Life & Background
Poe was born in Boston in 1809 to travelling actors; his father abandoned the family and his mother died when he was two. He was taken in, though never formally adopted, by the Richmond merchant John Allan, whose support he lost after gambling debts at the University of Virginia. He served in the army, was expelled from West Point deliberately, and turned to magazine work — editing, reviewing, and writing fiction and verse for periodicals in Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York. He married his cousin Virginia Clemm when she was thirteen; her death from tuberculosis in 1847 devastated him. He was the first significant American writer to attempt to live entirely on literary earnings, and he lived in poverty for most of his life. He was found delirious in Baltimore in 1849 and died days later at forty, the circumstances still unexplained.
The Raven
A grieving student, reading late at night to distract himself from the loss of a woman named Lenore, hears tapping at his chamber door. Finding nothing there, he opens the window, and a raven flies in and settles on the bust of Pallas above the door. Amused at first, he asks its name and it answers with one word, nevermore. He speaks to it more and more urgently, framing questions to which he knows the answer will be repeated — whether there is balm in Gilead, whether he will hold Lenore again in some distant Aidenn — until the repetition becomes torture he has constructed himself. In the last stanza the raven is still sitting, and the narrator's soul, he says, shall be lifted from its shadow nevermore.
Poe's essay The Philosophy of Composition claims that the poem was built backwards from calculated effect — the length fixed at a single sitting, the tone of melancholy chosen as the most poetic, the refrain selected for the sonority of a long o and r, and the death of a beautiful woman named as the most poetical topic in the world. Whether the account is honest or a hoax, it is a founding statement of the poem as engineered artefact rather than inspired utterance, and it underwrites his theory that a work must be short enough to be read in one sitting so that unity of effect is not broken. That theory made him the first serious theorist of the short story. His influence passed to Baudelaire, who translated him, and through the French Symbolists back into modernism.
Why Poe Matters
Poe invented the detective story with Dupin in The Murders in the Rue Morgue, giving Conan Doyle his template; wrote foundational Gothic and psychological horror; produced the first sustained theory of the short story as a form; and anticipated science fiction. He was dismissed by Emerson and by Eliot but taken with complete seriousness in France, which makes his transatlantic reputation a standard case in the history of taste. His work is also central to psychoanalytic criticism, from Marie Bonaparte to Lacan's seminar on The Purloined Letter and Derrida's reply.
Key Facts
All Major Works
- Tamerlane and Other Poems1827
- The Fall of the House of Usher1839
- The Murders in the Rue Morgue1841
- The Masque of the Red Death1842
- The Tell-Tale Heart1843
- The Raven1845
- The Philosophy of Composition1846
- Eureka1848