The Man of Exceptional Art

Edgar Allan Poe

1809-1849 , Boston , MA

      He was a personality of great impact on American and international literature. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809, a son of professional actors. His father and mother both died before the poet was three years old, which is the reason why he was raised as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia by John and Frances Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter.

       Poe was sent to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. However, after less than one year of school, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts. He returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated.

       Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army in 1827. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in the same year. Two years after, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received has gained the attention of the public.  

Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but again due to the lack of financial support, he was forced to leave. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia in Baltimore, Maryland.

Around those times, Poe began to sell short stories to magazines and later on in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin. The next year, he married Virginia, who was fourteen years old at the time.

For over 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.”

In 1847, Virginia died from tuberculosis and the bane worsened Poe’s lifelong struggle with great depression and alcoholism. 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 and after four days he died because of “acute congestion of the brain.” Medical practitioners studied the case of Poe and found out evidences that he may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s 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 one of the extraordinary critics who focused primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work. He has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement.

French symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. For nearly fourteen years, Baudelaire translated his works into French. Today, Poe is known and remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in the world of literature. 

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edgar-allan-poe