Edgar Allan Poe

I would define, in brief, the poetry of words as the rhythmical creation of Beauty. —Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was a poet, author, editor, and literary critic, though most know him best for his macabre short stories. As an author, he is considered part of the American Romantic literary movement, and he is acknowledged as the creator of the modern detective story. He was also the first well-known writer in this country to earn a living solely through his writing (though it wasn’t easy). He was born in Boston, and while quite young his mother died and his father left, so he was adopted by the Allan family from Virginia. He published his first book at the age of 18 called Tamerlane and Other Poems. After a semester of college and a stint in the army he spent years working for literary journals in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1835 he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm.
In 1844 the couple moved to New York City. On January 29th, 1845, his poem “The Raven” was published in The Evening Mirror, making him a household name for which he earned a one-time fee of $8. The following year Edgar and Virginia moved to the Bronx countryside for Virginia’s health (a few years earlier she had been diagnosed with consumption, now known as tuberculosis). They lived in a small cottage with her mother (also Poe’s aunt), Maria Clemm. While in the Bronx he wrote 20 poems and tales including the story, “The Cask of Amontillado” and the poems, “Ulalume: A Ballad,” “An Enigma,” “To My Mother,” and “Eureka: A Prose Poem,” as well as the poems included in tonight’s program. He also wrote the short story, “Landor’s Cottage,” whose titular structure is thought to be an “idealized version” of the Fordham cottage in which he lived. Virginia died there in the winter of 1847. In 1849 he left the cottage to go on a lecture tour and within two months, while in Baltimore, he was found ill and brought to a hospital where he passed way on October 7th, 1849, at the age of 40. The cause of death has never been discovered.
In his brief life and career, Poe left a vast legacy. With his 1841 story, “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” he created the first modern detective story. Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, who wrote the Sherlock Holmes stories, considered Poe the “father of the detective genre.” Poe also wrote science fiction—his story “Hans Phaall: A Tale” is about a trip to the moon and utilized scientific details. And Poe’s novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym inspired Jules Verne to write his fantastic stories. Poe was also considered the first great literary critic (it was as a critic he was known during his lifetime) reviewing poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow and author James Fenimore Cooper.
As he is most well-known for tales of terror and psychological horror stores– his influence on Stephen King, H.P. Lovecraft, and Alfred Hitchcock is well documented–it is not surprising that his poem, “The Raven” has become his most iconic. This corvid (the bird family that includes magpies, jays, crows, rooks, and jackdaws) has a spooky reputation. Though they are highly intelligent and playful, at times they are also carrion eaters. They appear in folklore and mythology around the world, acting as trickster figures, though in Europe, the raven’s deep black feathers, croaking sound, and carrion diet have associated the bird with bad omens and the dead. In Sweden, they are known as ghosts of murdered individuals and for the ancient Celts, ravens were associated with warfare and the battlefield. These associations make the raven of the poem, the intruder to the room, a reminder of a fate from which we can’t escape.