University of Virginia, Charlottesville, Virginia, United States
Poe attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money.
Gallery of Edgar Poe
United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, United States
In 1831 Poe began his studies at West Point, graduating four years later alongside many classmates who immediately resigned to be engineers and lawyers rather than go fight in the Second Seminole War.
United States Military Academy, West Point, New York, United States
In 1831 Poe began his studies at West Point, graduating four years later alongside many classmates who immediately resigned to be engineers and lawyers rather than go fight in the Second Seminole War.
(This epic poem gives an account of a Turkic ruler named T...)
This epic poem gives an account of a Turkic ruler named Tamerlane, who conquered kingdoms to win power while giving up that which his heart desired most. Despite the fact that his first published works were books of poetry, during his lifetime Edgar Allan Poe was recognized more for his literary criticism and prose than his poetry.
(The story surrounds the baffling double murder of Madame ...)
The story surrounds the baffling double murder of Madame L'Espanaye and her daughter in the Rue Morgue, a fictional street in Paris. Newspaper accounts of the murder reveal that the mother's throat is so badly cut that her head is barely attached and the daughter, after being strangled, has been stuffed into the chimney. The murder occurs in an inaccessible room on the fourth floor locked from the inside.
(In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems, fans may in...)
In Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems, fans may indulge in all of Poe's most imaginative short-stories, including The Fall of the House of Usher, The Murders in Rue Morgue, The Tell-Tale Heart, Ligeia, and Ms. In a Bottle. His complete early and miscellaneous poetic masterpieces are here also, including The Raven, Ulalume, Annabel Lee, Tamerlane, as well as select reviews and narratives.
(The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writ...)
The Portable Edgar Allan Poe compiles Poe's greatest writings, tales of fantasy, terror, death, revenge, murder, and mystery, including The Pit and the Pendulum, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Cask of Amontillado, The Masque of the Red Death, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the world's first detective story.
Edgar Allan Poe, an American author, was best known to his own generation as an editor and critic; his poems and short stories commanded only a small audience.
Background
Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, United States, on January 19, 1809, the son of professional actors. By the time he was 3, Edgar, his older brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, and younger sister, Rosalie Poe, had lost their mother to consumption and their father through desertion. The children were split up, going to various families to live. Edgar went to the charitable Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name.
The Allans were wealthy then and were to become more so later, and though they never adopted Poe, for many years it appeared that he was to be their heir. They treated him like an adopted son, saw to his education in private academies, and took him to England for a five-year stay; and at least Mrs. Allan bestowed considerable affection upon him.
As Edgar entered adolescence, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of his ward's literary inclinations, thought him surly and ungrateful, and gradually seems to have decided Poe was not to be his heir after all.
Education
Poe attended the grammar school for a short period until 1816 in Irvine, Scotland. Then he studied at a boarding school in Chelsea, London until summer 1817. He subsequently entered at the Reverend John Bransby's Manor House School at Stoke Newington.
In 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia, John Allan’s, his foster-father, allowance was so meager, that Poe turned to gambling to supplement his income. In eight months he lost $2,000. Allan's refusal to help him led to total estrangement and Poe gave up on the university after a year and stormed out on his own.
In 1831 Poe began his studies at West Point, graduating four years later alongside many classmates who immediately resigned to be engineers and lawyers rather than go fight in the Second Seminole War.
In April 1827 Poe managed to get to Boston, where he signed up for a five-year enlistment in the U.S. Army. In 1827, as well, he had his Tamerlane and Other Poems published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the highest noncommissioned rank in the Army, sergeant major. He was reluctant to serve out the full enlistment, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the Army on the understanding he would seek an appointment at West Point. He thought such a move might cause a reconciliation with his guardian, John Allan.
That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems were published in Baltimore and received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal. Armed with these new credentials, Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but another violent quarrel forced him to leave in May 1830. The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long as a cadet. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." His guardian, long widowed, had taken a young wife who might well give him an heir, and Poe realized his hopes of a legacy were without foundation.
During his early years of exile Poe lived in Baltimore for a while with his aunt Maria Clemm and her seven-year-old daughter, Virginia. He returned to his aunt's home in 1831, publishing Poems by Edgar Allan Poe and beginning to place short stories in magazines. In 1833 he received a prize for "MS. Found in a Bottle," and John Pendleton Kennedy got him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger.
In 1836 Poe moved to Richmond with Virginia, now his bride, and mother-in-law. Excessive drinking lost him his job in 1837, but he had produced prolifically for the journal. He had contributed his Politian, as well as 83 reviews, six poems, four essays, and three short stories. He had also quintupled the magazine's circulation. Rejection in the face of such accomplishment was extremely distressing to him, and his state of mind from then on, as one biographer put it, "was never very far from panic." The panic accelerated after 1837.
Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York, where he did hack work and managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838).Then they moved to Philadelphia, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In two years he boosted its circulation from 5,000 to 20,000 and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher."
In 1840, furthermore, he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left for the literary editorship of Graham's Magazine. It was becoming clear that two years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and his stay at Graham's confirmed this principle. Though he contributed skillfully wrought fiction and unquestionably developed as a critic, his endless literary feuding, his alcoholism, and his inability to get along very well with people caused him to leave after 1842.
The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a $100 prize for his "The Gold Bug", but Poe was now facing a kind of psychological adversity against which he was virtually helpless. His wife, who had been an absolutely crucial source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption which would eventually kill her. When his burden became too great, he tried to relieve it with alcohol, which made him ill.
After great struggle Poe got a job on the New York Mirror in 1844. He lasted, characteristically, into 1845, switching then to the editorship of the Broadway Journal. Although he was now deep in public literary feuds, things seemed to be breaking in his favor. The 1844 publication of the poem The Raven finally brought him some fame, and in 1845 the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales, both containing some of his best work, did in fact move him into fashionable literary society. But his wife's health continued to deteriorate, and he was not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.
Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to sustain steady employment, and amid the din of plagiarism charges and libel suits, his fortunes sank to the point that he and his family almost starved in their Fordham cottage in the winter of 1846. Then, on January 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died. The wonder is not that Poe began totally to disintegrate but that he nevertheless continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the brilliantly ambitious Eureka, and he was even to make a final, heart-wrenching attempt at rehabilitation.
He returned to Richmond in 1849, there to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore. Nobody knows exactly what happened, and there is no real proof that he was picked up by a gang who used him to "repeat" votes, but he was found on October 3 in a stupor near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital 4 days later.
Achievements
Unquestionably one of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience - the "inner world" of dream, hallucination, and imagination. In his poems, and to an impressive degree in his tales, he pioneered in opening up areas of human experience for artistic treatment at which his contemporaries only hinted.
Poe completely transformed the genre of the horror story with his masterful tales of psychological depth and insight; he became an early pioneer in the genre of science fiction and father of the modern detective story, as well.
As a critic, Poe laid great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure and formulated rules for the short story - the short story should relate a complete action and take place within one day in one place.
Poe was also the first author to try to make a professional living as a writer.
The Allan family had Poe baptized in the Episcopal Church in 1812.
Politics
About 1840 Poe attempted to secure a position within the Tyler administration, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas. Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick. Though he was promised an appointment, all positions were filled by others.
Views
Poe detested didacticism and allegory. He believed that meaning in literature should be an undercurrent just beneath the surface, so works with obvious meanings, he wrote, are far from art. He claimed that work of quality should be brief and focus on a specific single effect. To that end, he believed that the writer should carefully calculate every sentiment and idea.
Quotations:
"You are not wrong who deem That my days have been a dream; Yet if hope has flown away In a night, or in a day, In a vision, or in none, Is it therefore the less gone? All that we see or seem Is but a dream within a dream."
"I have absolutely no pleasure in the stimulants in which I sometimes so madly indulge. It has not been in the pursuit of pleasure that I have periled life and reputation and reason. It has been the desperate attempt to escape from torturing memories, from a sense of insupportable loneliness and a dread of some strange impending doom."
"Believe only half of what you see and nothing that you hear."
"Always keep a big bottle of booze at your side. If a bird starts talking nonsense to you in the middle of the night pour yourself a stiff drink."
"I remained to much inside my head and ended up losing my mind."
"Men have called me mad; but the question is not yet settled, whether madness is or is not the loftiest intelligence - whether much that is glorious - whether all that is profound - does not spring from disease of thought - from moods of mind exalted at the expense of the general intellect."
"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things that escape those who dream only at night."
"The world is a great ocean, upon which we encounter more tempestuous storms than calms."
Personality
Though, in ordinary circumstances Poe was a pleasant companion, who talked brilliantly, chiefly of literature, and had a sense of humour, it is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. Behind a screen of sometimes substantial, sometimes flimsy "reality," his fictional work resembles the dreams of a distressed individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.
Poe's critics interpret this pattern to represent the search of the individual for himself by going deep into himself and his ultimate arrival at the unplumbed mystery of his inner self. This search has come, of course, to characterize much of 20th-century art, and it is the distinguished accomplishment of Poe as an artist that his work looks forward with such startling precision to the work of the century that followed.
Interests
Poe had a keen interest in cryptography.
Writers
Shakespeare, Alexander Pope
Connections
In 1836 Poe married his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Eliza Clemm. Virginia died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence, Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman, a poet. There was a brief engagement.
Father:
David Poe, Jr
Mother:
Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe
sibling:
William Henry Leonard Poe
William Henry Leonard Poe, often referred to as Henry Poe, (January 30, 1807 – August 1, 1831) was a sailor, amateur poet and the older brother of Edgar Allan Poe and Rosalie Poe.
sibling:
Rosalie Poe
late spouse:
Virginia Eliza Clemm
Adoptive father:
John Allan
John Allan was a successful Scottish merchant in Richmond, Virginia who dealt in a variety of goods, including tobacco, cloth, wheat, tombstones, and slaves.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Strange Man Standing Deep in the Shadows
Strap in for a terrifying look into the life and times of the original strange man: Edgar Allan Poe. Poe is viewed as the ultimate doomed romantic whose last days are shrouded in sordid mystery. His life was a disaster, but his achievements in writing are amazing. He is widely recognized as father of the modern short story, inventor of the detective story and the master of horror.
