Edgar Allan Poe Biography Quotes 38 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, to traveling actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth (Eliza) Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father abandoned the family when Edgar was very young, and his mother died of illness in Richmond in 1811. Orphaned, he was taken in by the Richmond merchant John Allan and Allan's wife, Frances Keeling Valentine Allan. Though never formally adopted, Poe used Allan as his middle name. The household moved to Britain from 1815 to 1820, where Poe attended schools in Scotland and England before returning to Virginia. His relationship with John Allan oscillated between patronage and conflict, driven by money disputes and clashing temperaments; Frances Allan, by contrast, offered steadier affection until her death in 1829.

Education and Early Independence
In 1826, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia to study ancient and modern languages. He excelled academically but accumulated gambling debts and left after one term without a degree. Increasingly estranged from John Allan, he enlisted in the U.S. Army in 1827 under the name Edgar A. Perry and served at Fort Moultrie and Fort Monroe, rising to the rank of sergeant major of artillery. That same year his first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, appeared in Boston, anonymously. With Allan's intermittent support, Poe gained an appointment to the United States Military Academy at West Point in 1830. He engineered his court-martial in early 1831 by neglecting duties, seeking dismissal to pursue a literary life. A third volume, Poems (1831), introduced enduring lyrics such as "To Helen" and "Israfel".

Baltimore Years and First Successes
After West Point, Poe relocated to Baltimore, living with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia Clemm. There he turned vigorously to prose fiction. In 1833 he won a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for "MS. Found in a Bottle", earning the attention of the writer and statesman John Pendleton Kennedy, who became an early patron. Kennedy introduced Poe to Thomas Willis White of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where Poe served as editor and critic in 1835, 1837. He sharpened his reputation as a formidable reviewer and helped increase the magazine's circulation, but his tenure was marred by bouts of intemperance and friction with White.

Marriage and Editorial Career
In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm in Richmond. The couple, along with Maria Clemm, formed a close household that would sustain him emotionally amid professional instability. Poe moved to Philadelphia in 1838, a city then central to American publishing. He edited Burton's Gentleman's Magazine for William E. Burton and later Graham's Magazine under George Rex Graham, producing a stream of tales and criticism. Supporters such as James Russell Lowell praised him as a critic of rare precision, even as his exacting reviews earned him a "tomahawk" reputation.

Innovations in Fiction and Poetry
Poe's Philadelphia period established him as a leading storyteller. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838) was his only novel. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1839) gathered many of his early stories, including "The Fall of the House of Usher", whose meticulous unity of effect became a signature. In 1841 he published "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", introducing C. Auguste Dupin and shaping the template of detective fiction; "The Mystery of Marie Roget" and "The Purloined Letter" followed. He achieved popular success with "The Gold-Bug" (1843), and wrote enduring psychological studies such as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Black Cat".

Poe's criticism articulated a poetics centered on brevity, musicality, and the single effect, elaborated in essays like "The Philosophy of Composition" (1846). In poetry, he refined an incantatory sound and haunting imagery in works such as "Lenore", "Ulalume", and, most famously, "The Raven" (1845). First printed under a pseudonym in a periodical and then widely reprinted with his name by editors such as Nathaniel Parker Willis at the Evening Mirror, "The Raven" made Poe a household name.

New York, Public Reputation, and Literary Contemporaries
Poe moved to New York in 1844, writing for newspapers and magazines and briefly owning and editing the Broadway Journal in 1845. He aspired to found his own journal, to be called The Stylus, but never secured lasting backing. In literary New York he interacted with figures including Willis, Frances Sargent Osgood, and, through both collegiality and controversy, Elizabeth F. Ellet. An earlier meeting with Charles Dickens during the novelist's 1842 American tour had been a notable encounter; Poe's review of Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, with its comment on the raven "Grip", is often cited in discussions of influences on "The Raven".

Personal Struggles and Relationships
Poe's domestic life centered on Maria Clemm and Virginia, whose long illness with tuberculosis shadowed his later years. Virginia's death in January 1847 at their cottage in Fordham (now in the Bronx) devastated him. He formed attachments afterward, including with the poet Sarah Helen Whitman in Providence, whose brief engagement to Poe ended in 1848, and a rekindled courtship in 1849 with his Richmond childhood acquaintance Sarah Elmira Royster. Throughout, his health and finances were precarious, complicated by periods of drinking and by uneven magazine economies.

Final Years, Death, and Contested Memory
In 1848, Poe delivered a public lecture on cosmology that he expanded into Eureka: A Prose Poem, an ambitious, speculative work reflecting his fascination with science and metaphysics. In 1849 he lectured in the South and revisited Richmond, where friends noted a period of sobriety and plans for marriage to Elmira Royster. Traveling north in early October, he was found disoriented in Baltimore and taken to Washington College Hospital. He died there on October 7, 1849, at forty. The precise cause remains uncertain, with theories ranging from complications of alcohol to illness or election-related "cooping", but no definitive evidence resolves the matter.

After his death, Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a rival whom Poe had publicly criticized, wrote an obituary signed "Ludwig" and later edited a collection of Poe's works with a memoir that portrayed him harshly, spreading distortions that shaped early public perception. Over time, friends and admirers, including N. P. Willis and others, contested Griswold's account, and scholarship restored a more balanced view of Poe's life and achievements.

Legacy and Influence
Poe's synthesis of poetic musicality, rigorous aesthetics, and narrative innovation reshaped multiple genres. His Dupin tales influenced Arthur Conan Doyle and the later detective tradition; his explorations of horror and psychological fracture informed writers from Charles Baudelaire and Stephane Mallarme, early French champions who translated him, to H. P. Lovecraft. His essays on craft helped establish the short story as a distinct, principled form in American letters. Amid hardship and controversy, the support and conflicts with figures such as John Allan, Maria Clemm, Virginia Clemm, N. P. Willis, Thomas W. White, John P. Kennedy, George Rex Graham, William E. Burton, Sarah Helen Whitman, Frances Sargent Osgood, and Rufus Griswold were intertwined with his career. Today, Poe stands as a central American poet, critic, and storyteller whose art continues to reverberate across literature and popular culture.

Our collection contains 38 quotes who is written by Edgar, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Wisdom - Truth - Puns & Wordplay - Writing.

Other people realated to Edgar: Elizabeth Barrett Browning (Poet), Ray Bradbury (Writer), John Cusack (Actor), Lou Reed (Musician), James Whitcomb Riley (Poet), Caroline B. Cooney (Writer)