The life of Edgar Allan Poe is shrouded in as much mystery and ambiguity as the tales he wrote. His was a life fraught with tragedy, peculiarity, and above all, love lost. It was these very sentiments that created some of the most beautiful yet haunting American literature ever written. He is credited with the creation of several different genres that are more popular today than ever. Yet, his life is still one of mystery. We have learned a great deal about the life of Edgar Allan Poe since his untimely death; however, some questions may never fully be answered, such as how much inspiration was taken from his life? How much was imagination? Or was it something else altogether?
Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19th, 1809. …show more content…
They also involve some kind of loss. Several of his poems "investigate[s] the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it" (Edgar Allan Poe, par. 6). Poe’s life certainly offers a myriad of tragic situations to draw from. But there are also other stories that showed a different side of Poe. The Balloon Hoax he penned in 1844 about a balloon trip across the ocean “caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it – until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all” (Poe’s Life, par. 14) Poe had no way of knowing his story was years ahead of its time. Nevertheless, there has been some speculation that Edgar Allan Poe used what most would consider to be a more modern practice of mixing popular news stories of the time into his tales. In his "13 True Stories Behind Edgar Allan Poe's Terror Tales," Christopher Semtner claims that "the magazine editor [Poe] kept up with the latest scandals and sensational murder trials and incorporated them into his fiction" (par. 12). One case Semtner uses to illustrate this point is with Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher." In this tale, we learn of Roderick Usher interring his deceased twin sister inside a hidden room of the house. Semtner suggests that Poe loosely based this story on "the children of Luke Noble Usher, an actor who performed with and was a close friend of Poe's actress mother Eliza Poe. …show more content…
He was employed in that capacity by a few different publications, namely The Southern Literary Messenger. It was this work as an editor that his name became known and he was able to start financially supporting himself. The Poetry Foundation's biography on Edgar Allan Poe states that "Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature" (Edgar Allan Poe, par. 3). The accessibility to other writer's work coupled with his imagination could well have been the perfect storm that allowed him to not only create his own literary theories and models, but also the foresight to write his exemplary works in an effort to demonstrate his ideals. As the Poetry Foundation indicates "Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author' (Edgar Allan Poe, par.
Edgar Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19th, 1809. …show more content…
They also involve some kind of loss. Several of his poems "investigate[s] the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it" (Edgar Allan Poe, par. 6). Poe’s life certainly offers a myriad of tragic situations to draw from. But there are also other stories that showed a different side of Poe. The Balloon Hoax he penned in 1844 about a balloon trip across the ocean “caused a sensation, and the public rushed to read everything about it – until Poe revealed that he had fooled them all” (Poe’s Life, par. 14) Poe had no way of knowing his story was years ahead of its time. Nevertheless, there has been some speculation that Edgar Allan Poe used what most would consider to be a more modern practice of mixing popular news stories of the time into his tales. In his "13 True Stories Behind Edgar Allan Poe's Terror Tales," Christopher Semtner claims that "the magazine editor [Poe] kept up with the latest scandals and sensational murder trials and incorporated them into his fiction" (par. 12). One case Semtner uses to illustrate this point is with Poe's story "The Fall of the House of Usher." In this tale, we learn of Roderick Usher interring his deceased twin sister inside a hidden room of the house. Semtner suggests that Poe loosely based this story on "the children of Luke Noble Usher, an actor who performed with and was a close friend of Poe's actress mother Eliza Poe. …show more content…
He was employed in that capacity by a few different publications, namely The Southern Literary Messenger. It was this work as an editor that his name became known and he was able to start financially supporting himself. The Poetry Foundation's biography on Edgar Allan Poe states that "Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature" (Edgar Allan Poe, par. 3). The accessibility to other writer's work coupled with his imagination could well have been the perfect storm that allowed him to not only create his own literary theories and models, but also the foresight to write his exemplary works in an effort to demonstrate his ideals. As the Poetry Foundation indicates "Poe's theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author' (Edgar Allan Poe, par.