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Virtual Tour: Edgar Allan Poe House National Historic Landmark, Baltimore, MD

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Public hours are Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM (last entry at 3:40 PM.) There is a fee for admission. Private tours are also available for a fee and by appointment only. Follow Poe Baltimore on Facebook and join our mailing list for the latest from Poe Baltimore.
"...walking into Poe's Baltimore home is both disturbing and ethereal."

The Edgar Allan Poe House, a National Historic Landmark, is open to visitors ona seasonal schedule.

Poe's home is in an excellent state of preservation with much of the exterior and interior original fabric from the 1833-1835 period when Edgar lived there with his aunt, grandmother and two cousins. While the house is not furnished, visitors walk on the same floors, stairs and wander within the original plaster walls and woodwork that Edgar lived with.

Exhibits tell the story of Edgar Allan Poe's life and death in Baltimore and significant artifacts such as Edgar's portable writing desk and chair, and a telescope, china and glassware used by Edgar when living with the Allan family in Richmond, Virginia. Changing exhibits and tours are scheduled from time to time.

Poe Baltimore is an affiliate of the American Writers Museum.
An Important Note to Visitors: There are no restroom facilities in the House and Museum (though we can recommend nearby facilities.) The House is also not accessible to handicapped visitors and/or service animals but a video tour is available on this website. The House is small with tight winding staircases and may not be suitable for all visitors.

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Public hours are Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday 11:00 AM to 4:00 PM (last entry at 3:40 PM.) There is a fee for admission. Private tours are also available for a fee and by appointment only. Follow Poe Baltimore on Facebook and join our mailing list for the latest from Poe Baltimore.

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Poe’s Family, Friends, Enemies and Others

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Poe’s Family, Friends, Enemies and Others

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Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Baltimore - Poe's Family, Friends, Enemies and Others

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Poe's Family, Friends, Enemies and Others

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Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum - Wikipedia

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The Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum, located at 203 North Amity St. in Baltimore, Maryland, is the former home of American writer Edgar Allan Poe in the 1830s. The small unassuming structure, which was opened as a writer's house museum in 1949, is a typical row home.

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Baltimore's NFL team will announce its name today at noon at Harborplace. To find out the winner, call Sundial after 1 p.m. today at (410) 783-1800 and enter code 6130. One thing became clear through the weeks of studies, polls and focus meetings conducted by Baltimore's new NFL team: This city's first choice for a team name is the Colts.

But it also is the name of a team that moved out of town 12 years ago today, and it isn't coming back.

The replacement that will be announced today -- almost certainly Ravens -- is the result of thousands of hours of sifting through ideas and testing the reaction of likely fans.

A phone-in poll conducted by The Sun at the request of the football team began yesterday and ends at 10 this morning, allowing fans to chose from among three finalists: Ravens, Americans and Marauders.

By 3: 30 p.m. yesterday, the volume of calls surpassed 14,249, the old record for Sundial, The Sun's phone-in service. The record was set over three days in 1993, when readers were asked to name a potential expansion NFL team and picked Ravens.

If Ravens wins this time, that would be consistent with other phone-in polls taken in recent days. Channel 45 viewers picked Ravens by 79 percent, with 16 percent for Marauders and 5 percent for Americans. Channel 11 viewers voted 53 percent for Ravens, 15 percent Marauders, 13 percent for Americans and 19 percent for none of the above.

The process of picking the name began in mid-February, almost immediately after the NFL approved the move of the franchise to Baltimore and the settlement of a lawsuit with Cleveland. The agreement specified that the Browns would leave their name and colors behind for use by a team the league has promised to have in Cleveland by 1999.

"We wanted to generate a name that would be instantly recognizable and appreciated by the fans and we wanted it to have a historical tie to the community and exemplify the team," said David Modell, the team's marketing chief who coordinated the name selection.

Modell met with officials of NFL Properties in New York, where they sat around a table for four hours and pored over lists of hundreds of possible names.

The ideas came from a variety of sources: names considered by the league for expansion and its World League teams; suggestions received in a 1993 phone-in and mail-in poll by The Sun and a phone-in poll done by Channel 45, and local marketing research.

From there, the group came up with a short list of 17 names, from Admirals to Steamers.

Three "focus groups," or small groups of representative area residents, were selected by a marketing firm and brought together Feb. 27 and 28. Two of the groups were strong NFL fans, roughly divided by age: 25-35 and 35-45. The third group had people who considered themselves casual fans.

The groups were asked a series of questions to gauge their attitudes, first on their community, then on what would make a good football name, and finally about the specific candidate names.

They were asked questions such as, "If Baltimore were a car, what kind of car would it be? What person would you say most represents the community?" The consensus picks were a Jeep and Cal Ripken. They suggested a city that values sturdiness over flash, utility over aesthetics -- important factors for a name.

Then they were played the soundtrack from a short series of mock football games, with the announcer alternating the different names with crowd noise playing in the background.

Some conclusions emerged from the sessions. First, even though some people didn't want the new team to grovel for it, there was strong support for getting the Colts name back.

Asked for reaction to specific ideas, the groups, in general, thought: Admirals was too stuffy; Lancers too wimpy; Banners too dull, and Bulldogs too common.

They also thought Knights could work, but it didn't grab anyone; Pride, Spirit and Stars were not "NFL enough," and Bay Cats sounded too much like a Roller Derby team.

Mustangs was a polarizing pick. Some people liked it a lot, others believed it was too much a second-class substitute for Colts.

Steamers sparked a lot of conversation, and the groups said they liked the idea of a powerful locomotive, but they weren't too hot on Steamers in particular. Marauders also won support as a strong name, but one group thought it hard to spell and visualize.

Bombers, the pick of the league for Baltimore had the city won an expansion franchise in 1993, also was well-received, and fans noted that it lent itself to a lot of marketing possibilities, such as flight jackets. The avid fans weren't bothered by the connotation of terrorism or violence, but the less-serious fans found it troublesome.

Ravens was a consistent favorite, even among people who did not know it was the name of a poem or that Edgar Allan Poe is buried in Baltimore. Fans liked the tie-in with the other birds in town, the Orioles, and found it easy to visualize a tough, menacing black bird.

When they were divided into six smaller groups and asked to rank their top five picks, the testers put only two names on all six lists: Colts and Ravens. Three of the groups picked Ravens as their first choice, two picked Colts and one took Bulldogs.

Shortly afterward, at an NFL meeting in Florida, team owner Art Modell met with Indianapolis general counsel Michael Chernoff, who said bidding for the Colts name would begin in the "tens of millions" of dollars -- a price Baltimore's team believed was too rich.

Meanwhile, Bruce Burke, vice president and creative director of NFL Properties, called the B&O; Railroad Museum asking for some rail-related substitutes for Steamers. A list compiled by museum executive director John Ott contained a number of possibilities, from Stokers to Yardmen, but one caught the fancy of Burke and David Modell: Americans.

It is the name of a class of locomotives built in Baltimore and elsewhere around the middle of the last century.

A new short list then was subjected to a random telephone poll of area residents.

"Colts was very strong, not to anyone's surprise," said David Modell. "But Mustangs and Ravens was in the next tier, very strong. Then, in the next tier, was Americans, Railers and Marauders."

A few nasty faxes from the Arena Football League, where the Milwaukee Mustangs play, added to other trademark issues raised by that name and took it off the list.

Ravens won little support from within the club, but as poll after poll demonstrated, it seemed to be the fans' favorite. The team decided it could live with any of the final three, submitted the list to one more fan poll, and will go with the roar of the crowd.

"The first promise we made was we would bring this back to the fans in some way," David Modell said. "That was important to us."

Pub Date: 3/29/96

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Ravens never out of focus Probable NFL name consistent favorite in polls, group research

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Baltimore's NFL team will announce its name today at noon at Harborplace . To find out the winner, call Sundial after 1 p.m. today at (410) 783-1800 and enter code 6130. One thing became clear through the weeks of studies, polls and focus meetings conducted by Baltimore's new NFL team: This city's first choice for a team name is the Colts .

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It was a hot summer day in May 1827, and Johann Maelzel's robot exhibition was not going well.

Crowds had gathered inside Baltimore's Fountain Inn on Light Street to see the star of the show, a European chess-playing robot (or "automaton," in the language of the era) that had impressed the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin and sparked a decades-long debate about the nature of man and machine.

In fact, the "Automaton Chess Player" was a hoax; it would be 170 years before IBM supercomputer Deep Blue would defeat world chess champion Garry Kasparov in New York on May 11, 1997.

During Maelzel's show, a chess master, William Schlumberger, would secretly operate the device from a hidden cabinet underneath the machine. But Schlumberger, overwhelmed by the heat that day in 1827, suddenly burst out of the cabinet, abruptly ending the game.

Luckily for Maelzel, the outburst occurred outside the audience's line of sight. But two local boys had witnessed the excitement from a rooftop next door. Soon after, the Baltimore Gazette printed a story under the headline "The Chess Player Discovered."

The story "The Chess Player Discovered," which appeared in the Baltimore Gazette, June 1, 1827.

The story "The Chess Player Discovered," which appeared in the Baltimore Gazette, June 1, 1827. (Enoch Pratt Free LIbrary)

It wasn't exactly the big scoop the paper had been hoping for.

"The story died as suddenly as it had arisen," according to a 1927 retrospective in The Baltimore Sun. Contemporary news outlets disbelieved the eyewitness account.

"We will wager Pompey's pillar against a cambric needle that the editor of the Gazette had been deceived," said the New York Commercial Advertiser, whose own editors thought that Maelzel himself remotely controlled the device during games, though they could not describe how he did it.

An article, "The Great Chess Automaton," appeared in The Sun on Oct. 16, 1927.

An article, "The Great Chess Automaton," appeared in The Sun on Oct. 16, 1927. (The Baltimore Sun)

Filling in the missing "how" was where an early-career Edgar Allan Poe saw an opportunity to make a name for himself, said Scott Peeples, a Poe scholar and English professor at the College of Charleston. Poe had seen the automaton in Richmond, Va., where it toured after Baltimore and where he was living at the time, and he published an article in the April 1836 edition of the Southern Literary Messenger explaining what he thought was the nature of the hoax: that there was a man concealed within the automaton's body.

"He probably saw it as an opportunity to show off a little bit, to show how he could play detective and be a sort of investigative reporter," said Peeples.

The essay, "Maelzel's Chess Player," provided 17 pieces of evidence and was praised by contemporary papers, according to a listing of reviews in "The Poe Log," a copy of which was provided to The Sun by local Poe scholar George Figgs. These ranged from the Norfolk Herald, which called it one of the "best articles of any kind which have ever appeared in an American Periodical," to the New-Yorker (a different New Yorker than the one we know of today, which was founded in 1925), which agreed with Poe's solution, but complained that, around 9600 words, the essay was too long.

Poe didn't get everything right. Notably, he wrote that "were the machine a pure machine ... it would always win." He was also off about several of the mechanical details; though a human chess player was indeed playing on behalf of the machine, it was concealed underneath the automaton, not inside of it. He also relied heavily on previously published exposés, while criticizing the authors of those texts as presenting "bizarre" and "exceedingly unphilosophical" ideas.

Still, Poe's point-by-point analytical approach was what impressed his American peers the most, more so than the solution itself, said Peeples.

"It's not like Poe was shocking people by revealing" there was a man inside the machine, he said. "It's more the way he did it." Not just the whodunit, but also the how.

Diagrams from the article "The Great Chess-Robot Hoax," which appeared March 20, 1960, in The Sun.

Diagrams from the article "The Great Chess-Robot Hoax," which appeared March 20, 1960, in The Sun. (The Baltimore Sun)

The structure of the essay was a precursor to Poe's detective stories, said Tom Standage, deputy editor of The Economist and author of a book about the Mechanical Turk (another name for the automaton because of its costumed attire).

Poe would go on to write a series of tales featuring the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, a proto-Sherlock Holmes. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle acknowledged the influence of Poe by making a reference to Monsieur Dupin in "A Study in Scarlet," his first novel featuring Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson. After Dr. Watson points out a resemblance between Holmes and the French detective, Holmes responds in true Poe fashion: "Dupin was a very inferior fellow."

Catina Smith created Just Call Me Chef to give women running kitchens and businesses more recognition in a predominately male industry.

Eleven-year-old Jamaria Crump operates the all-things-lemon business, LemonTopia. The pop-up is at Cross Street Market through the end of August. (Anna Muckerman / Baltimore Sun video)

Eleven-year-old Jamaria Crump operates the all-things-lemon business, LemonTopia. The pop-up is at Cross Street Market through the end of August. (Anna Muckerman / Baltimore Sun video)

Catina Smith created Just Call Me Chef to give women running kitchens and businesses more recognition in a predominately male industry.

czhang@baltsun.com twitter.com/christinezhang

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When Mr. Robot met Mr. Poe: the curious case of the chess-playing machine

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In 1827, crowds gathered at Baltimore's Fountain Inn on Light Street to see a European chess-playing robot that had impressed the likes of Napoleon and Benjamin Franklin and sparked a decades-long debate about the nature of man and machine. And sparked a skeptical Edgar Allan Poe to write about it.

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Stoke Newington may just be the trendiest place to live in the capital right now. Each week, it seems like another smart cocktail bar, design boutique or destination restaurant is opening up on Church Street, and these days, you'd be lucky to snap up a house around Clissold Park for less than £1 million.

But 'Stokey' hasn't always been artisan coffee shops and gentrified dining, and this collection of photographs shows how parts of the area have changed over the years.

Local historian Amir Dotan has collected an array of photographs of buildings from Stoke Newington-past, overlaying them with Google Street View snapshots of how the area looks today.

"Over the past three years I've collected hundreds of digital copies of old photos and drawings of Stoke Newington," Dotan told the Evening Standard.

'Why gentrification is pants' - our man's lament on Stoke Newington

"Now when I walk down its streets I can't help visualising how most of them looked over the years.

"I wanted to convey that and better illustrate to others who are interested in Stoke Newington's history just how much it has changed as grand Victorian churches, large department stores, some pubs and cinemas that dominated the local scenery disappeared due to WW2 bomb damage and urban development. "

Dotan, who has been living in Stoke Newington for the past 15 years, says that he scours eBay, archives, books and private collections to find photographs and drawings of the area from the past.

"Every time I think I have uncovered all of them I stumble upon a newly discovered one, so it's great fun and a never ending collection in a sense," he jokes.

Using Google Street View, he then painstakingly matches up each building with the road that it once stood on, using Photoshop to bring both scenes together.

"I have a graphic design background, so the main challenge was less about technically superimposing the old images, but more finding the matching angle on Google Street View," Dotan explains.

"It's not as straightforward as it may seem, but it's great fun and very rewarding."

Follow us on Twitter: @eslifeandstyle

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25 brilliant photographs that show Stoke Newington then and now

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Stoke Newington may just be the trendiest place to live in the capital right now. Each week, it seems like another smart cocktail bar, design boutique or destination restaurant is opening up on Church Street, and these days, you'd be lucky to snap up a house around Clissold Park for less than £1 million.

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The northern suburbs: Stoke Newington and Stamford Hill | British History Online

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We are now about to traverse another of the northern suburbs of London, but one which it would not be possible to include among the "northern heights" of the great metropolis.

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Edgar Allan Poe's journey

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American Masters | Edgar Allan Poe: The Five Biggest Myths About Poe | Season 31 | PBS

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How well do you know Edgar Allan Poe? See if you can separate fact from fiction.

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Why should you read Edgar Allan Poe? - Scott Peeples

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Poe was a literary pioneer, inventing modern detective fiction and contributing to science fiction.
Library of Congress

Pioneering author, editor, poet, literary critic, husband, son...Edgar Allan Poe lived just to the age of 40 but his works continue to captivate readers around the globe today.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston in 1809. Both of his parents were actors. His mother, the much admired Elizabeth Arnold Poe was a talented actress. His father, David Poe was considered less talented. The Poes performed at theaters throughout the Eastern seaboard, from Boston to Virginia. In 1811, Elizabeth Poe died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, leaving orphaned Edgar, his infant sister Rosalie, and his older brother Henry. David Poe, apparently had abandoned his wife and children earlier and was not present when she died.

The three children were separated and raised by different families. Edgar was taken in by the successful Richmond merchant John Allan, and his frail wife Frances. The Allans had no children of their own. They raised Edgar as part of the family and gave him their middle name, but never legally adopted him.

In 1815, Edgar traveled with the Allans to England and Scotland, where John Allan planned to expand his tobacco business. Edgar attended boarding schools throughout the five years the family lived overseas. After John Allan's business venture failed, he moved the family back to Richmond, Virginia in 1820.

From University of Virginia to West Point

Edgar continued his studies in Richmond. He entered the University of Virginia in 1826 at the age of 17. During the year he attended the university, Edgar excelled in his studies of Latin and French. He was unable to complete his studies at the university because Allan refused to pay debts Edgar had incurred during the school year. Allan and Edgar quarreled over the debts, of which a large portion was incurred from gambling.

Shortly after his quarrel with his foster father, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond for Boston where he hoped to pursue a literary career. His first book of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems was published there. Unable to support himself, and receiving little assistance from his foster father, Poe enlisted as a private in the US Army on May 26, 1827 for a five year term. He entered under an assumed name and lied about his age, claiming to be 22 years old when he was only 18. Poe was assigned to Battery H of the First Artillery at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor. On October 31, 1827 Battery H was ordered to Fort Moultrie to protect Charleston Harbor. He sailed on the Brigantine Waltham, arriving for duty in Charleston on November 18.

At Fort Moultrie, Poe was promoted to artificer, the rank of a noncommissioned officer or enlisted man who had a mechanical specialty. On December 11, 1828, Poe's battery sailed for duty at Fortress Monroe, Virginia where he attained the rank of Sergeant-Major, the highest possible rank for a non-commissioned officer. His quick progress up the ranks can be attributed to his education, high social standing, and competence. Despite his accomplishments, Poe left military service in April 1829 and hired a substitute to complete his obligation.

A brief reconciliation between Poe and Allan occurred upon the death of Frances Allan in 1829. Allan assisted Poe in obtaining a discharge from the regular Army and an appointment as a cadet at the US Military Academy in West Point. Entering West Point in July 1830, Poe was again plagued by restlessness. One of his roommates described him as having "the appearance of being much older. He had a worn, weary, discontented look, not easily forgotten by those who were intimate with him." The financial hardship along with the realization that literature was his true vocation, led to Poe's decision to resign from the Academy. Allan, as Poe's guardian, refused to give him permission to resign. Unable to obtain permission to resign, Poe chose to neglect his duties and was court-martialed for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders."

Editor and Author

After leaving West Point, Poe eventually moved to Baltimore where he lived with his impoverished Aunt Maria Poe Clemm and her young daughter, Virginia. Poe continued to write poetry and prose. In 1833, he won a $50 prize and attention for his short story "Ms. Found in a Bottle." The attention he gained led to a job offer as an editor for the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Poe accepted the position and moved to Richmond in 1835. His aunt and cousin joined him the following year. Poe married his thirteen year old cousin, Virginia, shortly afterwards.

The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved to New York City in 1837 with the hope of Edgar finding work in the literary field. The city, as well as the rest of the country was in the midst of a depression caused by the financial "Panic of '37." Unable to find work, Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838. The six years he spent in Philadelphia proved to be his most productive, and perhaps the happiest years of his life. He worked as an editor and critic for one of the nation's largest magazines, Graham's Magazine. Some of his most famous stories were written in Philadelphia, including the "Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Mask of the Red Death," and "Ligeia." Poe referred to South Carolina settings in several short stories, including "The Balloon-Hoax" and "The Oblong Box." By far his most popular story inspired by Sullivan's Island was "The Gold Bug," originally published in 1843. In 1842, his beloved wife became ill with tuberculosis. Her illness and the constant strain of financial problems, caused Poe to sink into deep bouts of depression.

Professional and Personal Loss

The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved to New York City in 1844. Poe continued to work as an editor and critic. He gained his greatest fame as a poet after his poem "The Raven" was published in 1845. In the same year, he achieved his lifelong dream of owning a literary journal. Unfortunately, the journal failed within a few months. The Poes and Mrs. Clemm moved outside of New York City to a small cottage in 1846. Virginia died of tuberculosis the following year.

Death

For the next two years Poe continued to write poetry, short stories, criticism and plan for his own literary journal. After a successful lecture tour in the South and an extended visit in Richmond, Poe seemed to be finally recovering from the loss of Virginia, and making plans for the future. On his way back to New York City, Poe stopped in Baltimore where he died of "acute congestion of the brain." The day was October 7, 1849; Edgar Allan Poe was 40 years old.

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Edgar Allan Poe (U.S. National Park Service)

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Despite financial hardships and family woes, Edgar Allan Poe published a wide range of works, including short stories, poetry, and literary criticism.

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The Writings of Edgar Allan Poe:

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe  (A comprehensive collection of e-texts of all of Poe’s prose and poetical writings, from the original sources and with multiple versions as revised during his lifetime — includes poems, tales, sketches, essays, literary criticism, letters and miscellanea. Along with individual items, several important and scholarly collections are also provided, including the Harrison and Mabbott/Pollin editions.)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe:

Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography  (by Arthur Hobson Quinn — still the standard biography, perhaps slightly dated but sympathetic, and an impressive accumulation of what we know about Poe, done with great care and skill by someone with superb academic credentials, training and experience). (For a more condensed biography, see the “Annals” by Thomas Ollive Mabbott.)

The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe  (by Dwight R. Thomas and David K. Jackson — a chronologically sequenced collection of statements and extracts that provides an invaluable overview of Poe’s life, rooted in historical documents)

The Portraits and Daguerreotypes of Edgar Allan Poe  (by Michael J. Deas — the definitive book on Poe’s appearance and iconography, with many images now provided in full color)

Poe Studies / Dark Romanticism  (Full issues, 1968-1987)

A Poe Bookshelf  (A large selection of books, articles and lectures about Poe, all presented as e-text, with a few general lists of errata for more current books still under copy-right.)

General Topics about Edgar Allan Poe  (Standard Reference Works, Poe’s Death, etc.)

Searching  this site (via Google)

Information about Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore:

Poe in Baltimore  (with a chronology)

The Baltimore Poe House and Museum

The Poe Grave and Memorial  (Westminster Burying Ground)

The Site of Poe’s Death  (formerly the Washington University Hospital, the Baltimore City Marine Hospital, and the Church Home and Hospital)

The Moses Ezekiel Statue of Poe  (University of Baltimore, Law School Plaza)

Information About the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore:

A Brief History of the Poe Society

Poe Society Contact Information

Poe Society Membership Information

Poe Society Archives  (University of Baltimore, Langsdale Library, Special Collections)

Other Links:

Poe-related Organizations and Links

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“Depend upon it, after all, Thomas, Literature is the most noble of professions. In fact, it is about the only one fit for a man. For my own part, there is no seducing me from the path.” — from a letter by Edgar Allan Poe to Frederick W. Thomas (February 14, 1849).

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Notes:

Author.............: The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

Created...........: May 1, 1997

Last update.....: January 1, 2022

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Anyone is free to use information from this site for any legitimate purpose without charge as long as sources are properly noted. (Links to this site are welcome, and educational or artistic uses are encouraged. Wholesale lifting of our text or images, however, is not permitted — nor is the unacknowledged use of this material for student papers or commercial endeavors.) Schools may print and distribute any number of copies of these materials for use in class without special permission.

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Although substantially complete, various parts of this site are still under construction, and new material is constantly being added. Providing comprehensive and reliable information takes time, so please bear with us. (Proofreading pages, particularly historical items, requires considerable effort, and is likely to be a perpetual task.) We are currently in the process of giving the site a major rennovation to adopt XHTML (1.0 strict) and CSS. As part of these changes, we will continue to replace the white background with a colored one (to reduce the harsh appearance and improve readability on the screen) and add boxes to give pages a sense of visual continuity. (The box style of the heading changes somewhat to reflect the rank of that page in the overall hierarchy. The four main section division pages resemble the box at the top of the current page, and feature the image of Poe with his signature. Pages within each of these divisions have a slightly different style of box, and carry a navigation line at the top. The current page, referred to in navigation bars within this site as “Main Menu,” is technically the “Home” page.) Although these standards continue to evolve, it is presumed that sufficient time has passed so that they are supported in most browsers. Generally, revised pages will appear with a beige frame against a dark green background. These changes are part of an ongoing process and must be accomplished page by page. There are inevitably formatting quirks between various browsers, and although every reasonable effort has been made to support all major browsers, our pages are chiefly adapted to Firefox.

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Hosting

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[S:1 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore Allan Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe

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The website for people interested in serious scholarship and study about Edgar Allan Poe: biographies, chronologies, and a comprehensive collection of the works of Edgar Allan Poe, including poems, short stories, Pym, letters, criticism and miscellaneous writings, with variants and bibliographies, a…

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His name conjures up images of premature burial, black cats, forbidden crypts, and crumbling old houses where terrifying secrets dwell.

Almost one hundred and fifty years after his death, Edgar Allan Poe's prose and poetry continue to frighten, influence and inspire writers, composers, artists, poets, and readers all over the world. Despite a mixed reputation during his lifetime, Poe is today considered one of America's greatest writers.

Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, Poe was the son of professional actors. Soon after his father deserted the family, his mother died of tuberculosis, orphaning him at age three. Separated from his brother and sister, he went to live with a well-to-do family in Virginia. The Allans (from whom Poe took his middle name) provided him with a strong education, but were resistant to his literary aspirations. By the time he attended the University of Virginia, he had already begun to grow apart from his guardian, John Allan.

After running up gambling debts, and becoming estranged from the Allans, Poe left college and enlisted in the United States Army. There he progressed rapidly, becoming a sergeant major. It was then that he self-published his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems. After his discharge from the Army, Poe briefly attended West Point and then moved to Baltimore where he attempted to launch his career as a writer. In 1833, he married his thirteen-year-old cousin and moved her and her mother to Richmond, Virginia.

Throughout the late 1830s and early 1840s, Poe wrote much of his best work, including The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the stories "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Gold Bug." While other writers of the time were writing straight forward realistic representations of life in America, Poe was concerning himself with the subconscious- dreams, nightmares, and the unspoken. His work plumbed the depths of human fears and desires, often allowing the "reality" of the stories to fade away and make room for a reality only found within the mind. Though he had many admirers, the harsh conditions of the literary marketplace made it impossible for Poe to make a decent living through writing.

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December,
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow; - vainly I had 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.

- from "The Raven"

To support his new wife and mother-in-law, Poe moved to Philadelphia, then New York, and took a number of jobs as a magazine editor, working at publications including New York Mirror, Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine, and Godey's Lady's Book. Though his skill as both an editor and critic were exceptional, he often found himself at odds with others in the literary world. He had repeated bouts of alcoholism and rarely lasted more than a year and a half at any one job. In 1844 Poe received enormous attention for his masterful poem "The Raven." But with the advances in his career during the mid-1840s also came the setbacks of his continued feuds with other literary figures, drinking problems, employment problems, and most of all, the ill health of his wife, Virginia - who, like Poe's mother, suffered from tuberculosis.

In January of 1847 his wife died. After a period of mourning, Poe began once again to write, producing one of his masterpieces, "Eureka." He undertook a lecture tour to raise money for a new magazine, and eventually landed back in Richmond, where he hoped to marry his childhood sweetheart. On a trip back north to New York in 1849, Poe stopped in Baltimore where he was found on October 3rd, passed out on a street outside a bar. He died four days later. Though some have suggested foul play, no one is certain of the circumstances of his death. Sadly, it was not until years later, with the help of French poets such as Baudelaire, that Poe's rank as a great artist became solidified. A man profoundly ahead of his time, Edgar Allan Poe pointed to the mysteries of the psyche, to the dark truths that float in our dreams, to our unredeemable fears; and for this, generations of readers remain eternally grateful.

Major support for Edgar Allan Poe: Buried Alive is provided by the National Endowment for the Humanities. Additional support for this film is provided in part by National Endowment for the Arts, Joy Fishman, and Wallace S Wilson.

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Edgar Allan Poe biography | American Masters | PBS

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Born in Boston on January 19, 1809, Poe was the son of professional actors. Soon after his father deserted the family, his mother died of tuberculosis, orphaning him at age three. Separated from his brother and sister, he went to live with a well-to-do family in Virginia.

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by Robert Giordano

This site contains short stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe (Edgar Allen Poe is a common misspelling), story summaries, quotes, and linked vocabulary words and definitions for educational reading. It also includes a short biography, a timeline of Poe's life, and links to other Poe sites.

Most people recognize Poe by his famous poem,"The Raven". Others may have read one of his more popular dark and creepy tales like,"The Fall of the House of Usher" or "The Tell-tale Heart". Poe wrote quite a few gothic stories about murder, revenge, torture, the plague, being buried alive, and insanity. Many modern books and movies have "borrowed" ideas from Poe. Some of Poe's stories were not well accepted in his day because people were just not ready for them- they were too scary.

Many people don't know that Edgar Allan Poe also wrote stories about adventure on the high seas, buried pirate treasure, and a famous balloon ride. Poe invented the detective story with tales like"Murders in the Rue Morgue" and"The Purloined Letter". Sherlock Holmes and other fictional detectives would later be based on the characters that Poe created. Poe wrote love stories and even a few strange little comedies. He attempted to explain the composition of the universe in a way that sounds a little like quantum physics. Explore this site and you'll see why I think Edgar Allan Poe deserves to be recognized as one of the most original, imaginative, and ingenious authors of our society.

Summaries

Poe wrote many stories on many different topics. If you don't know where to start, you can browse short summaries of Edgar Allan Poe stories, so you can find something that interests you. Don't worry, I don't give away the endings!!

Wordlist

This site makes it easy for you read Poe's stories. Poe knew several languages and had quite a large vocabulary. Poe's works are not hard to read but sometimes he uses obscure words or references that the average user may not know. Because of this, I've created an ever growing wordlist containing many of these words and their definitions. When a word in the wordlist appears in any story, it becomes hyperlinked to its definition.

Gallery

In the Gallery, you'll find a large collection of Edgar Allan Poe portraits and daguerreotypes. Learn the details behind each of Poe's commonly recognized portraits.

In the Poe Artwork section, browse a constantly updated selection of art from current artists who were inspired by Edgar Allan Poe, his poetry, and prose. Artists who have created paintings, drawings, or illustrations based on Poe or his works, are invited to contact me about featuring your work on this site.

The Gallery also features photography from various trips to Edgar Allan Poe historic sites, like the ones in Richmond and Baltimore.

About this Site

Poestories.com was originally built by Robert Giordano in 2005 using 100% standards compliant HTML and CSS, written from scratch. In 2019, Robert updated all of the code to an HTML5 "Responsive" layout for phones and mobile devices. This site should work equally well in old browsers from 10 years ago, all the way up to the latest Chrome, Safari, Firefox, and Edge browsers. The site even works in Internet Explorer but why would you do that? Finally it means this site is fully functional with all styles turned off and is accessible to people with disabilities.

Enjoy your visit and don't forget to sign the guestbook.

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Edgar Allan Poe, short stories, tales, and poems

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A collection of stories and poems by Edgar Allan Poe with vocabulary words, a biography, image gallery, and a timeline of Poe's life

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It was raining in Baltimore on October 3, 1849, but that didn't stop Joseph W. Walker, a compositor for the Baltimore Sun, from heading out to Gunner's Hall, a public house bustling with activity. It was Election Day, and Gunner's Hall served as a pop-up polling location for the 4th Ward polls. When Walker arrived at Gunner's Hall, he found a man, delirious and dressed in shabby secondhand clothes, lying in the gutter. The man was semi-conscious and unable to move, but as Walker approached him, he discovered something unexpected: The man was Edgar Allan Poe. Worried about the health of the addled poet, Walker stopped and asked Poe if he had any acquaintances in Baltimore who might be able to help him. Poe gave Walker the name of Joseph E. Snodgrass, a magazine editor with some medical training. Immediately, Walker wrote Snodgrass a letter asking for help:

Baltimore City, Oct. 3, 1849
Dear Sir,

There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan's 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, he is in need of immediate assistance.

Yours, in haste,
JOS. W. WALKER
To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.

On September 27-almost a week earlier-Poe had left Richmond, Virginia, bound for Philadelphia to edit a collection of poems for Marguerite St. Leon Loud, a minor figure in American poetry at the time. When Walker found Poe in delirious disarray outside of the polling place, it was the first anyone had heard or seen of the poet since his departure from Richmond. Poe never made it to Philadelphia to attend to his editing business. Nor did he ever make it back to New York, where he had been living, to escort his aunt back to Richmond for his impending wedding. Poe was never to leave Baltimore, where he launched his career in the early 19th century, again-and in the four days between Walker finding Poe outside the public house and Poe's death on October 7, he never regained enough consciousness to explain how he had come to be found, in soiled clothes not his own, incoherent on the streets. Instead, Poe spent his final days wavering between fits of delirium, gripped by visual hallucinations. The night before his death, according to his attending physician John J. Moran, Poe repeatedly called out for " Reynolds"-a figure who, to this day, remains a mystery.

Poe's death-shrouded in mystery-seems ripped directly from the pages of one of his own works. He had spent years crafting a careful image of a man inspired by adventure and fascinated with enigmas-a poet, a detective, an author, a world traveler who fought in the Greek War of Independence and was held prisoner in Russia. But though his death certificate listed the cause of death as phrenitis, or swelling of the brain, the mysterious circumstances surrounding his death have led many to speculate about the true cause of Poe's demise. "Maybe it's fitting that since he invented the detective story," says Chris Semtner, curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, "he left us with a real-life mystery."

1. Beating

In 1867, one of the first theories to deviate from either phrenitis or alcohol was published by biographer E. Oakes Smith in her article " Autobiographic Notes: Edgar Allan Poe." "At the instigation of a woman," Smith writes, "who considered herself injured by him, he was cruelly beaten, blow upon blow, by a ruffian who knew of no better mode of avenging supposed injuries. It is well known that a brain fever followed." Other accounts also mention "ruffians" who had beaten Poe senseless before his death. Eugene Didier wrote in his 1872 article "The Grave of Poe" that while in Baltimore, Poe ran into some friends from West Point, who prevailed upon him to join them for drinks. Poe, unable to handle liquor, became madly drunk after a single glass of champagne, after which he left his friends to wander the streets. In his drunken state, he "was robbed and beaten by ruffians, and left insensible in the street all night."

2. Cooping

Others believe that Poe fell victim to a practice known as cooping, a method of voter fraud practiced by gangs in the 19th century where an unsuspecting victim would be kidnapped, disguised and forced to vote for a specific candidate multiple times under multiple disguised identities. Voter fraud was extremely common in Baltimore around the mid-1800s, and the polling site where Walker found the disheveled Poe was a known place that coopers brought their victims. The fact that Poe was found delirious on Election Day, then, is no coincidence.

Over the years, the cooping theory has come to be one of the more widely accepted explanations for Poe's strange demeanor before his death. Before Prohibition, voters were given alcohol after voting as a sort of reward; had Poe been forced to vote multiple times in a cooping scheme, that might explain his semi-conscious, ragged state.

Around the late 1870s, Poe's biographer J.H. Ingram received several letters that blamed Poe's death on a cooping scheme. A letter from William Hand Browne, a member of the faculty at Johns Hopkins University, explains that "the general belief here is, that Poe was seized by one of these gangs, (his death happening just at election-time; an election for sheriff took place on October 4), 'cooped,' stupefied with liquor, dragged out and voted, and then turned adrift to die."

3. Alcohol

"A lot of the ideas that have come up over the years have centered around the fact that Poe couldn't handle alcohol," says Semtner. "It has been documented that after a glass of wine he was staggering drunk. His sister had the same problem; it seems to be something hereditary."

Months before his death, Poe became a vocal member of the temperance movement, eschewing alcohol, which he'd struggled with all his life. Biographer Susan Archer Talley Weiss recalls, in "The Last Days of Edgar A. Poe," an event, toward the end of Poe's time in Richmond, that might be relevant to theorists who prefer a "death by drinking" demise for Poe. Poe had fallen ill in Richmond, and after making a somewhat miraculous recovery, was told by his attending physician that "another such attack would prove fatal." According to Weiss, Poe replied that "if people would not tempt him, he would not fall," suggesting that the first illness was brought on by a bout of drinking.

Those around Poe during his final days seem convinced that the author did, indeed, fall into that temptation, drinking himself to death. As his close friend J.P. Kennedy wrote on October 10, 1849: "On Tuesday last Edgar A. Poe died in town here at the hospital from the effects of a debauch. ... He fell in with some companion here who seduced him to the bottle, which it was said he had renounced some time ago. The consequence was fever, delirium and madness, and in a few days a termination of his sad career in the hospital. Poor Poe! ... A bright but unsteady light has been awfully quenched."

Though the theory that Poe's drinking led to his death fails to explain his five-day disappearance or his secondhand clothes on October 3, it was nonetheless a popular theory propagated by Snodgrass after Poe's death. Snodgrass, a member of the temperance movement, gave lectures across the country, blaming Poe's death on binge drinking. Modern science, however, has thrown a wrench into Snodgrasses talking points: Samples of Poe's hair from after his death show low levels of lead, explains Semtner, which is an indication that Poe remained faithful to his vow of sobriety up until his demise.

4. Carbon monoxide poisoning

In 1999, public health researcher Albert Donnay argued that Poe's death was a result of carbon monoxide poisoning from coal gas that was used for indoor lighting during the 19th century. Donnay took clippings of Poe's hair and tested them for certain heavy metals that would be able to reveal the presence of coal gas. The test was inconclusive, leading biographers and historians to largely discredit Donnay's theory.

5. Heavy metal poisoning

While Donnay's test didn't reveal levels of heavy metal consistent with carbon monoxide poisoning, the tests did reveal elevated levels of mercury in Poe's system months before his death. According to Semtner, Poe's mercury levels were most likely elevated as a result of a cholera epidemic he'd been exposed to in July 1849, while in Philadelphia. Poe's doctor prescribed calomel, or mercury chloride. Mercury poisoning, Semtner says, could help explain some of Poe's hallucinations and delirium before his death. However, the levels of mercury found in Poe's hair, even at their highest, are still 30 times below the level consistent with mercury poisoning.

6. Rabies

In 1996, the cardiologist R. Michael Benitez was participating in a clinical pathologic conference where doctors are given patients, along with a list of symptoms, and instructed to diagnose and compare with other doctors as well as the written record. The symptoms of the anonymous patient E.P., "a writer from Richmond," were clear: E.P. had succumbed to rabies. According to E.P.'s supervising physician, J.J. Moran, E.P. had been admitted to a hospital due to "lethargy and confusion." Once admitted, E.P.'s condition began a rapid downward spiral: Shortly, the patient was exhibiting delirium, visual hallucinations, wide variations in pulse rate and rapid, shallow breathing. Within four days-the median length of survival after the onset of serious rabies symptoms-E.P. was dead.

E.P., Benitez soon found out, wasn't just any author from Richmond. It was Poe whose death the Maryland cardiologist had diagnosed as a clear case of rabies, a fairly common virus in the 19th century. Running counter to any prevailing theories at the time, Benitez's diagnosis ran in the September 1996 issue of the Maryland Medical Journal. As Benitez pointed out in his article, without DNA evidence, it's impossible to say with 100 percent certainty that Poe succumbed to the rabies virus. There are a few kinks in the theory, including no evidence of hydrophobia (those afflicted with rabies develop a fear of water, but Poe was reported to have been drinking water at the hospital until his death) nor any evidence of an animal bite (though some with rabies don't remember being bitten by an animal). Still, at the time of the article's publication, Jeff Jerome, curator of the Poe House Museum in Baltimore, agreed with Benitez's diagnosis. "This is the first time since Poe died that a medical person looked at Poe's death without any preconceived notions," Jerome told the Chicago Tribune in October 1996. "If he knew it was Edgar Allan Poe, he'd think, 'Oh yeah, drugs, alcohol,' and that would influence his decision. Dr. Benitez had no agenda."

7. Brain tumor

One of the most recent theories about Poe's death suggests that the author succumbed to a brain tumor, which influenced his behavior before his death. When Poe died, he was buried, rather unceremoniously, in an unmarked grave in a Baltimore graveyard. Twenty-six years later, a statue honoring Poe was erected near the graveyard's entrance. Poe's coffin was dug up, and his remains were exhumed in order to be moved to the new place of honor. But more than two decades of buried decay had not been kind to Poe's coffin-nor to the corpse within it-and the apparatus fell apart as workers tried to move it from one part of the graveyard to another. Little remained of Poe's body, but one worker did remark on a strange feature of Poe's skull: a mass rolling around inside. Newspapers of the day claimed that the clump was Poe's brain, shriveled yet intact after almost three decades in the ground.

We know today that the mass could not be Poe's brain, which is one of the first parts of the body to rot after death. But Matthew Pearl, an American author who wrote a novel about Poe's death, was nonetheless intrigued by this clump. He contacted a forensic pathologist, who told him that while the clump couldn't be a brain, it could be a brain tumor, which can calcify after death into hard masses.

According to Semtner, Pearl isn't the only person to believe Poe suffered from a brain tumor: A New York physician once told Poe that he had a lesion on his brain that caused his adverse reactions to alcohol.

8. Flu

A far less sinister theory suggests that Poe merely succumbed to the flu-which might have turned into deadly pneumonia-on this deathbed. As Semtner explains, in the days leading up to Poe's departure from Richmond, the author visited a physician, complaining of illness. "His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn't think he should take the journey to Philadelphia," says Semtner. "He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick." According to newspaper reports from the time, it was raining in Baltimore when Poe was there-which Semtner thinks could explain why Poe was found in clothes not his own. "The cold and the rain exasperated the flu he already had," says Semtner, "and maybe that eventually lead to pneumonia. The high fever might account for his hallucinations and his confusion."

9. Murder

In his 2000 book Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe, author John Evangelist Walsh presents yet another theory about Poe's death: that Poe was murdered by the brothers of his wealthy fiancée, Sarah Elmira Shelton. Using evidence from newspapers, letters and memoirs, Walsh argues that Poe actually made it to Philadelphia, where he was ambushed by Shelton's three brothers, who warned Poe against marrying their sister. Frightened by the experience, Poe disguised himself in new clothes (accounting for, in Walsh's mind, his secondhand clothing) and hid in Philadelphia for nearly a week, before heading back to Richmond to marry Shelton. Shelton's brothers intercepted Poe in Baltimore, Walsh postulates, beat him, and forced him to drink whiskey, which they knew would send Poe into a deathly sickness. Walsh's theory has gained little traction among Poe historians-or book reviewers; Edwin J. Barton, in a review for the journal American Literature, called Walsh's story "only plausible, not wholly persuasive." " Midnight Dreary is interesting and entertaining," he concluded, "but its value to literary scholars is limited and oblique."

For Semtner, however, none of the theories fully explain Poe's curious end. "I've never been completely convinced of any one theory, and I believe Poe's cause of death resulted from a combination of factors," he says. "His attending physician is our best source of evidence. If he recorded on the mortality schedule that Poe died of phrenitis, Poe was most likely suffering from encephalitis or meningitis, either of which might explain his symptoms."

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The (Still) Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe

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Was the famous author killed from a beating? From carbon monoxide poisoning? From alcohol withdrawal? Here are the top nine theories

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art for art's sake" movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work's effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe's poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe's father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe's relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where Poems, his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe's first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia Saturday Courier and his "MS. Found in a Bottle" won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor. Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan's death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at The Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. The Southern Literary Messenger was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe's writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing Burton's Gentleman's Magazine and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. After his wife's death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe's most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the "heresy of the Didactic." While Poe's position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror."

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories-which include "The Black Cat," "The Cask of Amontillado," and "The Tell-Tale Heart"-are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character's psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," and "Ligeia" an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and Herman Melville. The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as "The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall" and "Von Kempelen and His Discovery," Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe's three tales of ratiocination-"The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Purloined Letter," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget"-are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe's particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as Lord Byron, John Keats, and Percy Bysshe Shelley, yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. "Tamerlane" and "Al Aaraaf" exemplify Poe's evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron's "Childe Harold's Pilgrimage," recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems-" To Helen," "Lenore," and " The Raven" in particular-Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved. "To Helen" is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. "Lenore" presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In "The Raven," Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven's ominous repetition of "Nevermore" in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover. Charles Baudelaire noted in his introduction to the French edition of "The Raven": "It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible." Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In "The Bells," for example, the repetition of the word "bells" in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of " The Raven." After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe's one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the New York Tribune bearing the byline "Ludwig," attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe's fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold's vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe's name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author's life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him "the poet of unripe boys and unsound men"), was the question of the value of Poe's works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe's detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe's works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams. Complementing Poe's erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe's works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe's transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe's bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe's theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe's works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America.

Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as Yvor Winters wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled "Edgar Poe's Tradition": "While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness."

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Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks...

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Edgar Allan Poe - Poet - Born in 1809, Edgar Allan Poe had a profound impact on American and international literature as an editor, poet, and critic.