Edgar Allan Poe - (1809-1849)
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Village Community School, New York City
Read another essay on Edgar Allan Poe written by Pennsylvania student Maurice Barnes or Virginia student Wes Martin.
I. Biography
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is one of the most well-known authors in the world. He led a very tragic life, but that is what inspired a lot of his most world-renowned works. Poe is noted for his strange poetry, which was ahead of its time. He was also famous for some of his short stories such as "The Cask of Amontillado", "The Fall of the House of Usher", and "The Tell-Tale Heart." One of his most famous short stories, for which he won first prize in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor in 1833, is "MS found in a Bottle." But Poe did not only write poetry and short stories, he was also a great critic. He wrote many essays about literary works that are still widely read. Poe did not pick up writing out of nowhere. Many things that made strong impressions on his life inspired him.
Poe had a very tough life ever since his childhood. He was born in Boston, Massachusetts
to a family of wandering actors who were constantly fighting. At the age of three his father, David Poe, left his mother with three young children and never returned. Poe's mother,
Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, struggled to keep her children fed, traveling from city to city wherever she could find work. In 1811 she made her way back to Richmond, Virginia where she would die, leaving Edgar a foster child.
Soon after his mother's death, a well-to-do merchant named John Allan adopted Edgar. This changed his name from Edgar Poe to Edgar Allan Poe. When Edgar was six years-old
he and his new family moved to England where he attended a private school where his education as a gentleman would begin. It would also be the beginning of a long series of
ever-changing environments and schools. Five years later, when Poe was eleven, he moved back to Richmond where he would attend a few of the local public schools.
When Poe was seventeen he was sent to the University of Virginia, and his happy childhood years were over. His adopted father, who was a wealthy landowner, gave Edgar
just enough money to live on, but hardly enough love. Edgar was thrown into a school full of rich, young, white men who had fathers that owned great amounts of land, while he was
poor and left out in the cold. Because Edgar had so little money, he developed a gambling problem. He would bet all of his money and lose, and bet money he didn't have and lose.
Eventually he got himself into a habit of drinking to ease his pain. All throughout Edgar's childhood, he thought that he would inherit his adoptive father's land and money, but this
speculation soon changed when Allan stopped paying for college and forced Poe to move back to Richmond to live with him. After his stay at the university, Edgar continued to
write letters to a woman with whom he had supposedly fallen in love, but his father intercepted them. Reality was so warped to Edgar that he had to escape in his writing and
in alcohol. Because of this neurotic childhood, Edgar would never be the same. As Poe grew up he lived in many places and had many jobs including being an editor, a
critic, and a freelance writer. He worked in various cities and on many different newspapers in which he had poems and stories published. Edgar worked and lived in cities such as
Baltimore, New York, Richmond, Providence, Boston, Philadelphia, and Pittsburgh. In New York City Poe lived at different addresses in different neighborhoods including Greenwich
Village, the Upper West Side, and the Bronx. His career revolved mainly around his writing because he did not have a family to support for most of his life, and didn't have to worry about a wife or children.
In his life, Poe had many loves, and many losses. He was always looking for and depended on female companionship, and was constantly looking for replacements(which were quite
poor substitutes) for his late mother. Love was something that he discovered when he was in second grade and sought throughout the rest of his life. His first love, the mother of a
friend of his in second grade, was named Jane Stith Stanard. He wrote a poem about her entitled "To Helen." But this inspiration would not only come from love. It would come
from grief as well. Soon after he met this woman, she died. This would be one of the many loves in Poe's life to die young. His next love was not to come until 1835 when he met a girl named Virginia Clemm, who was
actually his cousin. One year later he married her before she reached the age of fourteen. Edgar and Virginia constantly moved from city to city as Edgar changed jobs frequently.
After eleven years of moving from city to city and job-to-job, Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, the Bronx with Virginia. Edgar was ill and in no state in which he could work and
Virginia was dying. They had no money to buy food or fuel for heat and Virginia was beyond all human medical help. On January 30, 1847 Virginia died, ending the sanest period of Edgar's life.
Two years earlier when Edgar was visiting Providence he had seen, but not met, a woman named Mrs. Sarah Helen Whitman. In 1848, a year after the death of Virginia, he pursued
and asked her to marry him. His reputation was one that did not appeal to Mrs. Whitman, and she declined his proposal. When he went to Providence to see her that November, he
bought a drug called laudanum, with which he tried to kill himself that fall in Boston. Instead of killing himself, Edgar took a large enough dose to make himself violently ill, but too small a dose to kill himself.
After he recovered he returned to Providence where he met Mrs. Whitman once again. He promised to stop his attempt to marry her, but then showed up at her door the next morning
with hopes of finding a bride. She finally consented to marry him with the condition that he would stop drinking. Later in December when Edgar returned to Providence to make the
final arrangements for his marriage, but before the ceremony could take place, Edgar found a couple of men with whom he went to a bar. Edgar and the other men had a great time and
got drunk, breaking the promise he had made to Mrs. Whitman. The next morning he showed up at Mrs. Whitman's doorstep, drunk, but forgiven for the time being. This, of
course, put pressure on Mrs. Whitman to break the engagement and she had to speak to Edgar to set things straight. After she spoke to Edgar, apparently so did her mother.
During the session with Mrs. Whitman's mother Edgar, drunk, fainted on her couch which compelled Mrs. Whitman's mother to break off the engagement herself. This would not be
the last major love (and last major romantic heartbreak) of Edgar's life. There were other smaller relationships with which he tried to fill the gap in his life left by Virginia, but none of them could replace her.
Alcohol abuse was the thing that ended Poe's last possible chance of a lasting marriage and was also the substance that would end many other things for him. Ever since his
college years he would drink to escape his problems, but as the cliché goes: "You can't drown your problems in alcohol." Drinking was especially dangerous to Edgar because he
had a very low tolerance. One glass of wine would go straight to his head and it would take him little more to get drunk. But no one drinks without a reason. Edgar's was that he
thought that the world was intolerable and he sought to escape it in drinking and writing. Although Edgar's alcohol abuse was a very terrible thing in his life, it did lead to some of
his greatest writings. Poe would drink to ease his pain, which caused him more pain, and his pain caused him to write great things. His habit was a cycle that was very hard to break.
His alcohol abuse followed all throughout his life and even led to his death. Poe was found on the streets of Baltimore, unconscious (most probably because of heavy alcohol abuse),
and was taken to the nearest hospital. Three days later on October 7, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was proclaimed dead.
II. Poe's Professional Life
Edgar Allan Poe was always a writer, even at a young age, even when he was a child in school. He wrote one of his most famous works as a child, a letter called "To Helen" which was a love letter to his friend's mother. His young life also affected some of his later writings such as "Anna Bell Lee."
Poe was always ahead of his time. He created the scary effect of poems before any other writer. He brought writing up a level, which is one of the reasons he is so famous today.
More than other writers of his time, Poe was interested in the musical, rhythmic sound of poetry. In "The Bells" the sound of the constantly repeating word "bells" gives the poem a
musical sound. He had a weird style of writing that broke the old rules. He dared to go to the creepy side of his imagination. His works were like a nightmare, whereas literature
before Poe was expected to be about great things and nice things, and never the sleek, syringe of Poe. "The Bells" is also an example of his weird style of writing. It starts out as
a nice poem about wedding bells, and then slowly turns into a creepy poem about funeral bells. Some of his strange stories and works were affected by all the grief he suffered early
in his life. His parents died at a young age, which affected his view of the world. Poe never really kept one job. He started in the army, where he wrote a few of his works.
They were published in 1831. A year later he became an assistant editor to a newspaper called The Philadelphia Saturday Courier. Soon he was winning prizes for his works.
In 1835 he became an assistant editor to The Southern Literary Messenger, but left it two years later. In 1837 he moved to New York with his wife, where in 1838 he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordan Pym
, and a year later, The Conchologist's First Book. That same year, Poe became an assistant editor to Gentleman's Magazine. In 1841 he became the editor of Graham's Magazine
, but then left it in 1842. Then in 1845, Poe took the position of the Assistant Editor of the Evening Mirror. Months later he moved to The Broadway Journal,
which in a couple of months he became the proprietor of. He lost his control a year later and The Broadway Journal ceased publication.
As years went by Poe attempted to start other magazines, but without success. He started to drink heavily, and even attempted suicide. Although he never kept a steady job, he
nonetheless continued to write poems and stories which are still enjoyed today. They have given him a permanent place in American literature. III. Selected Works
Tamerlane and Other Poems, 1827 IV. Bibliography
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829
Poems by Edgar A. Poe, 1831
The Raven and Other Poems, 1845
"Eureka: A Prose Poem", 1848
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840
Prose Romances: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up, 1843
Tales, 1845
Works of Edgar Allan Poe, With Notices of His Life and Genius, 1850
The Political Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1870
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1849
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1902
Selections from the Critical Writings of Edgar Allan Poe, 1909
The Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe, 1938
The Complete Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Poe: Complete Poems
Eighteen Best Stories of Edgar Allan Poe
Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
The Poems of Edgar Allan Poe
Selected Writings, Poems, Tales, Essays, and Reviews
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe
Collective Writings of Edgar Allan Poe volume 1 and 2
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
The Conchologist's First Book
"Edgar Allan Poe," in Contemporary Authors. Edgar Allan Poe. Available: http://www.nypl.org/branch/resources/egaleliterary.html (April 17, 2000).
Philip Van Doren Stern, ed. Edgar Allan Poe. New York: The Viking Press. This essay was submitted by 8th grade students of Joan Brodsky Schur, a teacher at the
Village Community School in New York City.