Essay on Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe
Ralph Waldo Emerson called him the jingle man, Mark Twain said that his prose
was unreadable, and Henry James felt that a taste for his work was the mark of a
second rate sensibility. According to T. S. Eliot, quot;the forms which his lively
curiosity takes are those in which a preadolescent mentality delights. quot; After
notices like those, most reputations would be sunk without a trace, and yet Edgar
Allan Poe shows no sign whatsoever of loosening his extraordinary hold on our
imaginations. In 1959, Richard Wilbur, an elegant poet and a critic of refined taste,
inaugurated the Dell Laurel Poetry Series (mass market paperback selections from
classic British and American poets) with an ... Show more content on Helpwriting.net
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Allan, as parents, and he took their surname as his own middle name. In 1815,
business reasons led Allan to move to England for what would be a five year stay.
Both in London and then in Richmond after the family s return, Poe was well
educated in private academies. In 1825, he became secretly engaged to a girl named
Elmira Royster. The engagement, opposed by both families, was subsequently broken
off.
In 1826, Poe entered the University of Virginia, newly founded by former President
Thomas Jefferson. He distinguished himself as a student, but he also took to
drinking, and he amassed gambling debts of $2,000, a significant amount of
money at the time, which John Allan, although he had recently inherited a fortune,
refused to honor. After quarreling with Allan, Poe left Richmond in March 1827
and sailed to Boston, where, in relatively short order, he enlisted in the United
States Army (under the name Edgar A. Perry, and claiming to be four years older
than his actual age of eighteen) and published a pamphlet called Tamerlane and
Other Poems, whose author was cited on the title page only as quot;a Bostonian.
quot; This little book did not sell at all, but its few surviving copies are among the
most highly prized items in the rare book market; one accidentally discovered copy,
bought for a dollar, was recently auctioned for $150,000. Poe s military career went
more successfully. After two years, he had been promoted to sergeant major, the
highest