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Introductory Note
Introductory Note
Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was born in Boston, the child of actors who
died while he was very young. He was adopted by a Virginian gentleman, Mr.
John Allan, who put him to school in England for five years, then in Richmond,
and finally sent him to the University of Virginia. He remained there only a
short time, and after finding that he disliked business, and publishing a
volume of poems, he enlisted in the army. Mr. Allan had him discharged and
placed him in West Point, from which he got himself dismissed. After that he
supported himself in a hand-to-mouth fashion by writing for and editing
newspapers and periodicals, living successively in Baltimore, Richmond,
Philadelphia, and New York. The publication of his remarkable poem, "The
Raven," in 1845, brought him fame, and for a short time he was a literary
lion. But in 1847 his wife died, and his two remaining years were a gradual
descent.
Poe`s work falls into three divisions: poems, tales, and criticism. The
poems are chiefly remarkable for the amazing technical skill with which
haunting rhythms and studied successions of vowel and consonant sounds are
made to suggest atmospheres and emotional moods, with a minimum of thought. In
the writing of fiction, Poe is the great master of the weird tale, no writer
having surpassed him in the power of shaking the reader`s nerves with
suggestions of the supernatural and the horrible. In these stories, as in the
poems, he shows an extraordinary sense of form, and his effects are produced
not merely by the violently sensational, but by carefully calculated attacks
upon the reader`s imaginative sensibilities.
In criticism Poe was, if not a scholarly, at least a stimulating and
suggestive, writer, with a fine ear and, within his range, keen insight. His
essay on "The Poetic Principle" is his poetic confession of faith. He makes
clear and defends his conception of poetry; a conception which excludes many
great kinds of verse, but which, illuminated as it is by abundant examples of
his favorite poems, throws light in turn upon some of the fundamental elements
of poetry.
It is worth noting that no American author seems to have enjoyed so great
a European vogue as Poe.
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