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edgar allan poe
1809 - October 7,1849
This page is dedicated to the memory of Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allan Poe was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, the son of traveling actors. His father abandoned the family shortly after his birth, and his mother died when he was two. Separated from his brother and sister, Poe was given to the foster care of John Allan, a Virginia tobacco farmer. He attended the University of Virginia, distinguishiing himself as a student but losing large sums of money at gambling; following a quarrel with his foster father, he left home, tried a military career (briefly attending west point), and published his first volume of poetry, "Tamerlane and Other Poems" (1827). Poe lived in Baltimore with his aunt and her eight-year-old daughter, Virginia, whose tutor he became. He continued to write poetry and short fiction, and in 1833 he won a $50. prize for "Ms. Found in a Bottle." The following year he began his association with "The Southern Literary Messenger, " to which, in addition to stories, he contributed scores of critical reviews, whose frequent acerbity and slashing wit brought a new rigor to the hitherto self-congratulatory American literary scene. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia, who was thirteen at the time. Poor and frequently at odds with editors, Poe moved with his family back and forth between New York and Philadelphia. "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque", containing such stories as "Ligeia," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "William Wilson," was published in 1839.
In the last decade of his life, despite poverty, illness, heavy drinking, and the physical decline of Virginia, Poe remained feverishly prolific. Lecturing on American literature, concocting hoaxes and cryptograms, attempting to launch magazines, churning out reviews, and experimenting with a variety of fictional genres including the detective story, which he virtually invented with "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" (1841), he nevertheless did not achieve appreciable recognition until the publication of "The Raven" in 1845. The poem's instant popularity gave him new visibility in literary circles, but his personal situation remained acute, aggravated by his penchant for literary warfare--he accused Longfellow of plagiarism--and libel suits. Following Virginia's death in 1847, he was less productive, devoting his energies to Eureka, an idiosyncratic mixture of criticism, metaphysics, and cosmological speculation. He was found semiconscious in a Baltimore tavern and died on October 7, 1849. His last poems, posthumously published, were "The Bells" and "Annabel Lee". Poe's reputation in America suffered for years from charges of immorality and drunkeness; but through the French translations of Charles Baudelaire he became a major influence on modern writing.
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Imitation
by Edgar Allan Poe
A dark unfathomed tide
Of interminable pride--
A mystery, and a dream,
Should my early life seem;
I say that dream was fraught
With a wild and waking thought
Of beings that have been,
Which my spirit hath not seen,
Had I let them pass me by,
With a dreaming eye!
Let none of earth inherit
That vision on my spirit;
Those thoughts I would control,
As a spell upon his soul:
For that bright hope at last
And that light time have past,
And my worldly rest hath gone
With a sigh as it passed on:
I care not though it perish
With a thought I then did cherish.
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Alone
by Edgar Allan Poe
From Childhood's hour I have not been
As others were--I have not seen
As others saw--I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I lov'd, I lov'd alone.
Then--in my childhood--in the dawn
Of a most stormy life--was drawn
From ev'ry depth of good and ill
The mystery which binds me still:
From the torrent, or the fountain,
From the red cliff of the mountain,
From the sun that 'round me roll'd
In its autumn tint of gold--
From the lightning in the sky
As it pass'd me flying by--
From the thunder and the storm,
And the cloud that took the form
(When the rest of Heaven was blue.)
Of a demon in my view.
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Other Great works by this author:
*The Raven
*The Murders in the Rue Morgue
*The Pit and the Pendulum
*The Masque of the Red Death
*The Fall of the House of Usher
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