EDGAR ALLAN POE

Untitled Slide

• Born January 19th, 1809, Boston, MA
• Parents Elizabeth Hopkins and David Poe Jr.
• Parents seperated
• Mother died December 10th 1811
• Edgar went with the Allan family

Untitled Slide

• Joined the U.S. Army in the year 1827 when he was 18 years old
• In 1830 Edgar Allan Poe entered West Point as a cadet
• Rumored Poe was dismissed from West Point for attending drill practice nude
• Really just "gross negligence" and not enough money.

Untitled Slide

• Poe's work was constantly rejected from magazines and News Papers
• Married younger cousin Virginia in 1836
• Poe was able to find work as the editor of a newspaper

Poe was very succesful with his job, and managed to increase the circulation of the paper, The Southern Literary Messenger, from five hundred, to three thousand five hundred copies. Poe quit being the editor of the paper, and instead went back to New York and wrote "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" but was once again rejected. Poe then traveled to Philidelphia in 1838, there he wrote "Ligeia", "The Haunted Place", and his very first volume of short stories "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque". Poe was published in 1839, was given the copyright and twenty copies of the book, however he still recieved no money.

Untitled Slide

• Virginia died in 1847
• in 1849 Edgar wrote the poem "Annabel Lee" in her memory

HIS DEATH

• The Facts:
• Was found outside Ryan’s Fourth Ward polls in Baltimore, Maryland
• On october 3rd 1849
• Was taken to Washington College Hospital
• Died 4 days later on October 7th

WHY DO WE SEE POE SO DARKLY?

• Looking at works such as:
• The Raven(1845)
• The Fall of the House of Usher(1839)
• The Tell-Tale Heart(1843)
• The Pit and the Pendulum(1842)

"On the deck was a slender, slight, beautiful figure, a dim man, apparently enjoying the terror, the murk, and the dislocation of which he was the centre and the victim. That figure of my lurid dream might stand, for Edgar Poe, his spirit, his fortunes, and his poems- themselves all lurid dreams."

-Walt Whitman

WHY IS HE IMPORTANT

• Charles Baudelaire, Jules Verne and H. P. Lovecraft
• His work not only affected poetry, it affected fiction, and even scifi
• Inspired "art for art’s sake” a movement in nineteenth-century literature