edgar allan poe biography poem

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?

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.

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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.
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Annabel lee.

It was many and many a year ago,    In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know    By the name of Annabel Lee; And this maiden she lived with no other thought    Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child,    In this kingdom by the sea: But we loved with a love that was more than love—    I and my Annabel Lee; With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven    Coveted her and me.

And this was the reason that, long ago,    In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling    My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsman came    And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre    In this kingdom by the sea.

The angels, not half so happy in heaven,    Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,    In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night,    Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

But our love it was stronger by far than the love    Of those who were older than we—    Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in heaven above,    Nor the demons down under the sea, Can ever dissever my soul from the soul    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee:

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes    Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,    In her sepulchre there by the sea,    In her tomb by the sounding sea.

From The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe, vol. II, 1850

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• Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849)

Early Life and Work

Poe’s parents, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, were touring actors; both died before he was 3 years old. He was taken into the home of JohnAllan, a prosperous merchant in Richmond, Va., and baptized Edgar Allan Poe. His childhood was uneventful, although he studied for 5 years (1815-20) in England.In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia but stayed for only a year. Although a good student, he ran up large gambling debts that Allan refused to pay. Allan prevented his return to the university and broke off Poe’s engagement to Sarah Elmira Royster, his Richmond sweetheart. Lacking any means of support, Poe enlisted in the army. He had, however, already written and printed (at his own expense) his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), verses written in the manner of Byron.

Temporarily reconciled, Allan secured Poe’s release from the army and his appointment to West Point but refused to provide financial support. After 6 months Poe apparently contrived to be dismissed from West Point for disobedience of orders. His fellow cadets, however, contributed the funds for the publication of Poems by Edgar A. Poe … Second Edition (1831), actually a third edition – after Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). This volume contained the famous To Helen and Israfel , poems that show the restraint and the calculated musical effects of language that were to characterize his poetry.

Editorial Career

Poe next took up residence in Baltimore with his widowed aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia, and turned to fiction as a way to support himself. In 1832 the Philadelphia Saturday Courier published five of his stories – all comic or satiric – and in 1833, MS. Found in a Bottle won a $50 prize given by the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Poe, his aunt, and Virginia moved to Richmond in 1835, and he became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger and married Virginia, who was not yet 14 years old.

Poe published fiction, notably his most horrifying tale, Berenice , in the Messenger, but most of his contributions were serious, analytical, and critical reviews that earned him respect as a critic. He praised the young Dickens and a few other contemporaries but devoted most of his attention to devastating reviews of popular contemporary authors. His contributions undoubtedly increased the magazine’s circulation, but they offended its owner, who also took exception to Poe’s drinking. The January 1837 issue of the Messenger announced Poe’s withdrawal as editor but also included the first installment of his long prose tale, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , five of his reviews, and two of his poems. This was to be the paradoxical pattern for Poe’s career: success as an artist and editor but failure to satisfy his employers and to secure a livelihood.

First in New York City (1837), then in Philadelphia (1838-44), and again in New York (1844-49), Poe sought to establish himself as a force in literary journalism, but with only moderate success. He did succeed, however, in formulating influential literary theories and in demonstrating mastery of the forms he favored – highly musical poems and short prose narratives. Both forms, he argued, should aim at “a certain unique or single effect”. His theory of short fiction is best exemplified in Ligeia (1838), the tale Poe considered his finest, and The Fall Of The House Of Usher (1839), which was to become one of his most famous stories. The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) is sometimes considered the first detective story. Exemplary among his musical, mellifluous verses are The Raven (1845 )and The Bells (1849).

Virginia’s death in January 1847 was a heavy blow, but Poe continued to write and lecture. In the summer of 1849 he revisited Richmond, lectured, and was accepted anew by the fiancee he had lost in 1826. After his return north he was found unconscious on a Baltimore street. In a brief obituary the Baltimore Clipper reported that Poe had died of “congestion of the brain.”

Poems By Edgar Allan Poe

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• Edgar Allan Poe

B. 1809 D. 1849

All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream. - A Dream Within a Dream by Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809, the son of poverty-stricken actors. His father died from consumption; soon afterwards, his English mother, who in her time had played Juliet, Ophelia and a range of Shakespearian leading roles, died and left Edgar orphaned before he was three years old. He was taken into the family of John Allan, a tobacco importer, and spent part of his schooldays, which were mostly troubled, in England. At the University of Virginia he was notorious for gambling to pay his debts and left early; he enlisted in the US army, but was dishonorably discharged for failing to attend to his duties.

Love and death are obsessively linked in his stories and his poems. The death of his beautiful tragedian mother was followed by the early death of other beloved young women. His wife, Virginia, whom he married when she was 13, died at the age of 23. The Raven, recorded here, is a haunting meditation on lost love, influenced by the raven in Barnaby Rudge, and powerfully theatrical in effect. It works best read aloud; Poe himself frequently read it to appreciative audiences.

The Raven brought Poe fame, but no money. He struggled on in poverty, and suffered addiction and depression, earning what he could (in those days before copyright protection) from his writing. His poem, Annabel Lee, mourns his young wife, now idealized in death. Soon after writing it, in 1847, Poe was found at his Baltimore home, delirious from alcohol and illness, and died a few days later

Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

Read by david yezzi.

by Edgar Allan Poe

The Raven - Edgar Allan Poe - Read by David Yezzi

Annabel lee, annabel lee - edgar allan poe - read by david yezzi, featured in the archive, special collection, all hallows, norton anthology collection.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Biography of edgar allan poe.

Edgar Allan Poe (/poʊ/; born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic. Poe is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. Poe was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and considered to be the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction. Poe was the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.

Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe. His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.

Poe switched his focus to prose and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, Poe published his poem " The Raven " to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, at age 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.

Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums today. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual award known as the Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.

Publishing career

After his brother's death, Poe began more earnest attempts to start his career as a writer, but he chose a difficult time in American publishing to do so. He was one of the first Americans to live by writing alone and was hampered by the lack of an international copyright law. American publishers often produced unauthorized copies of British works rather than paying for new work by Americans. The industry was also particularly hurt by the Panic of 1837. There was a booming growth in American periodicals around this time, fueled in part by new technology, but many did not last beyond a few issues. Publishers often refused to pay their writers or paid them much later than they promised, and Poe repeatedly resorted to humiliating pleas for money and other assistance.

After his early attempts at poetry, Poe had turned his attention to prose, likely based on John Neal's critiques in The Yankee magazine. He placed a few stories with a Philadelphia publication and began work on his only drama Politian. The Baltimore Saturday Visiter awarded him a prize in October 1833 for his short story "MS. Found in a Bottle". The story brought him to the attention of John P. Kennedy, a Baltimorean of considerable means who helped Poe place some of his stories and introduced him to Thomas W. White, editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe became assistant editor of the periodical in August 1835, but White discharged him within a few weeks for being drunk on the job. Poe returned to Baltimore where he obtained a license to marry his cousin Virginia on September 22, 1835, though it is unknown if they were married at that time. He was 26 and she was 13.

Poe was reinstated by White after promising good behavior, and he went back to Richmond with Virginia and her mother. He remained at the Messenger until January 1837. During this period, Poe claimed that its circulation increased from 700 to 3,500. He published several poems, book reviews, critiques, and stories in the paper. On May 16, 1836, he and Virginia held a Presbyterian wedding ceremony performed by Amasa Converse at their Richmond boarding house, with a witness falsely attesting Clemm's age as 21.

Poe's novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was published and widely reviewed in 1838. In the summer of 1839, Poe became assistant editor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. He published numerous articles, stories, and reviews, enhancing his reputation as a trenchant critic which he had established at the Messenger. Also in 1839, the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published in two volumes, though he made little money from it and it received mixed reviews.

In June 1840, Poe published a prospectus announcing his intentions to start his own journal called The Stylus, although he originally intended to call it The Penn, as it would have been based in Philadelphia. He bought advertising space for his prospectus in the June 6, 1840 issue of Philadelphia's Saturday Evening Post: "Prospectus of the Penn Magazine, a Monthly Literary journal to be edited and published in the city of Philadelphia by Edgar A. Poe." The journal was never produced before Poe's death.

Poe left Burton's after about a year and found a position as writer and co-editor at the then-very-successful monthly Graham's Magazine. In the last number of Graham's for 1841, Poe was among the co-signatories to an editorial note of celebration of the tremendous success that magazine had achieved in the past year: "Perhaps the editors of no magazine, either in America or in Europe, ever sat down, at the close of a year, to contemplate the progress of their work with more satisfaction than we do now. Our success has been unexampled, almost incredible. We may assert without fear of contradiction that no periodical ever witnessed the same increase during so short a period."

Around this time, Poe attempted to secure a position within the administration of President John Tyler, claiming that he was a member of the Whig Party. He hoped to be appointed to the United States Custom House in Philadelphia with help from President Tyler's son Robert, an acquaintance of Poe's friend Frederick Thomas. Poe failed to show up for a meeting with Thomas to discuss the appointment in mid-September 1842, claiming to have been sick, though Thomas believed that he had been drunk. Poe was promised an appointment, but all positions were filled by others.

One evening in January 1842, Virginia showed the first signs of consumption, now known as tuberculosis, while singing and playing the piano, which Poe described as breaking a blood vessel in her throat. She only partially recovered, and Poe began to drink more heavily under the stress of her illness. He left Graham's and attempted to find a new position, for a time angling for a government post. He returned to New York where he worked briefly at the Evening Mirror before becoming editor of the Broadway Journal, and later its owner. There Poe alienated himself from other writers by publicly accusing Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism, though Longfellow never responded. On January 29, 1845, his poem "The Raven" appeared in the Evening Mirror and became a popular sensation. It made Poe a household name almost instantly, though he was paid only $9 for its publication. It was concurrently published in The American Review: A Whig Journal under the pseudonym "Quarles".

The Broadway Journal failed in 1846, and Poe moved to a cottage in Fordham, New York, in what is now the Bronx. That home is now known as the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage, relocated to a park near the southeast corner of the Grand Concourse and Kingsbridge Road. Nearby, Poe befriended the Jesuits at St. John's College, now Fordham University. Virginia died at the cottage on January 30, 1847. Biographers and critics often suggest that Poe's frequent theme of the "death of a beautiful woman" stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his wife.

Poe was increasingly unstable after his wife's death. He attempted to court poet Sarah Helen Whitman who lived in Providence, Rhode Island. Their engagement failed, purportedly because of Poe's drinking and erratic behavior. There is also strong evidence that Whitman's mother intervened and did much to derail their relationship. Poe then returned to Richmond and resumed a relationship with his childhood sweetheart Sarah Elmira Royster.

On October 3, 1849, Poe was found delirious on the streets of Baltimore, "in great distress, and... in need of immediate assistance", according to Joseph W. Walker, who found him. He was taken to the Washington Medical College, where he died on Sunday, October 7, 1849, at 5:00 in the morning. Poe was not coherent long enough to explain how he came to be in his dire condition and was wearing clothes that were not his own. He is said to have repeatedly called out the name "Reynolds" on the night before his death, though it is unclear to whom he was referring. Some sources say that Poe's final words were, "Lord help my poor soul". All medical records have been lost, including Poe's death certificate.

Newspapers at the time reported Poe's death as "congestion of the brain" or "cerebral inflammation", common euphemisms for death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism. The actual cause of death remains a mystery. Speculation has included delirium tremens, heart disease, epilepsy, syphilis, meningeal inflammation, cholera, carbon monoxide poisoning, and rabies. One theory dating from 1872 suggests that cooping was the cause of Poe's death, a form of electoral fraud in which citizens were forced to vote for a particular candidate, sometimes leading to violence and even murder.

List of selected works

• Annabel Lee
• The City in the Sea
• The Conqueror Worm
• A Dream Within a Dream
• The Haunted Palace

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Poetry by Edgar Allan Poe

While the focus of this site is Poe's short stories , I wanted to include a few of his poems because of their beauty and significance. I may include more of them in the future. If you want to browse all of Poe's poetry, there are several resources on the links page.

Vocabulary Words and Definitions

Poe used a lot of great words. Most poems have linked words you can click or tap, and a definition or more information will appear. If you use the "print this page" link, all words and definitions are listed at the end.   

"Alone" (1875) "Annabel Lee" (1849) "The Bells" (1849) "The City in the Sea" (1831) "The Conqueror Worm" (1843) "Dream-Land" (1844) "A Dream Within A Dream" (1850) "Eldorado" (1849) "For Annie" (1849) "The Haunted Palace" (1839) "Lenore" (1845) "The Raven" (1845) "The Sleeper" (1831) "Sonnet - To Science" (1845) "Spirits of the Dead" (1829) "To The River" (1829) "A Valentine" (1850) "The Valley of Unrest" (1845)

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe Poems

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of ANNABEL LEE; ...

Take this kiss upon the brow! And, in parting from you now, Thus much let me avow- You are not wrong, who deem ...

From childhood's hour I have not been As others were; I have not seen As others saw; I could not bring My passions from a common spring. ...

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 some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door. ...

Gaily bedight, A gallant knight, In sunshine and in shadow, Had journeyed long, ...

In visions of the dark night I have dreamed of joy departed- But a waking dream of life and light Hath left me broken-hearted. ...

'Twas noontide of summer, And mid-time of night; And stars, in their orbits, Shone pale, thro' the light ...

By a route obscure and lonely, Haunted by ill angels only, Where an Eidolon, named NIGHT, On a black throne reigns upright, ...

Oh! that my young life were a lasting dream! My spirit not awakening, till the beam Of an Eternity should bring the morrow. Yes! tho' that long dream were of hopeless sorrow, ...

The ring is on my hand, And the wreath is on my brow; Satin and jewels grand Are all at my command, ...

Edgar Allan Poe Poems, Quotes and Books | Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Edgar Allan Poe was a complex and fascinating figure, both as a writer and as a person. Edgar Allan Poe was a prominent American author, poet, and literary critic, born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe is known for his works of horror, mystery, and suspense, as well as his pioneering role in the development of the modern detective story. Some of his most famous works include "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Fall of the House of Usher."

Edgar Allan Poe was a master of macabre and suspenseful poetry. Some of his most famous poems include:

"The Raven" - This is perhaps Poe's most well-known poem, telling the story of a man haunted by a raven who repeats the phrase "nevermore."

"Annabel Lee" - A hauntingly beautiful poem about the death of a young woman, believed to be inspired by Poe's wife Virginia.

"The Bells" - A poem that describes the different sounds of bells and the emotions they evoke, from the joyous pealing of wedding bells to the mournful tolling of funeral bells.

"Ulalume" - A poem about a man who wanders through the woods on the anniversary of his lover's death, haunted by the memory of her.

"The Haunted Palace" - A poem about a once-beautiful palace that has become haunted and fallen into ruin.

"The Conqueror Worm" - A dark poem about the inevitability of death, personified as a "Conqueror Worm."

"To Helen" - A poem in which Poe addresses the beauty and inspiration he finds in a woman named Helen.

"Eldorado" - A poem about a knight's quest for the legendary city of gold, Eldorado, and the futility of his search.

"The City in the Sea" - A poem about a sunken city ruled by Death, where the "ghouls" and "ghosts" wander.

"A Dream Within a Dream" - A poem about the transience of life and the illusory nature of reality.

Edgar Allan Poe Books

Edgar Allan Poe was a prominent American author, poet, and literary critic in the 19th century. He is considered one of the fathers of the modern detective story and a master of horror and suspense. Here are some of his most well-known books:

"The Raven and Other Poems" - A collection of Poe's most famous poems, including "The Raven," "Annabel Lee," and "The Bells."

"Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" - A collection of Poe's short stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "The Murders in the Rue Morgue."

"The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket" - A novel about a young man's journey to the South Pole and the horrors he encounters along the way.

"The Gold Bug and Other Tales" - A collection of Poe's short stories, including "The Gold Bug," "The Black Cat," and "The Pit and the Pendulum."

"The Works of Edgar Allan Poe" - A complete collection of Poe's poems, short stories, and essays, including "The Raven," "The Tell-Tale Heart," and "The Philosophy of Composition."

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue and Other Tales" - A collection of Poe's short stories, including "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mystery of Marie Rogêt," and "The Purloined Letter."

"Eureka: A Prose Poem" - A non-fiction work in which Poe presents his cosmological and philosophical theories on the universe.

"The Cask of Amontillado and Other Tales" - A collection of Poe's short stories, including "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar," and "The Oval Portrait."

"The Portable Edgar Allan Poe" - A selection of Poe's most famous works, including poems, short stories, and critical essays.

"Complete Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe" - A comprehensive collection of all of Poe's works, including his poetry, short stories, essays, and novels.

Edgar Allan Poe Quotes

Edgar Allan Poe was known for his eloquent and poetic language, as well as his dark and mysterious themes. Here are some of his most famous quotes:

"All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream."

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

"I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity."

"The death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetical topic in the world."

"I have great faith in fools - self-confidence, my friends call it."

"Words have no power to impress the mind without the exquisite horror of their reality."

"Believe nothing you hear, and only one half that you see."

"There is no exquisite beauty… without some strangeness in the proportion."

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

"Never to suffer would never to have been blessed."

Details About Edgar Allan Poe 

Poe had a troubled personal life, marked by financial struggles, alcoholism, and the loss of several loved ones, including his wife Virginia, who died of tuberculosis at a young age. Poe died in mysterious circumstances in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 7, 1849, at the age of 40.

Despite his relatively short career, Poe's literary contributions had a significant impact on American and world literature, and he is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential writers in the horror and detective genres. His works continue to be celebrated and adapted in various forms, from films to TV series to theatrical productions.

Here are some additional details about his life and work:

Childhood: Poe was born to traveling actors and orphaned at a young age when his mother died of tuberculosis. He was taken in by John Allan, a wealthy tobacco merchant, but their relationship was strained, and Poe was later disowned by Allan.

Education: Poe attended the University of Virginia, but his gambling debts and conflicts with his foster father led to him dropping out after only one semester. He later attended West Point Military Academy but was expelled for neglecting his duties and disobeying orders.

Literary Career: Poe began his literary career as a critic, working for various magazines and newspapers. He also published his own poetry and short stories, which garnered attention for their dark, mysterious themes and intricate plots. Some of his most famous works, including "The Raven" and "The Tell-Tale Heart," were published in the mid-1800s.

Personal Life: Poe had a tumultuous personal life, marked by financial struggles, alcoholism, and the loss of several loved ones, including his wife Virginia, who died of tuberculosis. He was known for his erratic behavior and was often involved in public disputes with other writers and critics.

Legacy: Despite his relatively short career, Poe's literary contributions had a significant impact on American and world literature. He is widely considered one of the greatest and most influential writers in the horror and detective genres. His works continue to be celebrated and adapted in various forms, from films to TV series to theatrical productions.

Overall, Edgar Allan Poe was a brilliant and enigmatic figure, whose work continues to captivate and intrigue readers more than a century after his death.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar allan poe poems.

• A Dream Within A Dream
• A Valentine
• An Acrostic
• Annabel Lee
• Bridal Ballad
• Epigram for Wall Street
• Eureka - A Prose Poem
• Evening Star
• Hymn to Aristogeiton and Harmodius
• Impromptu. To Kate Carol
• In the Greenest of our Valleys
• In Youth I have Known One
• Sancta Maria
• Sonnet - To Science
• Sonnet- Silence
• Sonnet- To Zante
• Spirits Of The Dead
• The City In The Sea
• The Coliseum
• The Conqueror Worm
• The Divine Right Of Kings
• The Forest Reverie
• The Happiest Day-The Happiest Hour
• The Haunted Palace
• The Lake. To--
• The Sleeper
• The Valley Of Unrest
• To F--S S. O--D
• To Helen - 1848
• To Helen-1831
• To My Mother
• To One Departed
• To One In Paradise
• To The River --

Edgar Allan Poe Biography

I wasn’t too fond of literature as a young school boy, but I did look forward to my American Literature class when it came time for the works of Edgar Allan Poe. Whether it was his dark and macabre scenes or just the way he framed his words, I don’t know, but I always relished the discussion of Poe’s works and reading his many fascinating poems. I think one of the things I enjoyed most was hearing an audio recording of Vincent Price reading A Tell Tale Heart and The Pendulum. If I were to give any writer credit for inspiring me to continue writing and to pursue it as a livelihood, it would be Edgar Allan Poe.

Poe married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, and they lived in Baltimore, Maryland, for a short time. It was here the Poe penned The Raven. It was immediately successful. His young wife fell ill to tuberculosis and died just two years later. It is commonly believed that her early death was a significant influence on Poe’s later works, and in particular, his darker writings.

Although known primarily for his work in horror, Poe also was fond of humor and satyr . He was interested in reanimation, or the belief that dead bodies could be brought back to life — which was also a similar interest of Mary Shelley, the author of Frankenstein.

One of Poe’s earlier poems was The City in the Sea . It was the tale of a city that was ruled by ‘death’, and that the Devil was grateful to ‘death’ for allowing him to rule over the world. There is some controversy that perhaps Poe plagiarized a portion of the poem, as there are a few references that are quite similar to a lesser known poem called Musing Thoughts. The poem is still one of Poe’s better efforts from his early years of writing poetry.

The City in the Sea by Edgar Allan Poe

Another of Poe’s early works is Tamerlane . This is the tale of a young warrior who aspires to amass great power, and in the process, ignores the love he has for a young peasant girl. The story goes on to find Tamerlane on his death bed, filled with remorse for his choices in life , one of them being that he caused a broken heart.

Tamerlane by Edgar Allan Poe

Poe’s works are a central part of any study of American literature, in particular, that genre known as ‘gothic’. He will certainly always be a well loved poet for generations to come.

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• Alfred Lord Tennyson
• Elizabeth Barrett Browning
• Percy Bysshe Shelley
• Ambrose Bierce
• Charles Baudelaire
• Dante Gabriel Rossetti
• Fernando Pessoa
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Herman Melville
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• Jorge Luis Borges
• May Swenson
• Maya Angelou
• Oscar Wilde
• Paul Valery
• Robert Louis Stevenson
• Vachel Lindsay
• Vladimir Nabokov

Timeline of poet Edgar Allan Poe

The 10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Adaptations

I n the past few years, director Mike Flanagan has embarked on a spooky adaptation tour of sorts. He tackled Stephen King with Gerald’s Game and Doctor Sleep , received massive amounts of praise for his treatment of Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House , turned Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw into The Haunting of Bly Manor, and even took a stab at young-adult author Christopher Pike’s The Midnight Club . On October 12, Netflix audiences will get to see how he handles Edgar Allan Poe with the miniseries The Fall of the House of Usher .

This latest adaptation is notable due to the sprawling legacy Poe left behind. The author is essentially the first son of American horror and detective literature, and his stories and poems influenced other writers like James and H.P. Lovecraft. Poe’s work has been featured in horror cinema for almost as long as the genre has existed. If you’re looking to experience it onscreen before the upcoming Netflix show, you’re certainly not lacking in the way of solid offerings. From the early silent-film era to our favorite mean yellow family, here are ten adaptations that best exemplify Poe’s revolutionary work in the realm of the macabre.

The Plague in Florence (1919)

Written by Austrian filmmaker Fritz Lang, who went on to direct Metropolis and M , The Plague of Florence adapts Poe’s The Masque of the Red Death . Known for its personification of a plague as a mysterious figure, the short story was first published just a few years after a cholera pandemic tore across the globe claiming hundreds of thousands of lives. Most film adaptations place the story in medieval times, however, and Lang goes one step further with his silent film by rendering the plague as a woman who seems to tempt society as it perishes around her. We’re so consumed by lust and greed, Lang proposes, that death doesn’t even have to prey on us — we simply fall to it.

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1932)

With adaptations of Frankenstein and Dracula , Universal Pictures established itself as the go-to studio for American horror films in the early 1930s, and it would soon include Poe’s work in its stable of shocks with Murders in the Rue Morgue . This wasn’t the first American adaptation of Poe’s work; among others, D.W. Griffith filmed The Tell-Tale Heart in 1914, and the titular Phantom dressed as the Red Death for a bit in Universal’s first Phantom of the Opera film in 1925. Murders of the Rue Morgue , though, capitalizes on Poe at his outlandishly ghoulish best.

Centered on the story of a mad doctor who kidnaps women and injects them with ape blood to create a proper mate for his gorilla henchman, the film expands Poe’s short story about a killer orangutan to give leading man Bela Lugosi more creepy things to do. Fresh off Dracula , Lugosi would soon be shoved into every evil doctor/scientist role Hollywood had to offer, and Rue Morgue captures him at the height of his scenery-chewing aplomb. Director Robert Florey, having been passed over to helm Frankenstein , fills Rue Morgue with touches of German Expressionism, and the movie ends with an ape being shot and falling from a tall building — one year before King Kong .

The Black Cat (1934)

As Rue Morgue made abundantly clear, Poe’s work was ripe for narrative extrapolation. The Black Cat has little to do with his short story of the same title aside from the appearance of a black cat and Poe’s name featuring prominently on the poster. Instead, nestled inside a tale about a mysterious house built in a ruined World War I fort and the plans for revenge that go on there, it provided a chance for Universal Pictures to pit its two horror icons against each other — Lugosi takes on Boris Karloff here with the Frankenstein actor now playing a very effective serial murderer and cult leader.

Though moves Poe’s story outside the context of a man driven mad by a certain kind of cat, it decidedly takes advantage of the author’s consistent emotional thematics. The whole thing reeks of paranoia and of an untrustworthy world looming above to swallow you whole. It even allows Lugosi, who was far more well known for his otherworldly screen presence, to tap into a pathos he was rarely afforded in his career. And Karloff obviously relishes his malice, grinning and puppeteering the emotions of everyone around him just as Poe did with his readers: “Did you hear that, Vitus? The phone is dead. Even the phone is dead .”

The Tell-Tale Heart (1941)

While Universal flooded cinemas with horror films throughout the 1930s (the studio released a third loose Poe adaptation with The Raven in 1935), MGM stuck to its dramas and comedies. Horror had burned it a few times, typically thanks to director Tod Browning, who turned in the controversial Freaks . However, when it did produce horror — like 1941’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (which was nominated for three Academy Awards) — it was something special. This short, faithful adaptation of The Tell-Tale Heart , made to play in theaters before the feature film screened, is often stunning to look at.

Through a concoction of slow zooms and desperate close-ups, the feeling of guilt in the film becomes inescapable. Combined with its excellent sound design, this is a Poe adaptation that thrives purely on the author’s work.

House of Usher (1960)

The most famous Poe adaptations are likely those directed by Roger Corman, who in 1960 was quickly on his way to becoming a B-movie wunderkind. Poe’s stories, already in the public domain, were relatively cheap to adapt even with Corman’s ambitious set designs and the hiring of notable writers like novelist Richard Matheson ( I Am Legend ) to pen the scripts. House of Usher would prove they had major box-office potential, too.

The glue that held Corman’s films together was Vincent Price, a performer who, as Universal honed with Lugosi three decades earlier, could shift between menace and camp with ease. Here, Price taps into the former, playing one sibling in the cursed Usher family who is doomed to sink with his mansion in the death grip of his mad sister. Poe adaptations were generally black-and-white affairs before House of Usher arrived in gorgeous color, perfectly capturing the rotten setting and the bizarre characters who inhabit it.

The Pit and the Pendulum (1961)

In retrospect, House of Usher seems like a warm-up for The Pit and the Pendulum : Matheson returns as the screenwriter, and Price gets even more chances to luxuriate in macabre abandon (he plays two roles!). Corman’s dungeon set pieces are a wonderful combination of construction and matte paintings, and if you came to the theater to see the titular torture device, Corman didn’t disappoint. To match Price, the director hired Barbara Steele, who had starred in Mario Bava’s Black Sunday the year before. Here, she has just as much fun hissing her lines, and as in that landmark Italian film, she gets trapped in a gruesome iron maiden at one point — hey, if it works, it works!

The Masque of the Red Death (1964)

Corman directed eight Poe adaptations from 1960 to 1965, but not all were created equal. Premature Burial ? Without Price, it isn’t much fun. Tales of Terror ? A solid but uninspired collection of short films. Corman’s last true Poe masterpiece was The Masque of the Red Death , a beautiful movie about royal hedonism running amok during what is basically the apocalypse. As Prince Prospero, a Satan-worshipping ruler, Price has little use for humanity and delivers one of the best performances of his career. He is all smirking sadism until, of course, his fate drives him to impotent panic.

There are no giant pendulums or burning castles here, but Corman manages to harness the Poe story’s sheer delirium. This is especially showcased in the scene where corpses, killed by the Red Death at a ball, continue to dance. The director also captured Poe’s criticism of class and the price of unhinged decadence: “Why should you be afraid to die? Your soul has been dead for a long, long time.”

ABC Weekend Special — “The Gold-Bug” (1980)

The length of Poe’s stories made them prime targets for anthology television shows. A version of “The Cask of Amontillado” showed up in a 1949 episode of Suspense (starring Lugosi, who was by then suffering from deteriorating health owing to his drug addiction.) The best of these may be the Daytime Emmy–winning “The Gold-Bug” from ABC Weekend Special . It features a young Anthony Michael Hall in a surprisingly haunting mystery that serves as a kind of coming-of-age story.

Typically trapped under the thumb of his domineering uncle, Hall’s character finds escapism and twisted kinship among outcasts on an island. But he gets mired in trying to understand the secrets of the titular bug and eventually becomes just as obsessed with tales of buried treasure as his questionable allies are. Though this short TV movie is aimed at a young audience, Hall’s performance helps retain the doomed fixations of Poe’s tale.

The Simpsons — “Treehouse of Horror” (1990)

“The Raven” has proved the trickiest of Poe’s works to adapt. Its brevity and the confined setting usually left film versions to their own invention. Out of all things, however, the first Simpsons “Treehouse of Horror” special gave us the most faithful rendition we’re ever likely to see. With narration by James Earl Jones (but Homer as the face of the narrator) and Bart as the confounding Raven, we get a segment that is, oddly enough, less intent on going for laughs and more focused on quoting Poe’s poem in full. It’s funny but also a bit awe inspiring in its dedication.

Masters of Horror — “The Black Cat” (2007)

There are plenty of depictions of Poe himself on film that mix the writer’s biography with the content of his stories, but no actor has been as committed to this as horror staple Jeffrey Combs. Under the direction of Stuart Gordon (who had previously made a just-all-right adaptation of The Pit and the Pendulum ), Combs plays Poe in this Masters of Horror episode as an alcoholic trapped helplessly in his own nightmares, tormented by both a black cat and other visions of death; the episode culminates in hallucinations and disturbing bloodshed. Combs would reprise his role as Poe in a one-man show a few years later, remaining just as fascinated by the author as his critics and fans have been for nearly 200 years.

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