biography about edgar allan poe life

Edgar Allan Poe

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

• Who Was Edgar Allan Poe?

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

Quick Facts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

“The Raven”

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

“Annabel Lee”

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

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

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

“The Black Cat”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Fact Check: We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn’t look right, contact us !

The Biography.com staff is a team of people-obsessed and news-hungry editors with decades of collective experience. We have worked as daily newspaper reporters, major national magazine editors, and as editors-in-chief of regional media publications. Among our ranks are book authors and award-winning journalists. Our staff also works with freelance writers, researchers, and other contributors to produce the smart, compelling profiles and articles you see on our site. To meet the team, visit our About Us page: https://www.biography.com/about/a43602329/about-us

A Huge Shakespeare Mystery, Solved

How Did Shakespeare Die?

20 Shakespeare Quotes

William Shakespeare

Christine de Pisan

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz

14 Hispanic Women Who Have Made History

10 Famous Langston Hughes Poems

5 Crowning Achievements of Maya Angelou

Amanda Gorman

Langston Hughes

7 Facts About Literary Icon Langston Hughes

• National Poetry Month
• Materials for Teachers
• Literary Seminars
• American Poets Magazine

Main navigation

• Academy of American Poets

User account menu

Search more than 3,000 biographies of contemporary and classic poets.

Page submenu block

• literary seminars
• materials for teachers
• poetry near you

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.

Related Poets

William Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, who rallied for “common speech” within poems and argued against the poetic biases of the period, wrote some of the most influential poetry in Western literature, including his most famous work,  The Prelude , which is often considered to be the crowning achievement of English romanticism.

W. B. Yeats

William Butler Yeats, widely considered one of the greatest poets of the English language, received the 1923 Nobel Prize for Literature. His work was greatly influenced by the heritage and politics of Ireland.

Walt Whitman

William Blake

William Blake was born in London on November 28, 1757, to James, a hosier, and Catherine Blake. Two of his six siblings died in infancy. From early childhood, Blake spoke of having visions—at four he saw God "put his head to the window"; around age nine, while walking through the countryside, he saw a tree filled with angels.

Emily Dickinson

Emily Dickinson was born on December 10, 1830, in Amherst, Massachusetts. While she was extremely prolific as a poet and regularly enclosed poems in letters to friends, she was not publicly recognized during her lifetime. She died in Amherst in 1886, and the first volume of her work was published posthumously in 1890.

Newsletter Sign Up

• Academy of American Poets Newsletter
• Academy of American Poets Educator Newsletter
• Teach This Poem

Encyclopedia Virginia, Virginia Humanities

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.
• Name First Last
• Phone This field is for validation purposes and should be left unchanged.

Never Miss an Update

Partners & affiliates.

Encyclopedia Virginia 946 Grady Ave. Ste. 100 Charlottesville, VA 22903 (434) 924-3296

Indigenous Acknowledgment

Virginia Humanities acknowledges the Monacan Nation , the original people of the land and waters of our home in Charlottesville, Virginia.

We invite you to learn more about Indians in Virginia in our Encyclopedia Virginia .

Poems & Poets

Edgar Allan Poe

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• North America
• U.S., Mid-Atlantic

• World Biography

Edgar Allan Poe Biography

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

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

Orphaned at three

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

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

Enlists in the army

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

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

Marriage and editing jobs

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

Illness and crisis

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

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

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

For More Information

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

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

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

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

User Contributions:

Comment about this article, ask questions, or add new information about this topic:.

Pardon Our Interruption

As you were browsing something about your browser made us think you were a bot. There are a few reasons this might happen:

• You've disabled JavaScript in your web browser.
• You're a power user moving through this website with super-human speed.
• You've disabled cookies in your web browser.
• A third-party browser plugin, such as Ghostery or NoScript, is preventing JavaScript from running. Additional information is available in this support article .

To regain access, please make sure that cookies and JavaScript are enabled before reloading the page.

• History & Society
• Science & Tech
• Biographies
• Animals & Nature
• Geography & Travel
• Arts & Culture
• Games & Quizzes
• On This Day
• One Good Fact
• New Articles
• Lifestyles & Social Issues
• Philosophy & Religion
• Politics, Law & Government
• World History
• Health & Medicine
• Browse Biographies
• Birds, Reptiles & Other Vertebrates
• Bugs, Mollusks & Other Invertebrates
• Environment
• Fossils & Geologic Time
• Entertainment & Pop Culture
• Sports & Recreation
• Visual Arts
• Demystified
• Image Galleries
• Infographics
• Top Questions
• Britannica Kids
• Saving Earth
• Space Next 50
• Student Center
• Introduction & Top Questions

• What influence did Edgar Allan Poe have?
• How did Edgar Allan Poe die?
• When did American literature begin?
• Who are some important authors of American literature?
• What are the periods of American literature?

Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

Our editors will review what you’ve submitted and determine whether to revise the article.

• All Poetry - Biography of Edgar Allan Poe
• Poetry Foundation - Biography of Edgar Allan Poe
• Official Site of Edgar Allan Poe Museum
• National Park Service - Biography of Edgar Allan Poe
• Brandeis University - Edgar Allan Poe
• PBS - American Masters - Biography of Edgar Allan Poe
• Humanities LibreTexts - Edgar Allan Poe
• My Hero - Edgar Allan Poe
• Poets.org - Edgar Allan Poe
• Edgar Allan Poe - Children's Encyclopedia (Ages 8-11)
• Edgar Allan Poe - Student Encyclopedia (Ages 11 and up)
• Table Of Contents

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Poet Biographies

The Mysterious Life of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th-century master of vivid imagery and impeccable craftsmanship. His short stories and poems are renowned for their dark, eerie themes. His peculiar demise at a young age rounded off a life of mystery.

Edgar Allan Poe’s work as a poet, short-story writer, and editor was notable in his contribution to world literature. Poe was a pioneer of mysterious, thrilling writing that left its mark on American poetry and literature forever. He is considered one of the originators of detective fiction and true  gothic   horror .

He was also one of the first American writers to gain an international reputation. His overall body of work, such as; poetry, short stories , tales of horror, and even critical theories, has garnered him a major figure in the history of literature.

About Edgar Allan Poe

• 1 Life Facts
• 2 Interesting Facts
• 3 Famous Poems
• 4 Early Life
• 5 Literary Career
• 6 Writing Career and Relationships
• 8 Influence from other Poets
• Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809.
• Poe enlisted in the US Army at eighteen years old.
• Poe is credited with the invention of the detective genre of fiction.
• ‘ Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque ‘ was published in 1839.
• Virginia, Poe’s young wife, died in 1847 from tuberculosis, and Edgar Allan Poe died two years later.

Interesting Facts

• He struggled with gambling debts.
• Poe married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia.
• He might’ve been named after a Shakespearean character in “King Lear.”
• ‘ The Raven ‘ was published in 1845.
• His death has remained a mystery, inspiring many to speculate on the cause.

Famous Poems

• ‘The Raven’   is one of the scariest poems that Poe wrote. It has since become his most famous and commonly studied. The phrase “Quoth the raven Nevermore” has been included in everything from Halloween decorations to horror movies/tv shows. The poem takes the reader into the mind of a questionable narrator who is experiencing what seems to be a mental break.
• ‘ Anabel Lee’   is a gorgeous short poem that depicts, as many of Poe’s poems did, the death of a woman. Poe’s life was filled with tragedy , particularly around the women he loved. The poem describes the love the speaker had for a young woman who has since been taken away by the angels. Their jealousy got the best of them, and they brought her to Heaven.
• ‘Alone’   is another haunting poem that was inspired by the death of a woman in Poe’s life, this time his foster mother, Frances. In it, the speaker looks at his childhood and tries to understand his loneliness. The entire poem is quite dark and carries a depressing and downtrodden tone throughout.
• ‘The Haunted Palace’ originally appeared in Poe’s short story , The Fall of the House of Usher.  The poem describes, through the metaphor of an old house, the collapse of a person’s mind. This person, who is represented by the house, is slowly but steadily going insane.
• ‘Lenore ,’ which is also sometimes known as ‘A Pæan,’ is once more a description of the emotional results of a young woman’s death. In the poem, the speaker changes perspectives , alternating between different perspectives on Lenore and what everyone should do in regard to her death now.

Explore more Edgar Allan Poe poems here.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809. He was the second child of English actress Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and his father, David Poe Jr, who was also an actor. It is often speculated that Poe was named in accordance with the Shakespearean play in which his parents were performing at the time of his birth. His family was both Irish and English by descent and came to America around 1750. He had two siblings, an older brother, William, and a young sister, Rosalie.

Poe’s father left his family in 1810, and unfortunately for the young children, their mother died a year later from tuberculosis, or consumption as it was commonly known. Poe was not yet three years old. From that point on, Poe was raised by a Scotsman named John Allan in Richmond, Virginia. It was from this family that Poe took on his middle name, “Allan.” For a short time, when Poe was still quite young, the family took a trip to Scotland. He studied at a grammar school in Irvine and later at a boarding school in Chelsea, England.

After a temporary stay in Great Britain, the family moved back to Richmond in 1820, and in 1826 Poe registered at the University of Virginia. It was his intention to study ancient and modern languages. Poe’s time at the university was turbulent, and due to increasing gambling debts, he lost touch with his foster father. He left university after only one year and traveled to Boston, where he worked as a newspaper writer and clerk. Poe’s funds and career prospects were quite limited, so in an effort to improve his circumstances, he enlisted in the US Army at eighteen years old.

Literary Career

He served at Fort Independence in Boston at the same time that he was releasing his first volume of poetry titled ‘ Tamerlane and Other Poems .’ The book had very limited printing and received little to no attention. After two years in the army, Poe sought and was given a discharge, after which he moved back to Baltimore, where he stayed with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia Eliza Clemm. He was also publishing his second collection, this time, ‘ Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane , and Minor Poems,’  which was released in 1829.

Due to the circumstances of his military discharge, he was made to attend the United States Military Academy at West Point. His time there was also brief, during which he sought out a court-martial for neglect of duty. He then moved on to New York City. The following years saw the release of his third volume of poetry and the death of his brother. In the mid-thirties, after meeting with no poetic success, Poe turned to  prose . He won a prize for his work in 1833, bringing him a small amount of attention.

In 1835, Poe became the assistant editor of the  Southern Literary Messenger,  was fired for drunkenness, and married his thirteen-year-old cousin Virginia the next year. At their wedding ceremony, the couple was forced to lie about Virginia’s age, stating she was 21 instead of 13. In 1839, he was appointed coeditor for  Burton’s Gentlemen’s Magazine  in Philadelphia. Poe then regained his previous job and published a number of poems, stories, and reviews. It was during this time that he wrote some of his best-known stories such as, “ The Fall of the House of Usher ,” and “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue ,” which is considered to be the inception of the modern detective story . These works were part of the collection ‘ Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque’  published in 1839.

Writing Career and Relationships

Three years later, Poe’s temporary good fortune took a turn for the worse. Virginia began to show signs of consumption, symptoms Poe knew well. His drinking became worse during this time period, and he left his job. He worked for a couple of other journals, and his most popular poem, ‘ The Raven ,’ was published in 1845.

Poe’s wife died in 1847 from tuberculosis, causing a deepening of his depression and further worsening his alcoholism. After her death, he attempted to enter into a permanent relationship with another poet. The couple became engaged, only to split up, driven apart by Poe’s habits.

In 1849, Poe released a lecture called ‘ Eureka ,’ which has been met with mixed reviews to this day. Some scholars and critics viewed the work that explained the universe as a piece of genius, while others considered it nonsensical.

Edgar Allan Poe’s death is still somewhat mysterious. He left Richmond for Baltimore in September 1849. On October 3, 1849, he was found wandering around Baltimore in a semi-conscious state. He was taken to the hospital very early in the morning but was never conscious long enough to explain his condition. It is said that he was wearing someone else’s clothes during the whole ordeal and called out for someone named “Reynolds.” He died four days later of what was then called “acute congestion of the brain.” It is now thought that he had perhaps suffered from rabies, syphilis, cholera, or perhaps heart disease.

Influence from other Poets

Edgar Allan Poe was notably influenced by writers such as  Lord Byron ,  John Keats ,  Percy Bysshe Shelley . He has served as an inspiration for countless others since his death. It is said that the poems of Edgar Allan Poe heavily influenced the French Symbolist movement of the late 19th century.

Edgar Allan Poe has been attributed to many iconic quotes. However, one that stands out is his view on language when he says that “Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

Edgar Allan Poe was lauded for his wide range of talents, from short story writing to essays on critical theory. However, his poetry was iconic. His most famous work is ‘ The Raven ,’ a poem about the narrator ’s descent into madness.

Like with any creative person, their life filters through into their work. This was no different for Edgar Allan Poe. After the death of both his parents at a young age and then witnessing the death of his foster mother, it is clear to see the correlation between Poe’s fascination with the macabre and his own life circumstances.

Alongside being a pioneer in his poetic field, Edgar Allan Poe was responsible for creating a number of new words that had not been seen in print before. It is believed that he had a hand in the birth of around 1200 words.

Although we can never know a poet’s true inspiration, it can be argued that Edgar Allan Poe’s life experiences shaped his poetic style . He had suffered many losses throughout his life and had been surrounded by death at every stage. As life imitates art, it is safe to assume that these morbid experiences had an impact on Poe’s work.

Home » Poet Biographies » Edgar Allan Poe

About William Green

Experts in poetry.

Our work is created by a team of talented poetry experts, to provide an in-depth look into poetry, like no other.

Cite This Page

Green, William. "The Mysterious Life of Edgar Allan Poe". Poem Analysis , https://poemanalysis.com/edgar-allan-poe/biography/ . Accessed 13 September 2024.

Help Center

Request an Analysis

(not a member? Join now)

Poem PDF Guides

PDF Learning Library

Beyond the Verse Podcast

Poetry Archives

Poetry Explained

Useful Links

Poem Explorer

Poem Generator

[email protected]

Poem Solutions Limited, International House, 36-38 Cornhill, London, EC3V 3NG, United Kingdom

(and discover the hidden secrets to understanding poetry)

Get PDFs to Help You Learn Poetry

250+ Reviews

• Skip to global NPS navigation
• Skip to the main content
• Skip to the footer section

Exiting nps.gov

Edgar allan poe.

Library of Congress

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

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

From University of Virginia to West Point

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

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

Editor and Author

Professional and personal loss.

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

You Might Also Like

• edgar allan poe national historic site
• fort sumter and fort moultrie national historical park
• edgar allan poe
• fort moultrie

Last updated: January 30, 2023

Edgar Allan Poe | Biography, Facts, Poems & Quotations

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a 19th century American writer, editor and literary critic who is regarded as one of the greatest poets and short story writers of his era . Poe was a controversial figure during his time due to his being a ruthless literary critic who wrote caustic reviews of literary works of other writers. On January 29, 1845, Poe’s poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror . It became an immediate popular sensation making Edgar Allan Poe a household name . The poetry of Poe is famous for its dark romanticism , a literary sub-genre of romanticism , reflecting fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. Apart from poetry, Poe was one of the earliest practitioners of the short story and he is credited with creating the first recorded detective in the literary world. Know all about Edgar Allan Poe including his biography, interesting facts about him, his most famous poems and his best quotes.

After his father abandoned the family and his mother died, Poe was raised by his foster parents, John Allan and his wife Frances Allan . Though Poe wanted to become a writer from an early age, circumstances forced him to join the army at the age of 18. It was only in the early 1830s that Poe was able to dedicate his time to a full time writing career. He went on to work for a number of newspapers including Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine and Broadway Journal . Poe struggled financially throughout his life . Moreover, his life was marred by tragedies including the death of his wife Maria Clemm in 1847 . Poe died two years later under mysterious circumstances . Know about the family, education, career, marriage and death of Edgar Allan Poe through his biography.

INTERESTING FACTS

Edgar Allan Poe remains a towering figure in world literature due to his many contributions. He was controversial during his time due to his being a ruthless literary critic who wrote caustic reviews of literary works of other writers. Poe was able to achieve nationwide renown due to his poem The Raven but, despite being well known, he struggled financially throughout his life . There are many interesting facts related to Poe including his knack for cryptography ; his publishing a hoax article ; a mysterious man visiting his grave every January 19 th ; and a writer claiming that his ghost helped her in composing her poems . Know more about Edgar Allan Poe through these 10 interesting facts.

FAMOUS POEMS

Romanticism was a 19th century literary movement that laid emphasis on emotion and individualism as well as glorification of the past and of nature . The poetry of Poe is famous for its dark romanticism , a literary sub-genre of romanticism , reflecting fascination with the irrational, the demonic and the grotesque. The favorite theme of Poe was the death of a beautiful woman which he called “the most poetical topic in the world” . His poems appear throughout popular culture and lines from them are often quoted. Here are the 10 most famous poems by Edgar Allan Poe including The Raven, Eldorado, The Bells and Annabel Lee .

1. “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

2. “ Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”

3. “ Science has not yet taught us if madness is or is not the sublimity of the intelligence.”

4. “ Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality.”

5. “ To vilify a great man is the readiest way in which a little man can himself attain greatness.”

6. “ I need scarcely observe that a poem deserves its title only inasmuch as it excites, by elevating the soul. The value of the poem is in the ratio of this elevating excitement.”

7. “ The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world.”

8. “ All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.”

9. “ We loved with a love that was more than love.”

10. “ Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before. “

Leave a Comment Cancel reply

Privacy overview.

• Skip to primary navigation
• Skip to main content
• Skip to primary sidebar
• Skip to footer

The Poe Museum

Richmond, VA

Poe Timeline

Poe and lafayette tour richmond.

February 5, 2022

October 1824: A fifteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe was a part of a Junior Honor Color Guard that led Revolutionary War General Marquis De Lafayette around Richmond. Lafayette and Poe stopped at a home on Main Street to visit the Ege family, who had assisted in the revolution. 98 years later, that home would become the Poe Museum. ... Read More

Edgar Allan Poe Died

February 4, 2022

October 7th, 1849: After several days in the hospital, suffering from unknown ailments, Edgar Allan Poe died. Although there are many theories about his demise, the true cause of Poe’s death has never been determined. ... Read More

Poe Found in Baltimore

October 3rd, 1849: Edgar Allan Poe was found delirious and wearing someone else’s clothes in a tavern in Baltimore. He was taken to a hospital due to his alarming physical and mental distress. ... Read More

Poe’s Left Richmond for a Trip

September 27th, 1849: Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond on a boat to Baltimore. From Baltimore, he planned to go to Philadelphia to see a client, then travel to New York to gather his things and take his mother-in-law Maria and their possessions back to Richmond to permanently live with Elmira. ... Read More

• Interim pages omitted …
• Go to Next Page »

Museum Hours

Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Birthday: January 19 , 1809 ( Capricorn )

Born In: Boston, Massachusetts, United States

Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe was also associated with the ‘American Romantic Movement.’ He is better known for his tales of mystery and macabre. He was amongst the earliest American practitioners of short stories and generally considered the inventor of the detective-fiction genre. Poe is also credited for his contribution to the then-emerging genre of science fiction. His works greatly influenced American literature and other specialized fields like cosmology and cryptography. His best-known fiction works are generally Gothic and deal with themes like the effects of decomposition, concerns of premature burial, reanimation of the dead, and mourning. Many of Poe’s works are also considered part of the dark romanticism genre. He became famous for his popular poems like ‘The Raven’ and ‘Annabel Lee.’

Recommended For You

Died At Age: 40

Spouse/Ex-: Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (m. 1836–1847)

father: David Poe, Jr

mother: Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe

siblings: Rosalie Poe, William Henry Leonard Poe

Born Country: United States

Poets American Men

Died on: October 7 , 1849

place of death: Baltimore, Maryland, United States

Ancestry: Irish American, British American

City: Boston

U.S. State: Massachusetts

discoveries/inventions: Detective Fiction

education: University Of Virginia, United States Military Academy

You wanted to know

What are some common themes in edgar allan poe's works.

Some common themes in Poe's works include death, madness, love, and the supernatural.

What impact did Edgar Allan Poe have on the development of the detective fiction genre?

Poe is considered a pioneer of the detective fiction genre with his creation of the character C. Auguste Dupin in stories such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

Which famous poems did Edgar Allan Poe write?

Poe is known for poems such as "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells."

What is the significance of Edgar Allan Poe's writing style?

Poe's writing style, characterized by its dark and macabre themes, has had a lasting influence on Gothic literature and has inspired many writers.

How did Edgar Allan Poe's personal struggles influence his writing?

Poe's personal struggles, including the loss of loved ones and his battles with alcoholism, greatly influenced the dark and melancholic tone present in much of his work.

Recommended Lists:

Edgar Allan Poe was born Edgar Poe on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, USA. At the time of his birth, his parents were struggling actors attached to a repertory company in Boston.

Edgar’s father David Poe Jr., abandoned his career in law to become an actor; but was not very successful, possibly due to stage fright. Contrarily, his mother Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe was an accomplished actress. She was praised for her acting ability as well as for her melodious voice and attractive figure.

Edgar, the second of his parents’ three children, was born when his parents were living in a boarding house near Boston Commons. He had an elder brother named William Henry Leonard Poe, often referred to as Henry Poe, and a younger sister named Rosalie.

In the summer of 1809, a few months after Edgar’s birth in Boston, the family relocated to New York. Shortly after relocating, the short-tempered and alcoholic David Poe abandoned his family, never to return. Eliza, who at the time was pregnant with Rosalie, was left alone to take care of her two sons.

After struggling to make ends meet in New York, Eliza died of tuberculosis on December 8, 1811, leaving her three children orphaned. It is believed that David Poe died in Norfolk on December 11, 1811, three days after his wife’s death.

After their mother’s death, the three siblings were separated. While their paternal grandparents took up the responsibility of raising William Henry, Rosalie was adopted by William and Jane Scott Mackenzie. Edgar went to live with his godfather John Allan and his wife Frances Valentine Allan.

John Allan was a successful businessperson from Scotland and was based in Richmond, Virginia. Although they did not have children, John and his wife did not formally adopt Edgar. However, they gave him their name, calling him Edgar Allan Poe, and alternately spoiling and disciplining him.

In 1815, the Allans visited the United Kingdom. While living in London, Edgar was sent to Irvine, Scotland, the birthplace of John Allan. In Scotland, he studied at a grammar school for a short period.

In 1816, he was brought back to London, only to be sent to a boarding house at Chelsea. From 1817, he studied at ‘Manor House School’ in Stoke Newington. He then returned to Richmond in 1820. It is not known where he studied thereafter.

As he grew older, John Allan tried to initiate his foster son into the family business. However, Edgar had already decided to emulate his childhood hero, Lord Byron—the famous British poet.

In 1826, Edgar entered the newly founded ‘University of Virginia’ at Charlottesville. Although he did well academically, he started gambling to raise money for his upkeep and soon accumulated a huge debt. Since John Allan refused to pay up, Edgar left the university in March 1827 and returned home.

On his return to Richmond, Edgar Allan Poe realized that the already strained relationship with his foster father had gotten worse. His girlfriend had also got engaged to somebody else. Not having been welcomed, he left for Boston in April 1827.

Initially, he tried to sustain himself by doing odd jobs. Finally, on May 27, 1827, he enlisted in the ‘United States Army’ for five years as a private, calling himself Edgar A. Perry. While he was actually 18, he claimed to be 22 to avoid being asked for parental consent.

He was initially posted at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor with a salary of $5 a month. He had with him several manuscripts which he had brought from home. In the spring of 1827, he self-published his first book of poems ‘Tamerlane and Other Poems.’

In November 1827, Poe was posted with his regiment at Fort Moultrie in Charleston, South Carolina. Here he was promoted to the position of "artificer,” receiving $10 per month. He subsequently became Sergeant Major for Artillery.

Sometime at the end of 1828 or the beginning of 1829, Poe tried to end his enlistment. But for that, he needed to reconcile with his foster father. Although John Allan was not initially responsive, he relented when Edgar visited Richmond on receiving the news of Mrs. Allan’s death on February 28, 1829.

Poe finally left the military on April 15, 1829. He first traveled to Baltimore to spend some time with his brother Henry who lived with his paternal grandmother, aunt, and Cousin Virginia Eliza Clemm. It was here that he published his second book ‘Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems.’

In July 1830, Poe joined the ‘United States Military Academy’ as a cadet at West Point. Upon realizing that military life was not for him, he began to breach discipline on purpose, inviting court-martial. He was tried on February 8, 1831, and was found guilty.

After leaving the ‘Military Academy,’ Edgar Allan Poe went to New York where he published his third book ‘Poems.’ His friends at the ‘Academy’ helped him raise the publication cost.

In May 1831, he returned to Baltimore to live with his paternal family. By then, John Allan had disowned him. To earn his living, he turned his attention to prose; he had many of his works published in ‘Philadelphia Saturday Courier’ and ‘Baltimore Saturday Visiter.’

In 1833, Poe submitted six stories and a few poems for a contest sponsored by ‘Baltimore Saturday Visiter.’ Among them, ‘MS. Found in a Bottle’ earned him the first prize of $50. Published in the Visiter’s 19th October issue, it caught the attention of novelist and ‘Whig’ politician John P. Kennedy.

With Kennedy’s support, Poe’s literary career began to advance. Yet, his financial condition remained precarious. Finally, in August 1835, Kennedy helped him secure the post of assistant editor at ‘Southern Literary Messenger,’ published from Richmond. He was also a staff writer and critic.

Except for a brief interlude, when Poe lost his job after being caught drunk, he remained with the journal until January 1837, publishing several poems, stories, book reviews, and critiques. Thereafter, he moved to New York.

By now, he had realized that he needed to write a long novel in order to establish himself. The result was ‘The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket’ which was published by ‘Harper & Brothers’ in July 1838. Comprising actual narratives, the book was widely reviewed.

In spite of his novel’s success, Poe’s financial condition failed to improve. Respite came in May 1839 when he was hired as an assistant editor by ‘Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and American Monthly Review,’ published in Philadelphia.

According to the contract, Poe was to provide 11 pages of original material per month, and his salary was fixed at $10 per week. During this period, he had many well-known stories published, such as ‘The Man That Was Used Up,’ ‘The Fall of the House of Usher,’ ‘William Wilson,’ and ‘Morella.’

In June 1840, Poe was fired from his job, possibly because of his drinking habit. Just a few months before, he had his ‘Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque’ published in two volumes; but he did not get any royalty from it. As a result, he was once again in a financial mess.

Also in 1840, he started working on a new venture, planning to bring out his own journal. Since it would be based in Philadelphia, he decided to call it ‘Penn.’ Unfortunately, his dream did not materialize due to lack of funds.

In February 1841, he finally abandoned his plan of bringing out ‘Penn’ and joined ‘Graham’s Magazine’ as an assistant editor for an annual salary of $800. ‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ his first ever detective story, was published when he was at ‘Graham’s.’

In April 1842, he left the position and returned to New York where he joined ‘Evening Mirror.’ However, he continued to contribute to ‘Graham’s,’ maintaining a good relationship with the organization.

In January 1845, his now famous poem ‘Raven’ appeared in ‘Evening Mirror.’ While it made him a household name, his financial condition remained the same as he received only $9 as his remuneration.

On February 21, 1845, Poe signed a year-long contract with ‘Broadway Journal,’ subsequently joining the publication as its editor. He agreed to write at least one page of original work every week for one-third of the profit. By June, he had become its sole proprietor.

Though his dream came true, Poe now needed money to run the journal. Unfortunately, all his efforts to raise funds failed and the journal closed down in 1846. Thereafter, Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham where he lived until his death in 1849.

Edgar Allan Poe is best remembered for his narrative poem ‘The Raven.’ Although named after a talking raven, the narrator of the poem is a distraught lover who is torn between the desire to forget and the desire to remember. The raven is a visitor who answers his every query with ‘Nevermore.’ Noted for its supernatural environment, stylized language, and musical rhythm, the poem draws upon a number of references in folklores, mythological, as well as classical tales. It became an overnight sensation and made Poe famous.

On May 16, 1836, Edgar Allan Poe married his 13-year-old Cousin Virginia Eliza Clemm at a public ceremony in Baltimore. It was conducted by a Presbyterian minister, Rev. Amasa Converse, and her age was listed as 21.

Different biographers have different opinions about the nature of their relationship. Some believe they lived like siblings, while others claim that he loved her with passion. On the whole, it can be concluded that he was a loving husband and a dutiful son-in-law.

In January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of tuberculosis. She never fully recovered from it and died on January 30, 1847.

His wife’s death had a severe impact on Poe. Many times, he was found sitting by Virginia’s tomb in the middle of the night, cold and freezing. To get out of it, he courted several women, but could not overcome his sadness.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found in a disturbed state of mind on the roads of Baltimore. He was immediately taken to the ‘Washington Medical College’ where he died four days later on October 7, 1849.

Although many people attribute his death to alcoholism, friends as well as doctors have denied it. However, they were not able to ascertain the real cause of his death, which remains a mystery to date.

‘The Edgar Allan Poe Cottage’ in New York, where he spent the last days of his life, is now listed on the ‘National Register of Historic Places.’ It is located on Kingsbridge Road and the Grand Concourse in the Bronx, New York.

Edgar Allan Poe was known for his unique sense of style and fashion, often wearing a distinctive black suit and wide-brimmed hat to stand out in a crowd.

Poe was a master of cryptography. In 1841, he published two ciphers under the pseudonym "W. B. Tyler." The ciphers remained unsolved until 1992 and 2000 respectively. 

Poe was a pioneer in the field of detective fiction and is credited with creating the character C. Auguste Dupin, an early prototype of the modern detective, who appeared in several of his stories and inspired future sleuths like Sherlock Holmes.

See the events in life of Edgar Allan Poe in Chronological Order

How To Cite

People Also Viewed

Also Listed In

© Famous People All Rights Reserved

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 .

home | biography | summaries | stories | poetry | timeline | quotes | forum

gallery | wordlist | guestbook | bookstore | links | credits | site map | contact

home | stories | poetry | timeline | gallery | site map | contact

html5   pulp8

Encyclopedia of Humanities

The most comprehensive and reliable Encyclopedia of Humanities

Edgar Allan Poe

We explore the life of Edgar Allan Poe, and his main literary works. In addition, we discuss why he is regarded as one of the universal masters of the short story.

Who was Edgar Allan Poe?

Edgar Allan Poe was a celebrated American writer, regarded as one of the founding fathers of the American short story tradition and a central figure of American Romanticism . His work is considered the starting point of the detective fiction genre, and a contribution of unparalleled influence to horror and science fiction literature.

Poe had a short and tumultuous life, completely devoted to writing . His literary works, which delve into mystery, horror, and the macabre, provided him with a modest livelihood; yet, they have been a unique source of inspiration for subsequent generations of writers.

Poe is an extraordinarily popular figure in contemporary culture, with many of his works having been adapted to various arts and formats: film, animation, and even video games. Today, several of his former homes have been transformed into museums , and the annual literary award given by the Mystery Writers of America bears his name.

• See also: Victor Hugo

Birth and family life of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 18, 1809 . His parents were American David Poe Jr. and British Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, both theater actors. Edgar was the middle child of the couple, William being the eldest, and Rosalie the youngest, born in 1810. 

Tragedy marked Edgar's early life. When he was still an infant, his father abandoned the family, leaving his mother to the care of the three siblings. The following year, she succumbed to tuberculosis. Left orphaned, each of the Poe siblings was taken into different homes : William went to the paternal family home in Baltimore, while Edgar and Rosalie were adopted by the Allans and Mckenzies respectively, both from Richmond, Virginia.

John and Frances Allan, Edgar's foster parents, raised and baptized him in the Episcopal faith. Although they never formally adopted him, they did give him their last name . Edgar lived with them until early adulthood.

In 1815, the Allans traveled to the United Kingdom, where Edgar studied in Ayrshire, Scotland, his foster father’s birthplace . Shortly after, in 1816, he studied in London, both in Chelsea and Stoke Newington, before the family returned to Richmond in 1820. In 1825, after receiving a large inheritance, Edgar's foster father purchased a two-story house, which he named "Moldavia".

The following year, Edgar fell in love with Sarah Elmira Royster and also entered the University of Virginia , which he attended for only for 11 months. The institution was in its early stages, and university life was chaotic. Edgar soon found himself immersed in gambling debts, and the financial support from his foster father began to wane. This period marked the onset of family confrontations, leading to a growing estrangement between Edgar and his foster father.  

Eventually, Edgar was forced to drop out of university and return home. There, he was met with a rather hostile atmosphere: he was no longer fully welcome at home, and his former sweetheart had married another man . He then made the decision to leave for Boston in 1827.

Boston and military career

While in Boston, Poe used the pseudonym "Henri Le Rennet", and engaged in writing for newspapers and doing clerical work, among other low-paid jobs. However, he still managed to find time to devote himself to a newly discovered passion: writing .

In fact, in 1827 he published his first work: a pamphlet-sized collection of poems in the style of Lord Byron (1788-1824), entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems , which he signed as "a Bostonian". Fifty copies were made, which went totally unnoticed .

That same year, with poverty closing in on him, Poe had no choice but to enlist in the army, which he did under the name Edgar A. Perry . He initially served at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor and later at Fort Moultrie in South Carolina, where he was part of the crew of the brig Waltham and attained his first promotions. Two years later, he became Sergeant Major for Artillery.

With the intention of ending his military service early and enrolling at the Military Academy West Point, New York, to study and pursue a career, Poe decided to resume contact with his foster father . He needed his support to leave the service and enroll at West Point, having had no contact with his family for quite some time.

His foster father, however, still held reservations against him and took several months to reply , not even writing to inform him about the illness of his adoptive mother. Frances Allan died in February 1829, and Poe was finally allowed to visit his family. He reconciled with his foster father, who promised to support his admission to the academy in New York.

Thus, after finding a replacement, Poe left the military service, and before heading to New York, he spent some time in Baltimore with his father's family . There, he wrote his second collection of poems: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems , published in 1829.

This second work, centered on an astronomical anecdote by Tycho Brahe (1546-1601) and the Quran’s description of paradise, contains the longest poem Poe ever wrote . It received scant attention and mostly negative reviews, with the exception of writer, editor, and critic John Neal (1793-1876), who gave Poe "the very first words of encouragement I ever remember to have heard", as he himself defined it years later.

Poe finally arrived at West Point in 1830 and enrolled as a cadet . That same year, his foster father married Louisa Patterson, which greatly displeased Poe. His reproaches over this and illegitimate children ultimately estranged Poe from his foster father, who finally decided to disown him.

The life of a writer

Edgar Allan Poe did not last long at the West Point Academy. By 1830, he was determined to be expelled and pursue a life as a writer . Thus, he did everything possible to be court-martialed and dishonorably discharged, which he achieved in less than a year.

In February 1831, while in New York, Poe published his third book, simply called Poems . The funding for this volume came from his former fellow peers at the military academy, each contributing 75 cents to the project.

The book was artfully labeled as a "second edition" , since it contained the same long poems from his previous two books, along with six other unpublished works. It was dedicated "To the US Corps of Cadets".

Poe, however, did not stay much longer in New York, as his older brother was seriously ill due to complications derived from alcoholism . In March 1831, he returned to Baltimore and accompanied his brother until his death, in August of the same year.

While in Baltimore, Poe began to move away from poetry and made his early attempts at writing short stories . Times were tough for writers: newspapers and publications were abundant but fleeting, paid little and often delayed, and there was no international copyright law to prevent American publishers from releasing unauthorized copies of British authors rather than support local talent. To make matters worse, the economic crisis of 1837 complicated the situation even further.

The "Panic of 1837" was one of the most severe economic depressions in US history, comparable to the Great Depression of 1929. It started during the initial weeks of Martin Van Buren's (1782-1862) presidency when, in response to certain measures of the previous government, banks announced that they would no longer make their payments in gold and silver coins. This led to a speculative fever followed by a five-year economic depression, during which many banks went bankrupt and unemployment soared.

These circumstances forced Poe to beg for the payment of his works and live in a state of constant economic uncertainty. Still, his prose brought him his first successes . While he was working on what came to be his only theatrical piece, Politian , his first short stories saw the light of day: the weekly periodical Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded a prize in 1833 to his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle", which opened a space for him in the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond.

Initially, his role in the periodical was that of contributor: he published "Metzengerstein", considered his first horror tale , followed by "Berenice", which was so shocking that the editors received numerous protest letters from readers. Immediately after, Poe became an editor.

On September 22, 1835, Poe married his cousin on his father’s side, Virginia Clem. He was 26 years old, and she was only 13. By all indications, Poe was a loving and affectionate husband, though that same year he began with his drinking problems . In fact, his sporadic but publicly embarrassing bouts of drinking led to his dismissal from the Southern Literary Messenger in 1837.

Once again, Poe decided to try his luck in New York.

The prolific years

Poe devoted the following years to producing some of his greatest works . In 1838, his only complete novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , was published in New York, which was highly acclaimed. This work is considered the source of inspiration for Moby Dick , by Herman Melville (1819-1891) .

A year later, Poe and his wife moved to Philadelphia, where Burton's Gentleman's Magazine offered him the position of assistant editor . It was in this publication that his tales "William Wilson" and "The Fall of the House of Usher" appeared, the latter being one of his most famous short stories. Many of these tales were compiled in 1840 in his first published collection: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , which received mixed reviews and did not sell well.

That same year, Poe was determined to start his own magazine that was to be called The Penn or The Stylus . He even bought advertising space for it in Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post , but he would never get his project off the ground.

In 1841 Poe resigned from Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and secured a position at the prestigious Graham's Magazine as a writer and co-editor. There, he published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", regarded as the first detective story in history .

Around this period, he wrote other prominent short stories that appeared in various publications, such as "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Black Cat", "The Pit and the Pendulum", and "The Gold-Bug". With the latter, he won a $100 prize from Philadelphia's Dollar Newspaper , bringing him considerable fame in the literary circuit.

In 1842, life took a turn for the worse for Poe. Virginia, his wife, showed the first signs of tuberculosis, which would ultimately claim her life.

The Raven and death of Virginia

Virginia's illness progressed quickly, and Poe faced his wife's health problems with desperation . He began to drink again, and sought better and more stable opportunities. It was thus that Poe approached the Whig Party and the presidency of John Tyler (1790-1862), thanks to the mediation of his friend Frederick Thomas.

Poe aimed for a position in the US Customs Service, but he missed his scheduled interview, citing illness . It is possible that he may have been grappling with alcohol-related issues. Although he was granted a second interview, the available positions had already been filled.

In 1844, Poe resigned from the magazines and decided to return to New York, where he briefly worked as assistant editor for the New York Mirror , run by N. P. Willis, who became his close friend for the remainder of his life. That year he published "The Balloon-Hoax" in The Sun , and the following year, a preview of what was to become his most famous poem: "The Raven", in the New York Mirror .

"The Raven" is a lengthy narrative poem about a mourning lover grieving over the death of his beloved Leonore who receives in his chamber a stealthy visit from a raven at midnight. The bird, perched just out of his reach, continuously evokes his suffering with its cawing, which seems to say "nevermore":

Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor. "Wretch," I cried, "thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee Respite—respite and nepenthe, from thy memories of Lenore! Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!" Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore."

Following its publication in 1845, "The Raven" was replicated in numerous US newspapers, including the New York Tribune , Broadway Journal , and the Southern Literary Messenger , where Poe had formerly worked. The immediate success of this work made its author a nationally renowned writer , though he only received $9 in payment for its publication.

With fame also came the attention of other authors, many of whom Poe had antagonistic relationships with . His literary rivalry with Rufus W. Griswold (1812-1857) is well-known. They even competed for the love of fellow poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood (1811-1850). Poe had a brief affair with her, to which his dying wife did not object. However, Frances' indiscretions regarding the affair generated a certain scandal in the literary circuit.

Poe then moved from the New York Mirror to the Broadway Journal , and after the disappearance of this journal in 1846, the writer, his mother-in-law and his dying wife relocated to a house in Fordham, in the Bronx , known today as the "Poe Cottage". There, in the master bedroom, Virginia Clemm Poe succumbed to tuberculosis on January 30, 1847.

Poe’s final years

Poe never recovered from Virginia's death. His behavior following the death of his wife became erratic and self-destructive . Throughout 1847, he courted poet Sarah Helen Whitman, with whom he had brief and failed engagement. He also had close but platonic relationships with Annie Richmond and Sarah Anna Lewis, to whom he dedicated poems and from whom he often received financial help.

In 1848, he published "Eureka", a truly remarkable prose poem , considered a stroke of genius by some and described as absurd by others, in which he sought out to explain the universe from a philosophical perspective. Dedicated to Alexander von Humboldt (1769-1859), it revisited old obsessions from his youth, like astronomy, occultism, and metaphysics.

The following year, Poe traveled south, and wandered through Philadelphia and Richmond , where he eventually became engaged to the then widow Elmira Royster. They spent a last happy summer together, in the company of childhood friends and poet Susan Archer Telley, with whom he had a short-lived friendship. Yet, in numerous letters and writings he expressed his longing for death.

Finally, in October 1849, Poe was found in the streets of Baltimore, in a state of delirium and great distress . He was taken to hospital, where he died on October 7, for reasons that remain unknown. He was forty years old and was in such a dire condition that he was unable to explain what had happened to him.

During his agony, Poe is said to have repeated the name "Reynolds", and his final words were "Lord, help my poor soul". Newspapers at the time reported his death with euphemisms like "cerebral inflammation" or "congestion of the brain" , often used for alcohol-related deaths.

Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe

Upon the announcement of his death, his long-time rival Rufus W. Griswold published a long and slanted obituary in the New York Tribune under the pseudonym Ludwig , portraying Poe as a lunatic, a nocturnal wanderer who muttered curses in madness. The obituary began with "Edgar Allan Poe is dead. He died in Baltimore the day before yesterday. This announcement will startle many, but few will be grieved by it".

That was not Griswald's last attempt to tarnish Poe's memory. In 1850, he published along with James Russell Lowell and Nathaniel Parker Lewis a compilation of Poe's works, accompanied by a biographical note written by Griswold himself, in which he portrayed Poe as a depraved psychopath and drug addict. Although most claims in this biography were complete and malicious fabrications, which many of Poe's acquaintances denounced , this controversial image of the writer gained popularity among his readers and among those who assumed that, given the morbid themes of his tales, the author must therefore be an evil man himself. A more objective biography of Poe did not appear until 1875.

Poe’s funeral was a simple rite, attended by few people, and he was buried in the courtyard of the Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore. His grave initially only bore the "No. 80" identification , since the marble gravestone with the epitaph his nephew Nelson had paid for was lost in an accident.

Years later, in 1873, poet Paul Hamilton Hayne visited his resting place and published an outraged article about the undignified condition of the grave, which prompted the community to raise funds for a reburial. On October 1, 1875, Poe was reburied in a privileged site in front of the church , with a monument bearing his name, alongside the bodies of his wife and mother-in-law.

Poe's short stories and poems, obsessed with grief, melancholy, and crime, were highly praised by French poets Charles Baudelaire (1821-1867) and Stéphane Mallarmé (1842-1898), to whom Poe owes international fame. Since then, his works have served as a unique source of inspiration for many other great writers, such as Horacio Quiroga (1878-1937), Jorge Luis Borges (1899-1986), H. P. Lovecraft (1890-1937), and Julio Cortázar (1914-1984).

Today, Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as one of the great masters of the short story and a seminal figure in American literature . In addition, he is the father of the detective fiction genre and the horror tale, as well as a prominent thinker on literary theory. His short stories have been widely translated and adapted to film, television, animation, and even video games.

Among Edgar Allan Poe's major and most renowned works are:

• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838 novel)
• "The Fall of the House of Usher" (1839 short story)
• "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841 short story)
• "The Pit and the Pendulum" (1842 short story)
• "The Black Cat" (1843 short story)
• "The Tell-Tale Heart" (1843 short story)
• "The Gold-Bug" (1843 short story)
• "The Purloined Letter" (1844 short story)
• "The Raven" (1845 poem)
• "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846 essay)
• "Eureka" (1848 prose poem or essay)

Referencias

• Barzun, J., Cestre, C. y Mabbott, T. (2023). “Edgar Allan Poe (American writer)”. The Encyclopaedia Britannica. https://www.britannica.com/
• Educ.ar. (2022). Edgar Allan Poe, el inventor del miedo. https://www.educ.ar/
• Reagan Wilson, C. y Ferris, W. (eds.). (1989). “Edgar Allan Poe”. Encyclopedia of Southern Culture . University of North Carolina Press.
• The Poe Museum. (2023). Poe Biography. https://poemuseum.org/

Explore next:

• Virginia Woolf
• Brothers Grimm
• Jorge Luis Borges

¿Te interesan nuestros contenidos?

Puedes seguir nuestra cuenta de Instagram , donde publicamos contenidos exclusivos.

Was this information useful to you?

Updates? Omissions? Article suggestions? Send us your comments and suggestions

Thank you for visiting us :)

Author : Edgar Allan Poe

• 1.1.1 Stories
• 1.1.2 Poems
• 1.2 Individual poems
• 1.3 Individual stories
• 1.4 Longer works
• 1.5 Non-fiction
• 1.6 Letters
• 1.7 Criticism
• 2.2 Encyclopedia articles
• 2.3 Newspaper articles
• 2.4 Poems about Poe
• 2.5 On his works
• 2.6 See also

Titles given below in parenthesis signify an unnamed or unpublished work. The year following a work's title indicate the earliest known appearance of that work, not necessarily its first publication.

Collections

• The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe , 4 vol. (1859)
• Tales of Mystery & Imagination (1908)
• Poe's Tales of Mystery and Imagination , illustrated by Arthur Rackham  (1935)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• The Prose Romances of Edgar A. Poe (1843)
• Tales (1845)
• Mystery Tales of Edgar Allan Poe (1907) ( transcription project )
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems (1831)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tamerlane and other poems , type facsimile by R. H. Shephard (1884)

Individual poems

• An Acrostic (1829)
• Al Aaraaf (1829)
• Beloved Physician (1847)
• Bridal Ballad (1837)
• The Doomed City (early version)
• The Coliseum (1833)
• The Conqueror Worm (1843)
• Deep in Earth (1847)
• The Divine Right of Kings (1845)
• Dream-Land (1844)
• Dreams (1827)
• Eldorado (1849)
• Elizabeth (1829)
• Enigma (1833)
• An Enigma (1848)
• Epigram for Wall Street (1845)
• Eulalie (1843)
• Evangeline (1848)
• Evening Star (1827)
• Fairy-Land (1829)
• Fanny (1833)
• For Annie (1849)
• (The Happiest Day) (1827)
• The Haunted Palace (1839)
• Hymn (1833)
• Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius (1827)
• Imitation (1827)
• Impromptu. To Kate Carol (1845)
• Israfel (1831)
• The Lake — To —— (1827)
• Lenore (1843)
• Lines on Ale (1848)
• O, Tempora! O, Mores! (1825?)
• A Pæan (1831)
• Poetry (1824)
• Romance (1829)
• Scenes from "Politian" (1835)
• Serenade (1833)
• Silence (1839)
• The Sleeper (1831)
• Song (1827)
• Sonnet — To Science (1829)
• Sonnet — To Zante (1837)
• Spirits of the Dead (1827)
• Spiritual Song (1836)
• Stanzas (1827)
• Stanzas (1845)
• Tamerlane (1845 version)
• To —— (1829)
• To —— (1833)
• To —— —— (Poe) (1828)
• To F—— (1835)
• To F——s S. O——d (1833)
• To Helen (1831)
• To Helen (1848)
• (To Isaac Lea) (1829)
• To M. L. S—— (1847)
• To Margaret (1827)
• To Marie Louise (1847)
• To Miss Louise Olivia Hunter (1847)
• To My Mother (1849)
• (To Octavia) (1827)
• To One in Paradise (1833)
• To The River —— (1828)
• Ulalume (1847)
• A Valentine (1846)
• The Valley Nis (original version)

Individual stories

Longer works

• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1837)
• " The Unparalleled Adventure of One Hans Pfaall " (1835)

Non-fiction

• " Maelzel's Chess-Player " (1836)
• " The Philosophy of Furniture " (1840)
• " A Few Words on Secret Writing " (1841)
• " Morning on the Wissahiccon " (1843)
• Marginalia (1844–1849)
• " Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House " Broadway Journal , vol. I, no. 7, April 12, 1845, 1:103-104 (1845)
• " Anastatic Printing " Broadway Journal , vol. I, no. 15, April 12, 1845, 1:229-231 (1845)
• " The Philosophy of Composition " (1846)
• The Literati of New York (1846)
• " The Rationale of Verse " (1847)
• Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
• " The Poetic Principle " (1850)
• The Letters Of Edgar Allan Poe (1948), by John Ward Ostrom IA
• Review of Ballads and Other Poems
• Review of The Quacks of Helicon
• Review of The Old Curiosity Shop
• Review of Twice-Told Tales (1842)

Works about Poe

• Edgar Poe and his Critics (1860) by Sarah Helen Whitman
• Edgar Allan Poe (1881), by Edmund Clarence Stedman IA
• Edgar Allan Poe (1885), by George Edward Woodberry IA
• Edgar Allan Poe - a centenary tribute , by the Edgar Allan Poe Memorial Association (1910)
• Edgar Allan Poe - How to know him (1921), by Charles Alphonso Smith ( transcription project )

Encyclopedia articles

• " Poe, Edgar Allan ," in A Short Biographical Dictionary of English Literature , by John William Cousin , London: J. M. Dent & Sons (1910)
• " Poe, Edgar Allan ," in Encyclopædia Britannica (11th ed., 1911)
• " Poe ", in The Cambridge History of American Literature (1917–1921)
• " Poe, Edgar Allan ," by Emilie Watts McVea in The Encyclopedia Americana , New York: The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation (1920)
• " Poe, Edgar Allan ," in Collier's New Encyclopedia , New York: P. F. Collier & Son Co. (1921)

Newspaper articles

• " Death of Edgar Allan Poe " (October 9, 1849) by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1849)

Poems about Poe

• A Fable for Critics (1848) by James Russell Lowell
• " The Raven " by Sarah Helen Whitman (1848)
• " To Edgar Allan Poe " by Sarah Helen Whitman (1848)
• " Edgar Allan Poe " by Tom McInnes (1909)
• " The Fall of Usher " by Thomas Holley Chivers

On his works

• " Fall of the House of Usher, The ," by William B. Cairns in The Encyclopedia Americana , New York: The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation (1920)
• " Gold-Bug, The ," by William B. Cairns in The Encyclopedia Americana , New York: The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation (1920)
• " Raven, The ," by Edward Everett Hale in The Encyclopedia Americana , New York: The Encyclopedia Americana Corporation (1920)
• Edgar Allan Poe bibliography (Wikipedia)
• The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

Some or all works by this author were published before January 1, 1929, and are in the public domain worldwide because the author died at least 100 years ago. Translations or editions published later may be copyrighted. Posthumous works may be copyrighted based on how long they have been published in certain countries and areas.

Public domain Public domain false false

• 1809 births
• 1849 deaths
• Early modern authors
• Literary critics as authors
• Male authors
• Romanticism
• United States authors
• Author-PD-old
• United States poets
• Critics as authors
• Editors as authors
• Mystery authors
• Science fiction authors
• Short story authors
• Early modern poets
• Romantic poets
• Symbolist poets
• Contributors to Amazing Stories
• Contributors to Weird Tales
• Author pages connected to Wikidata
• Author pages linking to Wikimedia Commons categories
• Author pages with Wikidata image
• Author pages with gender in Wikidata
• Authors in EB1911
• Pages linking to scanned works at Internet Archive
• Author pages with authority control data
• Pages using authority control with parameters
• Author pages with VIAF on Wikidata

Navigation menu

• Created with Sketch.

Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘For Annie’ Heads to Auction

L ike so many others, Edgar Allan Poe moved to New York City for the promise of work. “He was a great New Yorker,” says Richard Austin, Global Head of Books and Manuscripts at Sotheby’s. “The number of addresses he lived at during this time is like how so many of us move around to different neighborhoods.”

It’s easy to imagine the author walking through the modern streets of Greenwich Village, which was already a bustling urban area during Poe’s time in the 1840s. Even then, the city was inspiring to artists. It there that he wrote some of his most famous works, like “The Raven” and “The Cask of Amontillado.” As he wrote of New York in a letter in 1844, “The city is brimfull [sic] of all kinds of legitimate liveliness – the life of money-making, and the life of pleasure.” But Poe also predicted the city’s growth and spread as he looked at the cliffs and trees near what is now Roosevelt Island, writing, “In twenty years, or thirty at farthest, we shall see here nothing more romantic than shipping, warehouses, and wharves.” He was right about the development but wrong, perhaps, about the lack of romance in it.

“The city is brimfull of all kinds of legitimate liveliness – the life of money-making, and the life of pleasure.”

When Poe moved to a small cottage in what is now The Bronx, he did so in the hopes of helping cure his wife Virginia of tuberculosis. Today the cottage has been preserved as a museum with a small front yard but the city has grown all around it with bodegas and high-rise buildings. In Poe’s time, he could look out from his porch and see farmland all around him. “It’s a window into New York’s past,” Austin says, and Poe’s as well.

Poe’s final and most difficult years were spent in this Bronx cottage. He, Virginia and his mother-in-law moved to the cottage in 1846. During this time, Poe was a struggling writer living in relative poverty. Peter Ackroyd wrote in his biography Poe: A Life Cut Short that Poe’s mother-in-law foraged greens along the country roads and even dug up turnips meant for cattle to keep everyone fed. Despite moving to this place outside the city, Poe’s wife died a year later.

This tumultuous time in Poe’s biography was an important period artistically. “His work was so much impacted by his life circumstances,” says Austin. “He’d be inspired by a woman he met or in the depths of despair, and he would write.” Poe wrote “The Bells,” “Annabel Lee,” “Ulalume” and the poem “ For Annie ” while living in the cottage. The titular bells of his poem are thought by some to be inspired by the tolling of the Fordham University church’s bells which were located near his home. “Annabel Lee,” about a couple so in love that the woman is killed out of spite, is a poem of grief, written after Virginia’s death. Austin noted that even among Poe’s notably gloomy oeuvre there is a particular focus on death in his work he produced in these last years.

Some of his final works were written both for publication and as a literary bouquet of roses. He sent them to women he courted after his wife’s death, most obviously “For Annie,” which was written for Nancy “Annie” L. Richmond. He sent her a copy of the poem after he’d sold it for publication, telling her he thought it was among his best works but might be mistaken, “so I wish to know what my Annie truly thinks of them.” On 26 June 2024, an autograph manuscript of the poem from the Library of Dr. Rodney P. Swantko is being auctioned by Sotheby’s for the first time since 2009.

Writing “For Annie” may have been a somewhat calculated move, Austin says. “Like many New Yorkers, he’s thinking of his next step.” Poe’s financial situation was particularly dire in his last years and he was likely aware that he needed another patron or relationship to support him. Poe is not thought of as a particularly autobiographical writer, but it’s clear that his life – and the places he lived – had a great influence on his work.

Perhaps it’s for this reason that so many cities have sought to claim him as their own. There are Edgar Allan Poe museums in Richmond, Baltimore and Philadelphia, as well as the one in New York City. But when he died under mysterious circumstances on a trip to Baltimore in 1849, home was still the cottage in The Bronx.

The city has changed as Poe predicted it would, but modern Poe aficionados could learn a lot about the writer by visiting the places where he lived and imagining themselves into New York City as it existed in the 1840s. The city has grown, the farmlands have been pushed even farther out, but it’s still the urban heart of the United States where so many talented artists have come, dreaming of creating work that is appreciated long after they are gone.

Edgar Allan Poe Books Available to Buy Now

About the Author

More from sotheby's, stay informed with sotheby’s top stories, videos, events & news..

By subscribing you are agreeing to Sotheby’s Privacy Policy . You can unsubscribe from Sotheby’s emails at any time by clicking the “Manage your Subscriptions” link in any of your emails.