Photo courtesy of Library of Congress.

Edgar Allen Poe
Romantic Period Poet, 1809-1849

"Born in Baltimore in 1809, he lost his parents while he was a mere boy, and ever afterward displayed an unrivaled power in making friends, and a fatal inability to keep them. The real character of Poe has come to be almost as much of a problem as the identity of the Man in the Iron Mask, but the surface facts and singularity unfortunate. A gambler, a drunkard, sensitive and melancholy, he wasted his genius and threw away his life.

His first work, published in 1829 under the title Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, shows some features that marked all his later efforts. There is an intricate machinery of words without much thought to justify it, a surfeit of sweet sounds, which the reader meets again in The Raven (1845), The Bells, and Annabel Lee. His prose stories are all full of mysticism. Whether tales of metempsychosis, of weird crime, of strange retribution, or of fantastic discover and marvelous invention, they are well-sustained extravaganzas, with an undercurrent of cool skepticism that sometimes appears as a kind of grim humor. Poe's wonderful knowledge of the mechanism of composition ought to have placed him among the first of critics, but he used it only to astonish or to support some whimsical judgment.

The Philosophy of Composition is an interesting compendium of the artificial subtleties in which this strange man delighted. He died in 1809.

Source:  English & American Literature, Shaw & Backus, p.428

Sample Works
A Dream Within A Dream
Annabel Lee
The Raven
The Sleeper

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