Research Guides: Edgar Allan Poe: Home

Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 - October 7, 1849)

For most of his early life, Poe lived in Richmond, Virginia, with the exception of a five-year period between 1815 and 1820 when the Allan family lived in England. Back in the United States, Poe attended an academy until 1826, when he entered the University of Virginia. He withdrew less than a year later because of various debts, many of them from gambling, which his foster father refused to help him pay. After quarreling with Allan about these debts, Poe left for Boston in the spring of 1827, where he enlisted in the Army under the name Edgar A. Perry. In the summer of 1827, Poe’s first book, Tamerlane, and Other Poems, signed anonymously as “A Bostonian,” appeared, but neither the reading public nor the critics paid much attention to it. In January, 1829, Poe was promoted to the rank of sergeant major and was honorably discharged at his own request three months later. Continue . . .

Source: May, Charles E. “Edgar Allan Poe.” Critical Survey of American Literature, Dec. 2016, pp. 2411–2421. From Literary Reference Center Plus database.

Book Collection

Edgar Allan Poe and the Juke-Box: uncollected poems, drafts, and fragments

Resources

The Poe Museum The Poe Museum began over a century ago when Edgar Allan Poe collector and researcher James Howard Whitty and a group of literary enthusiasts met in Poe’s hometown of Richmond, Virginia to create the state’s first monument to a writer. The Museum has enjoyed a history as unique as the author it honors.
The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore 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.
Poe Stories 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.
Sergeant Major Edgar Allan Poe Using psychoanalytic theory, it is the primary purpose of this article to frame Edgar Allan Poe's history as an enlisted man in the United States Army. For Poe, these were years of accomplishments as both artist and soldier. When researching this article, two forms of comment are readily detected. Military historians immediately understand the significance in Poe's meteoric rise to sergeant major. But these writers tend not to appreciate the literary history. Literary historians often note that Poe was an enlisted soldier, but, beyond that, seem not to appreciate that information. In none of this is there any sense that Poe sought, and for two years found, a degree of emotional stability. The social structure of the army contained and maintained Poe's psychic structure. This intertwining of the military and the literary, coupled with an understanding of psycho-social development, is the frame needed to understand Sergeant Major Poe.
Our Edgar This article features U.S. poet Edgar Allan Poe. He was considered a strange genius of a hack writer who lived in a narcissistic condition that made him oblivious to the booming U.S. nation. His life was characterized by unremitting disaster as evidenced by his being orphaned at the age of two and was they dysfunctional foster child of an unforgiving surrogate father. The difficulties in life he suffered made him understand and respect the driving power of his misery. Such difficulties contributed to his conception of what he called Imp of the Perverse.
Edgar Allan Poe: The Romantic as Classicist Edgar Allan Poe's affinity with classical values has not been properly noted by critics and other readers who have interpreted the romantic and Gothic elements in his fiction and poetry as proof of Poe's predilection for the subjective, macabre, and fantastic, as well as the transcendental. A careful examination of Poe's use of seemingly romantic materials, however, reveals that he measured the romantic stance detrimentally against the objectivity and rationality of the classical. Poe drew allusion and structure from his reading of classical literature to inform his own works with a classical worldview he sought in both life and art.
Poe or not Poe? A stylometric analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's disputed writings Edgar Allan Poe has left us with a literary legacy that in part lacks a definitive stamp of authenticity. While some of the 'possible Poes' that have been discovered after his death have generated heated discussion among scholars, many others have quickly slipped into obscurity. This paper reevaluates thirty-two of such prose texts as well as ten poems that have been tenuously attributed to Poe in the past, using the 'classify' function (employing Nearest Shrunken Centroid, Burrows' Delta and Support Vector Machines) of the stylo-toolkit for R. It also sheds new light (with the help of rolling Delta) on Poe's possible contribution to the so-called Paulding-Drayton review, infamous in Poe criticism for its defense of slavery. By contrasting and comparing the 'author signal' behind these pieces with unclear authorship, this analysis is able to answer with a high degree of accuracy the question: Poe or not Poe?
Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849 Read poems by this poet

From Films On Demand database:

Edgar Allan Poe: A Concise Biography In this introduction to Edgar Allan Poe's life and work from the Famous Authors series, viewers follow Poe's early life and fortunate adoption by the Allans. Poe's relationship with Frances Allan was tender, but he and John Allan did not get along. His stepfather sent him away to university and then cut him off completely. In response, Poe went to Boston and joined the army, but persisted writing. Eventually being dismissed from West Point, he went to live with Poe relatives in Baltimore and continue his writing and publishing. There he fell in love with his young cousin Virginia and brought her to Richmond, Virginia and later to New York and Philadelphia, to live with him throughout his literary ups and downs. (36 minutes)
The Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe, America’s master of the macabre, is famed for such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven.” But the story of his life was more bizarre than any of the tales he told. This episode of Biography sheds light on a man greatly blessed and supremely cursed: blessed with immortal genius and cursed by a life of lost loves and shattered hopes. Distributed by A&E Television Networks.
Edgar Allan Poe: A Journey in Verse DESCRIPTION Edgar Allan Poe was truest to his heart a poet. He has blessed American literature with some of the most striking and moving imagery ever created. His phrasing and lyricism have forever changed the landscape of poetic verse. This film includes “The Conqueror Worm,” “To My Mother,” “Israfel,” “Annabel Lee,” “The City in the Sea,” “Eldorado,” “To Helen,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Evening Star,” and “The Raven.” (34 minutes)
The Raven In this rare silent 1915 biographical film produced by the Essanay Film Manufacturing Company, Henry B. Walthall stars as Edgar Allan Poe. An ardent reader of Poe's works since childhood, Walthall here portrays the tortured writer with unfathomable depth and conviction. The Raven chronicles the immigration of Poe's ancestors, the embittered life Poe led, and his early and untimely death. Written and directed by Charles J. Brabin, the film is based on the play The Raven: The Love Story of Edgar Allan Poe by George C. Hazelton and The Play by Edgar Allen Poe. Henry B. Walthall, Ernest Maupain, and Eleanor Thompson star. (46 minutes)
Edgar Allan Poe Poe rose from the depths of despair at age 22, disinherited and destitute, to become one of the greatest figures in American literature. At that age he had three dozen poems published and went on to do about forty more. The Pit and the Pendulum and The Tell-Tale Heart are two of his most enduring works.