Although Poe had published his first volumne of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in 1827, it gained little critical or popular notice. His literary career truely started some years later when he began to write short stories for magazines where his outstanding skills as an editor and critic gained him some prominence and respect. But personal problems and poverty contintued to plague him and his alcoholism cost hm several editorial posts. In 1836, Poe married his fourteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm., but her ill health was a constant sourse of anxiety. Her death in 1847, of tuberculosis, led to Poe's complete mental and physical breakdown. When he recovered he joined a temperance society and became engaged to his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royston Shelton. Then, on October 3,1849 he was found beaten and unconscious in an alley and was taken to a Baltimore charity hosptital where he died four days later without ever regaining consciousness. The exact cireumstances of his death will forever remain a mystery. ( I have heard myself that they have dug him up and found out that he really died of rabies. but thats just what i heard....)
Part of the popular fasincation with Poe is his image as a tortured genius. The movelist D.H. Lawrence said that Poe was "doomed to seethe down his soul in a great coninuous convulsion of disintegration, and doomed to register the process." But this veiw undermines the full extent of Poe's brillance and his enormous influeence. The poet W.H.Auden said, "No one in his time, pus so much engergy and insight into making his contemporary poets take their craft seriously."
Poe is considered the father of the detective story and the modern gothic horror take, as well as a great lyric poet. He was the first modern writer to explore the darker recesses of the human psyche in poems and stories, which seem to take place n the surreal landscapes and situations of nightmares. Although considered one of the greaet writers of short fiction, Poe had an affinity for verse. "With me, poetry has been not a purpose but a passion,"he wrote. His poetry is rich with musical phrases and senous evocative imagery. Poems like "The Raven", "The Bells," abd "Annalbel Lee," remain among the most popluar and technically accomplished in the English language.
Christopher Moore
New York
1992
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