Edgar Allan Poe
The Revolution of Poe
Edgar Allan Poe has an acute and distinctive ability to capture the darkest and most heinous fascination of his readers, even years following his mysterious death. “He is the most often read of all of his contemporaries, but this is no accident, for this neurotic and unhappy artist is strangely modern, oddly keeping in with our own neurotic and unhappy age” (Van Stern xvi). What Poe introduced to America was the depth of darkest places of the human psyche, which was a relatively new domain. He fostered his success upon doing what few American writers had even attempted to accomplish; he liberated the subconscious mind and its terrible and strange images and debuted them onto published pages (xxxviii). The father of American Gothic Poetry and the detective novel, Edgar Allan Poe earned a place in history by challenging, even mocking the styles of his earlier contemporaries.
Faced with innumerable obstacles and grievances from an early age, and throughout his short lifetime, to say that the life of Edgar Allan Poe was unpleasant would be a gross understatement of his circumstances. Poe was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. “Poe was an American, a product of American Experience—Truculent, hot, angry” (Carlson 6). He was the child of young actors David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins. Edgar’s alcoholic father disappeared while he was merely an infant. Shortly following his father’s cruel abandonment, his mother fell ill and died in Richmond toward the end of 1811. “Poe’s life must have been a nightmare, more horrible than even his stories or letters indicate” (Van Stern xxxvi).
“He was condemned in early childhood to probable unhappiness; the circumstances of his life made that probability a certainty, for he was both unlucky and self-destructive” (xxxvii). He was adopted promptly by John Allan, and was given his name. Sources indicate that this foster relationship was only another dysfunction amidst Poe’s several others.
Edgar Allan Poe has an acute and distinctive ability to capture the darkest and most heinous fascination of his readers, even years following his mysterious death. “He is the most often read of all of his contemporaries, but this is no accident, for this neurotic and unhappy artist is strangely modern, oddly keeping in with our own neurotic and unhappy age” (Van Stern xvi). What Poe introduced to America was the depth of darkest places of the human psyche, which was a relatively new domain. He fostered his success upon doing what few American writers had even attempted to accomplish; he liberated the subconscious mind and its terrible and strange images and debuted them onto published pages (xxxviii). The father of American Gothic Poetry and the detective novel, Edgar Allan Poe earned a place in history by challenging, even mocking the styles of his earlier contemporaries.
Faced with innumerable obstacles and grievances from an early age, and throughout his short lifetime, to say that the life of Edgar Allan Poe was unpleasant would be a gross understatement of his circumstances. Poe was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. “Poe was an American, a product of American Experience—Truculent, hot, angry” (Carlson 6). He was the child of young actors David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins. Edgar’s alcoholic father disappeared while he was merely an infant. Shortly following his father’s cruel abandonment, his mother fell ill and died in Richmond toward the end of 1811. “Poe’s life must have been a nightmare, more horrible than even his stories or letters indicate” (Van Stern xxxvi).
“He was condemned in early childhood to probable unhappiness; the circumstances of his life made that probability a certainty, for he was both unlucky and self-destructive” (xxxvii). He was adopted promptly by John Allan, and was given his name. Sources indicate that this foster relationship was only another dysfunction amidst Poe’s several others.