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Edgar Allan Poe -- Biography
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Biography: Life of Edgar Allan Poe
EARLY LIFE.--The most famous of all southern writers and one of the world's
greatest literary artists happened to be born in Boston because his
parents, who were strolling actors, had come there to fill an engagement.
His grandfather, Daniel Poe, a citizen of Baltimore, was a general in the
Revolution. His service to his country was sufficiently noteworthy to cause
Lafayette to kneel at the old general's grave and say, "Here reposes a
noble heart."
An orphan before he was three years old, Poe was reared by Mr. and Mrs.
John Allan of Richmond, Virginia. In 1815, at the close of the War of 1812,
his foster parents went to England and took him with them. He was given a
school reader and two spelling books with which to amuse himself during the
long sailing voyage across the ocean. He was placed for five years in the
Manor School House, a boarding school, at Stoke Newington, a suburb of
London. Here, he could walk by the very house in which Defoe wrote
Robinson Crusoe. But nothing could make up to Poe the loss of a mother
and home training during those five critical years. The head master said
that Poe was clever, but spoiled by "an extravagant amount of pocket
money." The contrast between his school days and adult life should be
noted. We shall never hear of his having too much money after he became an
author.
In 1820 the boy returned with the Allans to Richmond, where he prepared for
college, and at the age of seventeen entered the University of Virginia.
"Here," his biographer says, "he divided his time, after the custom of
undergraduates, between the recitation room, the punch bowl, the
card-table, athletic sports, and pedestrianism." Although Poe does not seem
to have been censured by the faculty, Mr. Allan was displeased with his
record, removed him from college, and placed him in his counting house.
This act and other causes, which have never been fully ascertained, led Poe
to leave Mr. Allan's home.
Poe then went to Boston, where, at the age of eighteen, he published a thin
volume entitled Tamerlane and Other Poems. Disappointed at not being able
to live by his pen, he served two years in the army as a common soldier,
giving both an assumed name and age. He finally secured an appointment to
West Point after he was slightly beyond the legal age of entrance. The
cadets said in a joking way that Poe had secured the appointment for his
son, but that the father substituted himself after the boy died. Feeling an
insatiable ambition to become an author, Poe neglected his duties at West
Point, and he was, fortunately for literature, discharged at the age of
twenty-two.
HIS GREAT STRUGGLE.--Soon after leaving West Point, Poe went to his kindred
in Baltimore. In a garret in that southern city, he first discovered his
power in writing prose tales. In 1833 his story, MS. Found in a Bottle,
won a prize of one hundred dollars offered by a Baltimore paper. In 1834
Mr. Allan died without mentioning Poe in his will; and in spite of his
utmost literary efforts, Poe had to borrow money to keep from starving.
After struggling for four years in Baltimore, he went to Richmond and
became editor of the Southern Literary Messenger. He worked very hard in
this position, sometimes contributing to a single number as much as forty
pages of matter, mostly editorials and criticisms of books. In Baltimore he
had tested his power of writing short stories, but in Richmond his work
laid the foundation of his reputation as a literary critic. While here, he
married his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Perhaps it was irregular habits that
caused him to lose the profitable editorship of the Messenger soon after
he married. Let us remember, however, that his mother-in-law was charitable
enough not to unveil his weakness. "At home," she said, "he was as simple
and affectionate as a child."
The principal part of the rest of his life was passed in Philadelphia and
New York, where he served as editor of various periodicals and wrote
stories and poems. In the former city, he wrote most of the tales for which
he is to-day famous. With the publication of his poem, The Raven, in New
York in 1845, he reached the summit of his fame. In that year he wrote to a
friend, "The Raven has had a great 'run'--but I wrote it for the express
purpose of running--just as I did The Gold Bug, you know. The bird beat
the bug, though, all hollow." And yet, in spite of his fame, he said in the
same year, "I have made no money. I am as poor now as ever I was in my
life."
The truth was that it would then have been difficult for the most
successful author to live even in the North without a salaried position,
and conditions were worse in the South. Like Hawthorne, Poe tried to get a
position in a customhouse, but failed.
He moved to an inexpensive cottage in Fordham, a short distance from New
York City, where he, his wife, and mother-in-law found themselves in 1846
in absolute want of food and warmth. The saddest scene in which any great
American author figured was witnessed in that cottage in "the bleak
December," when his wife, Virginia, lay dying in the bitter cold. Because
there was insufficient bed clothing to keep her warm, Poe gave her his coat
and placed the family cat upon her to add its warmth.
Her death made him almost completely irresponsible. The stunning effect of
the blow may be seen in the wandering lines of Ulalume (1847). The end
came to him in Baltimore in 1849, the same year in which he wrote the
beautiful dirge of Annabel Lee for his dead wife. He was only forty when
he died. This greatest literary genius of the South was buried in Baltimore
in a grave that remained unmarked for twenty-six years.
In anticipation of his end, he had written the lines:--
"And oh! of all tortures,--
That torture the worst
Has abated--the terrible
Torture of thirst
For the napthaline river
Of Passion accurst:--
I have drank of a water
That quenches all thirst."
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