout his life.

There have been counter claims such as rabies, epilepsy, delirium tremens , heart disease, syphilis, cholera, carbon monoxide poisoning, and even murder. One thing is clear; Edgar Allan Poe’s death was definitely as mysterious as any of his intriguing dark poems or short stories.

Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

Poe is best remembered for playing a crucial role in developing America’s romanticism. His extremely dark fictional themes about the death of beautiful women went on to inspire several famous writers for centuries. Famous poets and writers that drew inspiration from Edgar Allan Poe include: Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Henry James, David Morrell, and B. Traven.

However, Poe’s works weren’t always dark and full of Gothic burial scenes. There was a humorous and funny side to Poe’s works in some cases. Most notable of such works were: A Predicament (1838), The Duc De L’Omelete (1832),  Three Sundays in a Week , and The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether (1845).

Generally, Poe is considered by many as the father of the modern detective genre. Poe’s C. Auguste Dupin character went on to influence other fictional characters such as Sherlock Holmes (created by Sir Authur Conan Doyle), Hercule Poirot (created by Agatha Christie), Misir Ali (created by Humayun Ahmed), Nancy Drew (created by Edward Stratemeyer), and few others.

As a matter of fact, C. Auguste is considered the world’s first fictional detective. The book that he made his first appearance, Poe’s “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841), is regarded as the first detective fiction story. In 1842 and 1844, Poe published The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and  The Purloined Letter respectively.

Prior to Poe starting the detective genre in literature, the word “detective” had not yet been coined. Poe dazzled the literary community with his expertly crafted character, Detective Auguste Dupin – the world’s first fictional detective. Furthermore, the terms- short story and Tintinnabulation were coined by Poe himself.

Edgar Allan Poe’s influence wasn’t confined to just poems and short stories. Poe’s i1848 Eureka: A Prose Poem is considered an amazing artistic depiction (although lacking proper scientific proofs) of how our cosmos works. Therefore, in the scientific world of cosmology and literature, Poe has received a lot of reverence for advancing the science fiction genre.

In the world of cryptography, Poe achieved significant following during his days of deciphering codes submitted by the readers of the Alexander’s Weekly Messenger .  He absolutely loved codes and ciphers, and demonstrated a working knowledge of it. His 1843 short story “The Gold Bug” had significant themes of cryptography. The famous US cryptographer William Friedman cited Edgar Poe as one of his greatest influence.

Poe is considered as one of the first few writers to play with the idea of time travel and apocalyptic scenarios that involved the dead rising. The latter was evident in his 1835 story titled “ The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall ”. The story talks about how a man journeys to the moon on a balloon. Similarly, in his short story, “ The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar ” contains strong themes about hypnotism and death.

Today, the Baltimore house that he lived in from 1831 to 1835, along with his aunt/mother-in-law and first cousin (later wife), has been converted into a museum. The place attracts numerous visitors and avid Edgar Poe readers.

Tags: Baltimore Edgar Allan Poe Henri Le Rennet Modern detective genre Poetry The Raven

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Edgar Allan Poe

Arthur Hobson Quinn with a new introduction by Shawn Rosenheim

Now in paperback—the classic, monumental biography of Poe by Arthur Hobson Quinn. Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the...

Now in paperback—the classic, monumental biography of Poe by Arthur Hobson Quinn. Renowned as the creator of the detective story and a master of horror, the author of "The Red Mask of Death," "The Black Cat," and "The Murders of the Rue Morgue," Edgar Allan Poe seems to have derived his success from suffering and to have suffered from his success. "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" have been read as signs of his personal obsessions, and "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Descent into the Maelstrom" as symptoms of his own mental collapse. Biographers have seldom resisted the opportunities to confuse the pathologies in the stories with the events in Poe's life. Against this tide of fancy, guesses, and amateur psychologizing, Arthur Hobson Quinn's biography devotes itself meticulously to facts. Based on exhaustive research in the Poe family archive, Quinn extracts the life from the legend, and describes how they both were distorted by prior biographies.

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Without warning, without any preliminary fanfare of trumpets, a book has now appeared that towers above others of its kind, a book in which resourceful scholarship and a lucid gift of expression are happily joined. I wish I could recapture all I have recklessly said in praise of other books and concentrate it here.

Book Details

List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Chapter 1. The Heritage Chapter 2. Richmond–The Early Years Chapter 3. The School Days in England Chapter 4. Richmond Again, 1820–1826 Chapter 5. The University of

List of Illustrations Foreword Preface Chapter 1. The Heritage Chapter 2. Richmond–The Early Years Chapter 3. The School Days in England Chapter 4. Richmond Again, 1820–1826 Chapter 5. The University of Virginia Chapter 6. "Tamerlane" and the Army Chapter 7. Hope Deferred – "Al Aaraaf" Chapter 8. West Point and the "Poems" of 1831 Chapter 9. Baltimore – The Early Fiction Chapter 10. The Editor of the "Messenger" Chapter 11. Philadelphia – The "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" Chapter 12. At the Summit – The Editor of "Graham's Magazine" Chapter 13. Following the Illusin Chapter 14. New York – "The Raven" and Other Matters Chapter 15. The "Broadway Journal" and the "Poems" of 1845 Chapter 16. Widening Horizons – Friends and Enemies Chapter 17. "Eureka" Chapter 18. To Helen and For Annie Chapter 19. Richmond – The Last Appeal Chapter 20. The Recoil of Fate Appendices Bibliography Index

Arthur Hobson Quinn

Shawn james rosenheim.

with Hopkins Press Books

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A brief, credible biography of Edgar Allan Poe

Peter Ackroyd's brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, "Poe: A Life Cut Short," is readable and credible

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“Poe: A Life Cut Short”

by Peter Ackroyd

Nan A. Talese/Doubleday, $21.95

When done well, the brief life gives its audience an intellectually plausible take on a famous person that’s also fun to read.

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Still, the form’s chief advantage — its brevity — cannot help leaving key matters undeveloped. The busy but attentive reader will put it down plagued by the maddening itch of unanswered questions.

Peter Ackroyd, a historian, novelist and the author of the best Shakespeare biography I’ve found, is nothing if not readable and credible.

In this little book, he examines the life of Edgar Allan Poe to show why the author of “The Raven” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” still matters.

Born in Boston to a theatrical family, Poe was orphaned early and raised by adoptive parents in Richmond, Va. A feckless young man of striking features and personal charisma, he soon established the pattern of his life: Poe distinguished himself while sober, but sabotaged his prospects by sprees, drinking himself into shambolic insensibility.

Spending most of his adult life as a hack writer for one newspaper or magazine or another, Poe worked in Richmond, New York, Philadelphia, Boston and Baltimore, where he died in 1849 at age 40. Yet he managed to write prodigiously, producing the short stories and poems for which he is chiefly remembered. He was also a prescient, if often vicious, literary critic.

Today, Poe remains a cultural touchstone, while most of his contemporaries and rivals are justly forgotten. As Ackroyd notes, he can be credited with inventing the modern horror story, the modern detective story, and, possibly, the modern sci-fi story.

Ackroyd gives us a rounded portrait, including items that may have eluded our English teachers. Poe was a Southern gentleman, for example, much devoted to the institution of slavery. His gothic sensibility — a fascination with sickly women, premature interment and a mingling of beauty, love and death — arose from the early losses of his mother and adoptive mother.

Still, Ackroyd gives only glancing attention to a number of intriguing matters. In an aside, he declares that heavy drinking and alcoholism are not the same thing. Given the role drink played in Poe’s life or death, that’s an idea worthy of explication.

Ackroyd mentions Poe’s debt to German romantic literature, but says little of what that entails. He suggests strongly that Poe may have written the horror stories with tongue in cheek, but offers scant support.

He notes in passing that Poe “disliked the culture of New England in general, and of Boston in particular; he despised in equal measure Transcendentalism and Abolition.”

Abolition is understandable, but transcendentalism? The mind scrabbles for more — Poe vs. Emerson, please! — but Emerson’s name does not even appear.

Of course, I am asking for a different book than the one Ackroyd has written. If he answered my querulous demands for additional information, “Poe: A Life Cut Short” would soon be something approaching a full biography.

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The Poe Museum

Richmond, VA

Private Perry is Mr. Poe

October 12, 2016

John Limon argues that Poe was one of the first American writers who was important both to the fields of literature and science because he engaged in literary mediation, or “negotiation with science.” Limon notes that Poe’s works provide abundant examples that he anticipated forecasted several future developments in technology, e.g., exploration of the Poles, astronomy, physics, space travel, photography, electronic communications, and the forensic sciences. He wrote about these technical subjects in imaginative ways that captured the public’s interest and concludes that lay writers like Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, or those who wrote “without “letters,” also struggled with the professional class to establish their authority to speak on emerging scientific issues “(19).

Poe had not received any formal training as a scientist. However, he had considerable exposure to scientific ideas in his education, in his training, and in his investigations of science. He believed that an interested, observant, and skilled writer did not need credentials from any official accreditation organization before he was qualified to write about scientific topics. Therefore, in the present column, I will discuss Poe’s early technical preparation, activities, and some of his experiences that likely inspired his interest in writing about science as a poet, journalist, fiction, and non-fiction writer.

Poe’s early schooling and military training inspired and shaped his interest in science. According to Kenneth Silverman, Poe’s secondary education started after his foster parents moved from England to Richmond. In 1821, “Edgar attended the private academy of Joseph H. Clarke,” which served to prepare young gentlemen to obtain “an honorable entrance in any University in the United States.” One of his classmates wrote a testimonial that Poe was one of the top students in the class (23).  Thomas and Jackson list the classes that students typically enrolled in while at that school. They included English, Languages (French, Latin, and Greek), Arithmetic, Geometry, Trigonometry, Navigation (using celestial observations), Gunnery and Projectiles, Optics, Geography, Maps and Charts, and Astronomy (41, 48). Continuing a description of Poe’s education and experiences, Silverman writes that in February 1826, Edgar Allan Poe was among the first group of students enrolled at the University of Virginia. School records there indicate that he was a bright and dedicated student. Despite not being able to afford to pay for his college textbooks, he was one of the top students in several  of his classes. However, hefty financial and gambling debts to the University and to his classmates left him hopelessly in debt. When his foster father refused to continue paying for Poe’s college expenses, he was forced to drop out near the end of his first term (Silverman 29-34).

Major William F. Hecker, the author of Private Perry and Mister Poe , writes that Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the alias of Private Poe. He spent three years as an artilleryman stationed for the longest period at Fort Moultrie, in a coastal area outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Poe spent much of his Army service learning cannon drill and maintenance. This task needed to be performed by a soldier who had extraordinary expertise and skill in the areas of measurement, logistical planning, and design. Army records indicate that Poe “was the most technically competent artillerist in his battery.” He was assigned to “oversee the ammunition supply of the battery.” He was quickly advanced to an artificer, a technical job concerning the “weights and measures of iron and chemicals” (xxxiv).  According to Army records, “Poe was the army’s expert bomb artisan, carefully designing, preparing and constructing inter-connected systems of iron and chemicals with the ultimate goal of explosively destroying his creation” (xxxv-xxix).  It was extraordinary for that time that Poe was promoted to a Sergeant Major in less than two years after he enlisted (xxix), and then enrolled in the United States Army Officer’s School at West Point. At the military academy, he took some classes in French, astronomy, math and navigation, but decided to get himself expelled in 1831 so he could pursue his interests in being a writer. Once again, lacking the necessary financial support from his foster father, Poe wrote: “The army does not suit a poor man—so I left abruptly,” and “threw myself upon literature as a resource” (Poe).

Hecker concludes that Poe’s four years in the Army did not detract in the least from his future career as a writer. On the contrary, it exposed him to many disparate subjects to write about, such as Cryptography, Geography, Oceanography, and Astronomy (xii). Also, he was able to incorporate many of his experiences relating to science into the themes of his poetry, journalism, fiction and non-fiction works. In the next column, I will explore Poe’s earliest published writing on science, a poem entitled, “Sonnet—To Science.”

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Memorandum in Poe Manuscript, May 29, 1841. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore. www.eapoe.org/works/misc/poeautobiogrpahy.

Hecker, William F. Private Perry and Mister Poe . Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2005.

Limon, John. The Place of Fiction in the Time of Science . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990.

Silverman, Kenneth . Edgar Allan Poe: A Biography. New York: HarperCollins, 1991.

Thomas, Dwight and David Jackson, Ed. The Poe Log- A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809-1849. Boston: G.B. Hall and Company, 1987.

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  Murray Ellison received a Master’s in Education at Temple University (1973), a Master’s of Arts in English Literature at VCU (2015), and  a Doctorate in Education at Virginia Tech in 1987. He is married and has three adult employed daughters. He retired as the Virginia Director of Community Corrections for the Department of Correctional Education in 2009. He is the founder and chief editor of the literary blog,  www.LitChatte.com . He is an editor for the “Correctional Education Magazine.”He also serves as a board member, volunteer, tour guide, poetry judge, and all-around helper at the Poe Museum in Richmond. See picture blow:

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The Troubled Life of Edgar Allan Poe

How he came to exemplify the brilliant but troubled writer..

Updated August 14, 2023 | Reviewed by Devon Frye

• What Is Alcoholism?
• Find a therapist to overcome addiction
• Poe was the first American to earn the sobrioquet of the brilliant, but troubled and alcoholic, writer.
• Major themes in his early life included death and loss and an unrequited need for respect from his stepfather.
• He had a significant family history of alcoholism, in both his father and older brother.
• His excessive drinking began in college and took an ever-increasing toll after his mid-20s.

Previous articles in this blog have described the tortured lives of remarkably creative and accomplished figures, including Herman Melville , Charles Darwin , and Abraham Lincoln , and touched on the possible interaction of mental illness and their remarkable achievements. The discussion of Herman Melville, for instance, centered on the role of possible bipolar illness on his worldview, his periods of seemingly boundless energy, and his imagery.

It is fitting, then, to also consider the role of substance abuse in the lives of creative figures. A particularly appropriate person is Edgar Allan Poe, poet, short story writer, and creator of both the science fiction and detective genres, who exemplified the image of the alcoholic writer. 1 This first article in this two-part series will provide the background of the story of his life; the second part will explore his addiction to alcohol and possibly other substances.

Born in Boston in 1809, Edgar Poe was the son of actors David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father, the son of an Irish immigrant who had been an officer in the Revolutionary War, was an actor of limited talent who was very fond of the bottle and deserted his family when Edgar was one year old. His mother succumbed to tuberculosis at age 21, a year later.

The Poe children were dispersed, and Edgar went to live with her mother’s friend, Mrs. John Allan in Richmond, Virginia. Mrs. Allan, with no children of her own, lavished attention on him; her husband, a prosperous tobacco merchant, was a difficult man who withheld the praise Edgar sought from him.

The family added "Allan" to his name but he was never legally adopted. When he was six, they moved to England for five years, during which Edgar studied at a succession of boarding schools but felt isolated and never fit in very well.

The family returned to Richmond and prospered due to an inheritance coming to John Allan. These were better years for Edgar, who was known to be pleasant and was often asked to recite poetry.

During this time he became infatuated with a friend’s mother, whom he idealized. She died when he was 15, and brokenhearted, he visited her grave regularly. In some ways, his experience was similar to that of Emily Dickinson , who at age 14 lost her cousin, to whom she was very attached, marking the beginning of the theme of bereavement in many of her writings, and accentuated later when other important figures in her life passed away.

It has been speculated that both Poe’s mother’s death and this formative experience may have been the beginning of the motif of lovely young women who die early, with a love that persists beyond the grave. His grief, however, did not prevent him from meeting, and later proposing to another young lady, Sarah Elmira Royster.

In 1826 Poe enrolled in the University of Virginia, which was then in its second year after having been founded by Thomas Jefferson. Though his skill at poetry and painting was recognized, he also earned the reputation of a reckless gambler and heavy drinker. It was said that he drank his whiskey straight and copiously but without seeming to take pleasure in it. In less than a year his debts were so great that his stepfather paid them off but would not let him go back to the university.

Poe’s return to Richmond was, not surprisingly, an unhappy one, made worse by the news that Ms. Royster had married someone else. He moved to Boston where he worked part-time as a newspaper writer. But financial pressures led him to join the army in May of 1827 using a false name and saying that he was 22 instead of 18.

He was first stationed in Boston, where he published his first book, the poetry collection Tamerlane and Other Poems, which met with no success. Later he was transferred to Charleston, where he was assigned to assemble artillery shells. He did well, rising to the non-commissioned rank of sergeant major, but he tired of it.

He appealed once again to his stepfather, who was, however, occupied with the illness of his wife. After her death in February 1829, he reluctantly paid the fees necessary for Poe to leave before his enlistment was over, in the hopes that he would later attend West Point, to which his stepfather had used his influence to obtain an appointment.

After his discharge, Poe went to Baltimore, where he moved into the home of his 39-year-old aunt Maria Clemm, who would become a mother figure to him, as well as her daughter Virginia, later to become his wife, and his older brother Henry. During this time he published another book of poetry, again without notable success.

In July of 1830, he entered West Point, in perhaps his last attempt to please his stepfather. In his seven months there he became known for his fondness of brandy, and was admired by the other cadets for his satirical poems about their superiors.

Once again, though, Poe tired of his occupation, but his stepfather, to whom he was now estranged, would not pay the fees necessary for his release. In response, Poe refused to go to classes or church or to carry out other orders. As was his intent, he was court-martialed, and dismissed from the service.

In 1831 he returned to Maria Clemm’s home in Baltimore. Not long afterward Henry died, apparently of tuberculosis but complicated by debilitation from alcoholism. While mourning the loss of yet one more important figure in his life, Poe began writing short stories to help pay the family’s expenses and subsidize his poetry.

Though most paid little, he achieved some success with "MS. Found in a Bottle" in 1833. It led to him landing a job at the Southern Literary Messenger, first as a part-time contributor, then as a regular writer and book reviewer, and later as its editor.

In 1836 he persuaded his young cousin Virginia, then 13, to marry, though there is disagreement as to whether this was ever consummated. (There is some question as to whether Poe ever had a sexual relationship in his life. 2 ) Maria Clemm continued to live with them, caring for the house then and even after Virginia’s death from tuberculosis at age 24 in 1847.

At first, he was a diligent husband and at least initially was not drinking. He became known for the vigor with which his reviews denounced the works of the literary stars of his day. But somewhere along the line, he returned to the bottle. It led to his being fired from his first major literary job, the first of many which would end this way.

The second article in this two-part series will describe the ever-increasing toll which Poe paid for his addiction, leading to his death in a delirious state at age 40, as well as his own thoughts about his drinking, and the possibility that his symptoms may have resulted not only from alcohol, but also from other substances.

Portions of this article are adapted from Fragile Brilliance: The Troubled Lives of Herman Melville, Edgar Allan Poe, Emily Dickinson and Other Great Authors .

1. Goodwin, D.W.: Alcohol and the Writer , Andrews & McMeel, New York, 1988.

2. Baab-Muguira, C.: Is this why Edgar Allan Poe never had kids? The Millions. Feb. 25, 2022. https://themillions.com/2022/02/is-this-why-edgar-allan-poe-never-had-kids.html

Wallace Mendelson, M.D., is a Professor of Psychiatry and Clinical Pharmacology (retired) at the University of Chicago.

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