Edgar Allan Poe , the celebrated nineteenth-century American short-story writer, poet and critic, was born in Boston in 1809. His parents were itinerant actors, but Poe's father died in 1810 and his mother the following year, leaving behind two further siblings, William Henry Leonard Poe, a year Edgar's elder, and Rosalie Poe, a year his junior. The young Edgar was taken in by a wealthy merchant of Richmond, Virginia, John Allan, whose name Poe consistently used, though he was never legally adopted. From 1815 to 1820, Poe went with the Allens to England, going to school there, as later described in the semi-autobiographical story 'William Wilson'. On their return to Richmond, Poe experienced strained relations with Allan, who was neither faithful to his wife nor sympathetic to his 'stepson', who supported her. When Poe began attending University of Virginia in 1826, Allan gave him no money and Poe took to gambling -- with a characteristic lack of success.

Allan's insistence that Poe should pursue a legal career led to him flee to Boston, where he published the unsuccessful Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), anonymously and at his own expense. He entered the U.S. army under an assumed name, and was posted to Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, later the setting for the stories 'The Gold-Bug' and 'The Balloon Hoax'. Poe was reconciled with Allan on the insistence of the dying Mrs Allan. He then moved to Baltimore to live with his brother and their aunt, Mrs Maria Clemm. There he published Al Araaf (1829), a second verse collection, similarly overlooked. Poe was admitted to West Point military academy in 1830, but was soon dismissed for gross neglect of duty.

After a short stay in New York, Poe's Poems (1831) were published, including early versions of 'Israfel', 'To Helen' and 'The City in the Sea'. He returned to Mrs Clemm's in Baltimore, and during his stay there from 1831 to 1835, had a number of stories published in literary magazines. One, 'MS Found in a Bottle', won a prize adjudicated by John Pendleton Kennedy.Kennedy offered him the editorship of the influential and longest-surviving antebellum Southern literary magazine, the Southern Literary Messenger , a position Poe held from December 1835 to January 1837. In 1835, Poe obtained a licence to marry his cousin Virginia, then thirteen, though he may have married her in secret before the public ceremony in 1836. Poe moved with Virginia and Mrs Clemm back to Richmond, and saw his unfinished tragedy 'Politian' published, as well as eighty-three widely-discussed and controversial review articles, six poems, four essays and three stories, before being dismissed from the Messenger for heavy drinking.

Poe then travelled to New York, where, between 1837 and 1838, he wrote his only novel, the dark nautical tale The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym . It appeared without attribution to Poe -- though its authenticity as a memoir was much doubted -- and bears some resemblance to the later fictions of Herman Melville . Pym has had its admirers, notably Henry James 's Prince Amerigo in The Golden Bowl (1904). W.H. Auden considered it 'one of the finest adventure stories ever written'.

In Philadelphia from 1839 to 1840, Poe co-edited Burton's Gentleman's Magazine , in which such subsequently famous tales as 'The Fall of the House of Usher' (a rare immediate success), 'William Wilson' and 'Morella' first appeared. Poe's first prose collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) featured 'Berenice', 'Ligeia', and 'The Conqueror Worm'. He then left Burton's to edit Graham's Magazine (1841-42), in which further well-known Poe stories such as 'The Murders in the Rue Morgue', 'A Descent into the Maelstrom' and 'The Masque of the Red Death' were published, as well as much intelligent literary criticism. Some found Poe's bleakness off-putting, however. James E. Heath of the Southern Literary Messenger rejected their 'gloomy German mysticism' which did not 'improve the heart'.

Returning to New York, Poe worked for The New York Mirror , and saw his stories 'The Mystery of Marie Roget' and 'The Gold-Bug' win literary prizes. In 1844, Poe wrote his most popular piece of poetry, 'The Raven':
Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

Eagerly I wished the morrow, -- vainly had I sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow -- sorrow for the lost Lenore --
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore --
Nameless here for evermore.

Still widely known today are 'The Raven's' closing lines: 'Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door! / Quoth the Raven, "Nevermore".' The poem, which later appeared in 1845's collection The Raven and Other Poems , was immediately popular, spawning some fifteen parodies.

Meanwhile, as a literary critic, Poe was engaged in a vitriolic correspondence with Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, an earlier supporter whom Poe accused of plagiarism. Poe bought The Broadway Journal in 1845, and, before it closed the next year, published more subsequently famous stories, including 'The Pit and the Pendulum', 'Eleonora' and 'The Premature Burial', and reprinted favourite works like 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. A collection of previously published Tales also appeared in 1845. It was his only work to approach commercial respectability, selling around 1500 copies. Poe was next associated with Godey's Lady's Book , which published 'The Cask of Amontillado' and a number of articles. When Thomas Dunn English replied to Poe's harsh criticisms of his writing, he was successfully challenged by Poe in a libel suit.

Poe next lived with his wife and mother-in-law for a time without regular income, apparently on the verge of starvation. Virginia died of tuberculosis in the winter of 1847, and, though prolific to the end, Poe never recovered from the upset, suffering increasingly from deep depression, his characteristic irascibility and much drinking. He published various stories, as well as the obscure philosophical essay Eureka (1848) (though Paul Valery was later a fan), an ambitious attempt to write a theory of cosmogony. Eureka , originally a lecture, picked up from an earlier essay, 'The Philosophy of Composition' (1846), in which Poe had sought to explain the genesis of 'The Raven' as an attempt to write a poem 'that would suit at once the popular and the critical taste'. A last work of self-scrutiny, 'The Poetic Principle', was posthumously published in 1850. In each is revealed the essential coherence of Poe's aesthetic views. His romantic conception of poetic unity related it predominantly to mood or emotion. Poe's works invariably demonstrate his belief in particular in the beauty of melancholy.His critical essays, however, have not been universally admired, James notably dismissing them as 'the most complete and exquisite specimen of provincialism ever prepared for the edification of men'.

In his last year, Poe became severely disturbed. He developed a number of relationships with women, notably a Mrs Shew, the poet Sarah Whitman and a Mrs Richmond, whom Poe addressed in the poem 'To Annie'. Unable to choose between the latter two, Poe tried to kill himself. He returned to Richmond in 1849, where he wrote three oft-quoted poems: 'Annabel Lee' ('This maiden she lived with no other thought / Than to love and be loved by me'); 'The Bells' ('Keeping time, time, time, / In a sort of Runic rhyme, / To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells / From the bells, bells, bells, bells'); and 'A Dream within a Dream' (All that we see or seem / Is but a dream within a dream'). He undertook a number of lecture engagements, sought to give up alcohol, and got engaged to a Mrs Shelton. On Poe's journey north to bring Mrs Clemm to the wedding, however, he met with disaster. He broke the journey in Baltimore, and was discovered five days later in a delirium near a saloon, which was being used as an election office. It is thought he had been captured when drunk by a political gang wanting to use him for repeat votes. Days later, Poe died. He was buried in Baltimore next to his wife.

Poe's literary reputation has experienced great highs and lows. His own work displays the influence of the poetics of Alfred, Lord Tennyson , Samuel Taylor Coleridge 's prose writings and the fictions of Charles Brockden Brown , America's first gothic novelist. Poe was largely ignored or derided in his day. Ralph Waldo Emerson notoriously dismissed him as 'the jingle man', and James Russell Lowell commented on him being 'three-fifths [. . .] genius, and two-fifths sheer fudge' ('A Fable for Critics' [1848]). Walt Whitman thought Poe's poetry 'brilliant and dazzling, but with no heat'. The American longing for a distinctive national voice, literary mode and/or setting -- propagated and largely answered by the Transcendentalists and others around New England -- was hardly answered by Poe, whose gloomy works lacked the requisite idealism and sense of contemporaneity. Moreover, Poe's landscapes were invariably either non-specific, fantastic or European. For his part, Poe ridiculed the contemporary 'gross paradox of liking a stupid book better, because, sure enough, its stupidity is American'. It has been calculated that during his life, Poe earned less than $300 from all his literary works, a small figure -- though comparable to that earned by his peer Nathaniel Hawthorne .

Immediately following his death, a long, influential obituary by Rufus Griswold claimed that Poe was a friendless 'dreamer -- dwelling in ideal realms -- in heaven and hell'. Subsequently, Henry James thought that 'to take him with more than a certain degree of seriousness is to lack seriousness one's self'. W.B. Yeats and George Bernard Shaw , however, were important early advocates. Yeats considered Poe 'always and for all lands a great lyric poet'; Shaw thought Poe and Walt Whitman the 'only two men born since the [American] Declaration of Independence whose plea for mercy could avert a prompt sentence of damnation on the entire nation'. T.S. Eliot 's views rather replicated those of James : 'That Poe had a powerful intellect is undeniable: but it seems to me the intellect of a highly gifted young person before puberty. The variety and ardour of his curiosity delight and dazzle, yet in the end the eccentricity and lack of coherence of his interests tire.'

RC , 2002

Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809-1849 
from Literature Online biography 

Published in Cambridge, 2002, by Chadwyck-Healey (a ProQuest Information and Learning Company)
Copyright ¨Ï 2002 ProQuest Information and Learning Company.