Edgar Allan Poe: Biography Of This American Writer And Poet
Few people know who Edgar Allan Poe was. Titles like The black cat, The Fall of the House of Usher either The Tell-Tale Heart They are universally recognized as some of the most chilling horror stories in the history of literature, which have laid the foundations for the work of later authors such as Lovecraft, Baudelaire and Stevenson.
Indeed, There are few “Gothic” story writers of the second half of the 19th century who do not recognize the influence that Allan Poe has had on their work And Poe is the master of masters, the one who placed the horror story in a privileged place in literature and outlined for the first time what would later become the well-worn detective genre. In short, we owe much in the literary field to Richmond’s genius, although, as we will see (and as often happens), his immortal fame came after his premature and enigmatic death.
Brief biography of Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the horror story
The one who went down in literary annals as the great master of the “Gothic” genre actually wanted to be a poet. And from a very early age, Poe was inevitably attracted to the muses, which brought him into conflict, once again, with his tyrannical adoptive father, John Allan, a rich southern gentleman who wanted a more “promising” future for his pupil. ”.
Those who had the opportunity to know Poe in his youth (including his first great love, Sarah Elmira Royster), describe him as a rather quiet and taciturn boy, but with an energetic and impetuous character, which he brought to light when he felt overwhelmed. At least during his early years, Poe was not the melancholic man immersed in his ramblings that we will see later, but rather a passionate young man with a vigorous physique and a brilliant mind that made him stand out above his peers. But, let us start at the beginning.
An unstable childhood
Poe’s biological parents were David and Elizabeth Poe, actors by profession, who made their living wandering from town to town. This itinerant life was what determined the place of birth of little Edgar, which was completely accidental: the city of Boston, in the north of the United States, where the future writer was born on January 19, 1809.
The couple had already had a son, William Henry, and would have another daughter, Rosalie, born in 1810. When Edgar was months old, his father abandoned them, and his mother, poor and sick, could only survive two more years. So, In 1811, Edgar and his brothers were orphaned by both parents, at the mercy of the charity of neighbors, friends and family
Henry, the eldest, was left in the care of his grandparents, while Rosalie was adopted by the Mackenzie family. As for Edgar, he was taken in by the Allans, a southern couple originally from Richmond, Virginia, at the request of Frances, his wife, who longed with all her soul for the child he had not been able to have. It seems that John, the husband, accepted almost reluctantly, and the indifference he always felt towards this unwanted offspring is manifested in the fact that, despite raising him as a son, he never officially adopted him or remembered of him once his wife died.
However, it is fair to recognize that Edgar always showed a hostile character towards his adoptive father Perhaps his close bond with Frances and John’s continued infidelities had something to do with it. Be that as it may, during his youth, Edgar Poe, now known as Edgar Allan Poe, displayed impulsive and rebellious behaviors that upset his despotic parent.
A southern gentleman
Despite having his family roots in the northern United States, Poe had grown up in Virginia, so, ideologically, he was a southern gentleman, with all that this entailed at the time Culturally, then, the future writer was very far from the democratic and liberal ideals of the North, and some authors have even seen in his writings traces of evident racism, linked to the slave regime that was still legal in the southern states.
But, underneath all this, hid a young man in need of affection, who had lost his biological family at the age of two and who had grown up emotionally emasculated by an abusive and domineering adoptive father, with whom he never managed to get along. The climax came when Poe began to correspond with Sarah Elmira Royster, a young woman with whom he fell in love and whom he intended to marry. Upon returning from the University of Charlottesville, from which he had to flee due to gambling debts, he learned that John Allan had intercepted the correspondence and had pressured to undo the engagement. Not only that; The adoptive father flatly refused to lend him money to pay off his debts and return to university. Poe’s anger knew no bounds, and his relationship with John Allan was permanently broken.
The misadventures of young Poe
The breakup convinces Poe that he must fulfill his dream and carve out a future as a poet However, his first publication, Tamerlane and Other Poems, does not obtain the expected success, and is forced to enlist in the army to survive. Meanwhile, Frances, the beloved adoptive mother, dies. To Poe’s dismay, the message of her death arrives too late. When she returns to town, Frances has been buried for days. But another misfortune still awaits the young man. John Allan has remarried, and his new wife is not willing to allow the “whim” of his previous wife to interfere between her future children and her inheritance. The Allan house is closed to him forever. Edgar finds himself, suddenly, absolutely alone.
Only? Not really. Because in Baltimore he still has a few blood relatives left: Henry, the eldest brother, who suffers from tuberculosis and lives poorly in the house of Mrs. Clemm, their aunt, along with Virginia, his little daughter. That’s where Poe heads and there he settles, eager for a love that he no longer knows where to look for. For a few months (the few that his brother’s agony lasts) she shares a bed with him in the attic of the house, and tries to find work on a newspaper. He remains determined to be, if not a poet, at least a writer.
Sweet Virginia, wife, sister and friend
Finally, in 1836, he obtained a prize of fifty dollars in a literary contest, which he won with his story. Manuscript found in a bottle Poe’s joy is not small, since this is the first remuneration that his work has received. Furthermore, among the members of the jury is John Pedleton Kennedy, a true patron who opened the doors of some publishing houses for him and who found him work in the Southern Literary Messenger. The future finally seems to smile on our protagonist.
However, the demon of drinking has already made an appearance in Poe’s existence. His excessive drunkenness and the corresponding hangovers cause him to repeatedly miss his job, which leads to his dismissal as unexpected as it is disappointing. Dazed, Poe returns to the only home he knows: the Clemm house. Henry, his older brother, has already passed away.
To the astonishment of many of his biographers, the writer married that same year his cousin Virginia, the daughter of Miss Clemm, the girl he met during his first stay in Baltimore and who was only thirteen years old at the time (Poe has already turned twenty seven). Although marriages of this type were not at all unusual at the time, there is no doubt that it is an intriguing event to say the least, which has caused rivers of ink to flow and has led the writer’s biographers on their heads. Some believe that Virginia represented the angelic sister that Poe did not have and that, therefore, there was no carnal intercourse between them; at least, during the first years. In any case, both Miss Clemm and Virginia were the main emotional support for the unstable and brittle Edgar during those dark years.
Their marriage coincides with a period of relative professional fortune, since, in 1839, their Tales of the grotesque and the arabesque, a compilation of his horror stories, which include, among other masterpieces, the story Ligeia and The Fall of the House of Usher. Later, in 1843, Poe received no less than one hundred dollars for his story. The Gold Bugaward awarded by the Dollar Magazine.
Determined to found his own newspaper, Poe begins to work in various publications As the Evening Mirror or the Broadway Journal, and finally manages to become the sole owner of the latter, which represents an unparalleled opportunity to fulfill his publishing dream. However, with the publication he also inherits his debts, which he cannot meet. Consequently, the broadway It closed in 1846 and, with it, the only chance that fate would give Poe to achieve his dream disappeared. Meanwhile, in 1845, he appeared in the Evening Mirror his most famous poem, which will launch him to definitive fame: The Raven.
After a period of relative professional stability (not at odds with the economic precariousness, always present in Poe’s adult life) dark times come. His wife Virginia becomes seriously ill with tuberculosis and dies prematurely at the age of twenty-five. The death of her beloved child upsets Poe, who drinks and takes to laudanum as he had never done before.
Not even the reunion with his great love of youth, Sarah Elmira Royster, manages to put his life back on track. On October 7, 1849, the writer was found in a delirious state on the streets of Baltimore, dressed in clothes that do not belong to him. This information has fueled the theory that Poe was used as a forced voter in the municipal elections that were taking place those days, since it was common for the candidates to get beggars drunk and take them to all the electoral centers to vote for them again and again. again. This may have been the case; Either way, everything about Poe’s final weeks remains a mystery.
The great master of terror died in a Baltimore hospital, dejected, sick and tired, at the age of forty. As they say, the character died, but the legend was born. Because the fame of his stories only grew, until he became the great literary reference that he is today. Not in vain Charles Baudelaire, the enfant terrible of literature, he said that, when he read Poe, he read his other self. And we all have an Edgar Allan Poe within us.
