Life & Works of Edgar Allan Poe

One of the most celebrated and widely read of the American poets, Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, the son of an English actress and an actor from Baltimore who later disappeared. With the death his mother in 1811, he was sent to live with wealthy foster parents., Mr. and Mrs. John Foster Allan, in Richmond, Virginia. He was sent to England and Scotland for his education, which he continued at the University of Virginia. He later joined the U.S. Army but obtained his release when John Allan, his foster father, paid for his discharge. Poe obtained an appointment to West Point, but he was expelled for gambling and other violations of the academy's strict code of behavior.

After this brief, unsuccessful career in the military, Poe embarked on his literary career, working as a freelance writer and critic in New York, Philadelphia, and Baltimore. He served as an editor for a number or literary magazines, including the Southern Literary Messenger, Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, Graham's Magazine, the New York Mirror, and the Broadway Journal. His own reputation as a man of letters grew out of his contributions to Graham's, which included poetry and literary criticism. Among his earliest works were "Romance" and "Sonnet - To Science," published in 1829; "The Bells," one of his mos

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came relatively late in the poet's life. But the grief and despair that it caused may have been partly responsible for the last, and fateful, bout of drinking that cut short a significant literary career at the age of thirty-eight. A second noteworthy influence on Poe's work was his education in Great Britain. It was here that he was exposed to the works of the great English poets: Keats, and Coleridge. This literary tradition provided the inspiration for Poe's own subsequent literary efforts. Other sources of inspiration may have been the dark and mysterious aura of the Scottish landscape, with its castles and legends and tales of the macabre. This sense of mystery and nostalgia, so far removed from the bustling, commercial atmosphere of America,must have captured the imagination of the young Poe, becoming the basis for his later work. Poe's consumption of alcohol, which began at the age of seventeen and continued until his death twenty-two years later, affected both the nature and the quantity of his work. The drinking compounded his despair and his dwelling on macabre subjects that found their way into his work. He was not necessarily a better artist for these moody obsessions, but they did stamp his work with an indi
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