Edgar Allan Poe - Research Paper Example

Introduction Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. His parents, who were both itinerantprofessional actors, passed away before he was three. Shortly after Edgar was born, his father, David Poe, had vanished, abandoning his mother and later died in the year 1810 in Virginia. Late the following year, his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia orphaning him together with his siblings (Mondragon, 1). While other families took in his siblings, half-sister Rosalie Poe and his older brother William Henry Leonard Poe, foster parents John and Frances Allan brought Poe up in Richmond, Virginia. Unlike his foster parents, Poe was never interested in business – his childhood hero was Lord Byron, the British poet and he dreamt of becoming a writer like him. In fact, he was found having written early poetic verses on the backs of his foster father’s ledger sheets. At 13, young Poe had compiled poetry enough to publish a book. However, his headmaster advised his foster father against permitting this (Poemuseum.org, 1). Poe’s foster parents were wealthy tobacco traders and they took him to top boarding schools and afterwards to the University of Virginia, where he did very well in his studies. However, barely one year since joining the university, Poe accumulated huge gambling debts and was forced to leave school on declining to pay them (Poets.org, 1). Mondragon explains that Poe‘s relationship with his foster father had always been a tumultuous and that he only gave him a hundred dollars to cover yearly expenses, which was way too little compared to the required minimum of roughly 450 dollars. This is what made him involved with gambling. Poe then returned to Richmond for a short time but his relationship with his foster father worsened. In the year 1827, he went to Boston where he enrolled in the US Army and assumed the name Edgar A. Perry. They sent him to South Carolina (Sullivan's Island) which later provided him with settings for his works, The Gold Bug and The Balloon Hoax (Liukkonen, 3). In the same year 1827, Poe published his first anthology of poems namely Tamerlane, and other Poems. In the year 1829, his second anthology known as Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published. These two collections received neither significant public nor critical attention. Poe was admitted to the US Military Academy after his Army service. However, due to lack of monetary support, he did not stay. He later moved to Baltimore, Maryland to live with Mrs. Maria Clemm, his aunt, together with her daughter Virginia Clemm (Poets.org, 2). Here, he started selling short stories to magazines and in the year 1835, he got a job in Richmond as the Southern Literary Messenger editor. Poe went to live in Richmond together with his aunt and cousin. In one year, with his scathing book reviews and his sensational stories, he had participated in making the Southern Literary Messenger the most popular magazine. He rapidly became highly reputed as an intrepid critic of some of the most famous writers in the nation (Poemuseum.org, 9). It was while he was working with Southern Literary Messenger that he finally established himself as a magazine writer. In the year 1836, he married his cousin who was only 13 years old. During the subsequent ten years, he became the editor of various literary journals such as the Broadway Journal (New York) as well as the Graham's Magazine and Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (Philadelphia). These also gave him the chance of establishing himself as an, incisive, energetic and caustic critic and editor, a poet and a short-story author. Some of the renowned poems and stories/literary classics that he published are The Raven, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of Usher, and The Murders in the Rue Morgue (Poemuseum.org, 1). Others according to Liukkonen include Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, his first collection (1840), The Raven (1963), Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), The Conchologist's First Book (1839), which was Poe's longest tale, among others. In 1847, Poe’s wife died from tuberculosis, leaving him very depressed and making him increase his alcoholism tendencies. In the year 1849, he addressed his famous poem Annabel Lee to his beloved wife. The subject of this poem, a favorite of Poe, is the demise of a beautiful woman (Liukkonen, 6). In 1849, he briefly went back to Richmond but later left to Philadelphia for a job as an editor. However, he stopped in Baltimore for strange reasons. He was then found semi-conscious on 3 October 1849. Four days later, Poe died of acute brain congestion (Poets.org, 3). The mention of the name Edgar Allan Poe evokes images of mysterious women who come back from the dead, lunatics and murderers, premature burials, among others (Poemuseum.org, 1). His supernatural fiction is generally devoted to death, disease, terror, madness and revivification. Generally, he dealt with the damnation of death, mental or physical enfeeblement, paranoia anchored in personal psychology, obsessions, and the cosmos as cause of inspiration and horror, as well as feverish fantasies (Liukkonen, 13). As Mondragon explains, a recurring theme throughout the life of life Edgar was personal tragedy. The themes of almost all his work had to do with a cynicism regarding all forms of certainty, terror, the irrational, as well as haunting. In essence, he experienced tragedy and sadness almost all his life with everyone that he loved dying or being disastrously lost to him. He had experienced the death of his parents at a very tender age, a sour relationship with his foster father who later disinherited him, his first girlfriend to whom he was secretly engaged, Elmira, was taken away from him by her family when he went to the University of Virginia. He had also experienced the death of his foster mother, the death of his wife, had failed endeavors to publish among others. All these influenced his writings most. Another factor that influenced Edgar was the background in which he grew up. As he grew up under the care of his wealthy foster parents, sea merchants and skippers’ tales as well as house slaves’ stories were his early influences. The dying and the dead always had a strong hold over Edgar. This is clearly evidenced by the story that when he was six years, as he was passing near a local graveyard, terror once seized him certain that the spirits of the dead would pursue him. Poe’s experiences as a student abroad (England) where his family lived for five years also increased further influences to his life (Mondragon, 1&2). In England, he went to Manor School at Stoke Newington, which later became the setting for his story called William Wilson. Conclusion Apparently, the work of Poe as a poet, a critic and an editor had a greatly impacted on American as well as international literature. In deed, he was one of the first American writers who became a key figure in world literature He is famous for being the earliest literary critic and theoretician in America. His oeuvre consists of numerous book reviews and essays, poems, a novel, short stories, a book of scientific theory, and a textbook. Through his stories, he is deemed as being among the inventors of the modern detective and horror fiction (Poemuseum.org, 1). As Poets.org documents, his numerous anthologies also mark him as the modern short story architect. Additionally, Poe was among the first critics who focused principally on style and structure’s effect in a literary work; therefore, people deem him as a precursor to the movement called ‘art for art's sake’. According to French symbolists, Poe was a literary forerunner (4). Works Cited Liukkonen, Petri. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849). 2008. Web. Mondragon, B. Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849). 1997. Web. Poemuseum.org. Poe's Life: Who is Edgar Allan Poe? 2010. Web. Poets.org. Edgar Allan Poe. 1997. Web. Read More