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• Born: 19 January 1809
• Birthplace: Boston, Massachusetts
• Died: 7 October 1849
• Best Known As: Author of "The Raven"

Edgar Allan Poe's classic poem "The Raven" cemented his reputation as a black-feathered literary master of the macabre. In the late 1820s and early 1830s Poe mixed poetry with work as a soldier in the U.S. Army. He was dismissed from West Point and moved to Baltimore, Maryland, where he began writing prose. Throughout the 1830s and 1840s Poe worked on various magazines in Richmond, Philadelphia and New York, and also published creepy short stories and poems, including "The Purloined Letter," "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado." His story The Murders in the Rue Morgue is widely considered to be the first modern detective story, with Poe the forerunner of later masters of the craft like Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and Agatha Christie. Never in robust health, and a heavy drinker into the bargain, Poe died under mysterious circumstances at age 40 after visiting Virginia to lecture. He was found languishing on the street in Baltimore and taken unconscious to a local hospital, where he died.

Poe's detective in The Murders in the Rue Morgue was named C. Auguste Dupin... Baltimore's National Football League team, the Ravens, is named in whimsical tribute to Poe's famous poem... Since the 100th anniversary of Poe's death in 1949, an anonymous visitor has come to Poe's grave each year on the writer's birthday, leaving three roses and a bottle of cognac. By tradition no one attempts to follow the "Poe Toaster" and his identity remains unknown. However, it is presumed others have taken over for the original visitor... Poe wrote an 1836 essay unmasking the chess-playing automaton The Turk as a human-powered fraud.

Poe, Edgar Allan (1809–49), critic. The famed American poet and short‐story writer was the son of actors, although he was not raised by them. In 1835 he published sections of an unfinished blank‐verse drama, Politian, and later he occasionally wrote theatrical criticism for various publications, including the Broadway Journal, of which he became owner. As with much of his critical writings, he argued against what he deemed superficial and foreign. However, Poe was a perceptive enough playgoer to quickly, and largely correctly, evaluate the merits of an American effort such as Fashion.

Unquestionably one of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience - the "inner world" of dream, hallucination, and imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and was a magazine editor.

Edgar Allan Poe was best known to his own generation as an editor and critic; his poems and short stories commanded only a small audience. But to some extent in his poems, and to an impressive degree in his tales, he pioneered in opening up areas of human experience for artistic treatment at which his contemporaries only hinted. His vision asserts that reality for the human being is essentially subterranean, contradictory to surface reality, and profoundly irrational in character. Two generations later he was hailed by the symbolist movement as the prophet of the modern sensibility.

Poe was born in Boston on Jan. 19, 1809, the son of professional actors. By the time he was 3, Edgar, his older brother, and younger sister had lost their mother to consumption and their father through desertion. The children were split up, going to various families to live. Edgar went to the charitable Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name.

A New Family

The Allans were wealthy then and were to become more so later, and though they never adopted Poe, for many years it appeared that he was to be their heir. They treated him like an adopted son, saw to his education in private academies, and took him to England for a 5-year stay; and at least Mrs. Allan bestowed considerable affection upon him.

As Edgar entered adolescence, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of his ward's literary inclinations, thought him surly and ungrateful, and gradually seems to have decided that Poe was not to be his heir after all. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia, Allan's allowance was so meager that Poe turned to gambling to supplement his income. In 8 months he lost $2, 000. Allan's refusal to help him led to total estrangement, and in March 1827 Poe stormed out on his own.

Poe managed to get to Boston, where he signed up for a 5-year enlistment in the U.S. Army. In 1827, as well, he had his Tamerlane and Other Poems published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the highest noncommissioned rank in the Army, sergeant major. He was reluctant to serve out the full enlistment, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the Army on the understanding that he would seek an appointment at West Point. He thought that such a move might cause a reconciliation with his guardian. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore and received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal. Armed with these new credentials, Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but another violent quarrel forced him to leave in May 1830.

The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long as a cadet. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." His guardian, long widowed, had taken a young wife who might well give him an heir, and Poe realized that his hopes of a legacy were without foundation.

Marriage and the Search for a Place

During his early years of exile Poe had lived in Baltimore for a while with his aunt Maria Clemm and her 7-year-old daughter, Virginia. He returned to his aunt's home in 1831, publishing Poems by Edgar Allan Poe and beginning to place short stories in magazines. In 1833 he received a prize for "MS. Found in a Bottle, " and John Pendleton Kennedy got him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger. In 1836 Poe married his cousin Virginia - now 13 years old - and moved to Richmond with his bride and mother-in-law. Excessive drinking lost him his job in 1837, but he had produced prolifically for the journal. He had contributed his Politian, as well as 83 reviews, 6 poems, 4 essays, and 3 short stories. He had also quintupled the magazine's circulation. Rejection in the face of such accomplishment was extremely distressing to him, and his state of mind from then on, as one biographer put it, "was never very far from panic."

The panic accelerated after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York, where he did hack work and managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). Then they moved to Philadelphia, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In 2 years he boosted its circulation from 5, 000 to 20, 000 and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840, furthermore, he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left for the literary editorship of Graham's Magazine.

It was becoming clear that 2 years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and his stay at Graham's confirmed this principle. Though he contributed skillfully wrought fiction and unquestionably developed as a critic, his endless literary feuding, his alcoholism, and his inability to get along very well with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and Crisis

The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a $100 prize for his "The Gold Bug, " but Poe was now facing a kind of psychological adversity against which he was virtually helpless. His wife, who had been an absolutely crucial source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption that would eventually kill her. When his burden became too great, he tried to relieve it with alcohol, which made him ill.

After great struggle Poe got a job on the New York Mirror in 1844. He lasted, characteristically, into 1845, switching then to the editorship of the Broadway Journal. Although he was now deep in public literary feuds, things seemed to be breaking in his favor. The 1844 publication of the poem "The Raven" finally brought him some fame, and in 1845 the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales, both containing some of his best work, did in fact move him into fashionable literary society. But his wife's health continued to deteriorate, and he was not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to sustain steady employment, and amid the din of plagiarism charges and libel suits, his fortunes sank to the point that he and his family almost starved in their Fordham cottage in the winter of 1846. Then, on Jan. 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died.

The wonder is not that Poe began totally to disintegrate but that he nevertheless continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the brilliantly ambitious Eureka, and he was even to make a final, heart-wrenching attempt at rehabilitation. He returned to Richmond in 1849, there to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore. Nobody knows exactly what happened, and there is no real proof that he was picked up by a gang who used him to "repeat" votes, but he was found on October 3 in a stupor near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital 4 days later.

World of His Work

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. Behind a screen of sometimes substantial, sometimes flimsy "reality, " his fictional work resembles the dreams of a distressed individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

Poe's critics interpret this pattern to represent the search of the individual for himself by going deep into himself and his ultimate arrival at the unplumbed mystery of his inner self. This search has come, of course, to characterize much of 20th-century art, and it is the distinguished accomplishment of Poe as an artist that his work looks forward with such startling precision to the work of the century that followed.

Further Reading

Arthur H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography (1941), is extremely reliable. Two very readable treatments are Hervey Allen, Israfel: The Life and Times of Edgar Allan Poe (1934), and William R. Bittner, Poe: A Biography (1962). A thorough study is Edward C. Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend (1963). Two critical studies which supplement each other are Patrick F. Quinn, The French Face of Edgar Allan Poe (1957), which concentrates on the fiction, and Edward H. Davidson, Poe: A Critical Study (1957), which emphasizes the poetry. See also Killis Campbell, The Mind of Poe (1933); Haldeen Braddy, Glorious Incense: The Fulfillment of Edgar Allan Poe (1953); and Harry Levin, The Power of Blackness (1958). Perry Miller, The Raven and the Whale: The War of Words and Wits in the Era of Poe and Melville (1956), and Sidney P. Moss, Poe's Literary Battles: The Critic in the Context of His Literary Milieu (1963), discuss Poe in the context of his times. For a full list of Poe's works see Robert E. Spiller and others, eds., Literary History of the United States, vol. 3 (1948; 3d rev. ed. 1963).

For more information on Edgar Allan Poe, visit Britannica.com.

Poe, Edgar Allen (1809-49). Described by Mallarmé as ‘ce cas littéraire absolu’, Poe occupies a more significant place in the history of French literature than in that of his native America. This French version of Poe, made available by Baudelaire's translations of and introductions to his work (1848-65), itself contained two distinct strands. On the one hand there was the poet of the macabre, whose Extraordinary Tales renewed French Gothic fiction through their exploration of psychological terror and portrayed a network of feelings on the edge of normal psychic life (loss of the mother, obsession with the body, permeable borders between living and dead) on which the Decadents and Surrealists would draw. On the other, there was the mathematician of poetic effects, whose Philosophy of Composition, with its theory of poetry as an autonomous and deliberate object of language and its attack on lyrical effusion, didacticism, and sentimentality, reinforced the French tradition of ‘l' art pour l'art’ and profoundly influenced Mallarmé and Valéry. The diversity of critical approaches which Poe's work has always stimulated in France has been very evident in modern literary theory in such work as Bachelard's 1944 preface to Baudelaire's translation of The Adventures of Gordon Pym and the seminal debate initiated by Lacan's Structuralist analysis of The Purloined Letter (1966) and Derrida's Post-Structuralist response (1972).

[James Kearns]

(1809-1849), short-story writer, poet, and critic. The son of itinerant actors, Poe was orphaned at two and was adopted by John Allan, a Richmond, Virginia, merchant and his wife. They gave Poe his middle name and a genteel childhood but eventually became the source of profound unhappiness. Allan was unfaithful to his wife, and when Poe took her part, Allan turned on him savagely. Although Allan violently opposed Poe's literary career, he unwittingly encouraged it. His firm imported many foreign books and magazines, which Poe read assiduously, giving him a literary sophistication far beyond his Richmond peers. Allan sent Poe to the University of Virginia with no spending money; when the boy ran up heavy gambling debts, his foster father refused to pay. After a bitter quarrel, Poe left home to seek literary fame.

Poe moved to Boston in 1827 where he published a book of poems but almost starved. He enlisted in the army and soon became sergeant major of his regiment. A reconciliation with Allan, motivated largely by Poe's hope of an inheritance, led to an appointment to West Point. There he began brilliantly, but another falling out with Allan plunged him into depression. He stopped attending classes and drills and was dismissed in 1831. His cadet friends helped finance a book of poems containing some of his best lyrics, "Israfel" and "The Doomed City," but the book was hardly noticed.

Poe spent the next years living in Baltimore with his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her daughter, Virginia. One of his best stories, "A MS. Found in a Bottle," won him a job on the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He proved an able editor, greatly increasing circulation. But he had begun drinking heavily, and he soon parted company with the magazine.

In 1836 he married Virginia Clemm, who was only thirteen, and departed with her and Mrs. Clemm for the North. For the next several years he alternated between editing and writing, publishing both poetry and prose, in particular The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, a tale of shipwreck and picturesque horrors in the South Seas. As literary editor of Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, which had a large circulation, Poe became a major figure in American letters, making enemies by the score with his trenchant criticism. But alcohol cost him this job, too.

He continued to write, however, producing "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," "The Gold Bug," and "The Mystery of Marie Roget" in a cool style that was the polar opposite of his romantic poems and horror stories. If he did not invent the detective story with these tales, he perfected it.

In 1842, inspired in part by a talk with Charles Dickens, Poe wrote "The Raven," his best-known poem. It was an immense success and almost instantly won Poe the fame for which he hungered. But money did not come with it: he still earned as little as four dollars for an article, fifteen dollars for a story. Tormented by poverty, Poe watched his wife die of tuberculosis. He became more and more unstable, drinking and taking opium, at one point attempting suicide with the drug. He published a grandiose prose poem, "Eureka," which combined half-baked science and dubious cosmogony. Returning to Richmond, he swore off liquor and became engaged to one of his youthful loves, now a rich widow. But a trip to Baltimore led to a fatal drinking bout.

As an editor Poe struggled to raise American literature to the level of his own formidable intelligence and talent. His instability doomed this ambition to failure, but his own artistry somehow survived his impulse for self-destruction. Poe added the concept of professionalism to the role of the writer in America. For him language and its artful use was virtually an end in itself, transcending ideology.

Bibliography:

Julian Symons, The Tell-Tale Heart: The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1978); Edward Wagenknecht, Edgar Allan Poe: The Man behind the Legend (1963).

Author:

Thomas Fleming

See also Literature.

1809–49, American poet, short-story writer, and critic, b. Boston. He is acknowledged today as one of the most brilliant and original writers in American literature. His skillfully wrought tales and poems convey with passionate intensity the mysterious, dreamlike, and often macabre forces that pervaded his sensibility. He is also considered the father of the modern detective story.

Early Life and Works

After the death of his parents, both of whom were actors, by the time he was three years old, Poe was taken into the home of his godfather, John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant. The Allans took him to Europe, where he began his education in schools in England and Scotland. Returning to the United States in 1820, he continued his schooling in Richmond and in 1826 entered the Univ. of Virginia. He showed remarkable scholastic ability in classical and romance languages but was forced to leave the university after only eight months because of quarrels with Allan over his gambling debts. Poverty soon forced him to enlist in the army.

Because of the deathbed plea of his foster mother, he achieved an unenthusiastic reconciliation with Allan, which resulted in an honorable discharge from the army and an appointment to West Point in 1830. However, when Allan remarried the following year Poe lost all hope of further assistance from him and was expelled from the Academy for infraction of numerous minor rules. His first book, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in 1827. It was followed by two more volumes of verse in 1829 and 1831. None of these early collections attracted critical or popular recognition. Poe went to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her daughter Virginia. In 1835, J. P. Kennedy helped him become an editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He contributed stories, poems, and astute literary criticism, but his drinking lost him the editorship.

Later Life and Mature Works

In 1836 Poe married Virginia Clemm, then only 13, and in 1837 they went to New York City, where he published The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838). From 1838 to 1844, Poe lived in Philadelphia, where he edited Burton's Gentleman's Magazine (1839–40) and Graham's Magazine (1841–42). His criticism, which appeared in these magazines and in the Messenger, was direct and incisive and made him a respected and feared critic. Some of his magazine stories were collected as Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). At that time he also began writing mystery stories. In 1844, Poe moved back to New York, where he worked on the Evening Mirror and later edited and owned the Broadway Journal.

The Raven and Other Poems (1845) won him fame as a poet both at home and abroad. In 1846 he moved to the Fordham cottage (now a museum) and there wrote “The Literati of New York City” for Godey's Lady's Book. His wife died in 1847, and by the following year Poe was courting the poet Sarah Helen Whitman. However, in 1849 he returned to Richmond and became engaged to Elmira Royster, a childhood sweetheart who was by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton. On his way north to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, he became involved in a drinking debauch in Baltimore. This indulgence proved fatal, for he died a few days later.

Assessment

Poe's literary executor, R. W. Griswold, overemphasized Poe's personal faults and distorted his letters. Poe was a complex person, tormented and alcoholic yet also considerate and humorous, a good friend, and an affectionate husband. Indeed, his painful life, his neurotic attraction to intense beauty, violent horror, and death, and his sense of the world of dreams contributed to his greatness as a writer. Such compelling stories as “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” involve the reader in a universe that is at once beautiful and grotesque, real and fantastic.

His poems (including “To Helen,” “The Raven,” “The City in the Sea,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee”) are rich with musical phrases and sensuous, at times frightening, images. Poe was also an intelligent and witty critic who often theorized about the art of writing. The analytical mind he brought to criticism is evident also in his famous stories of ratiocination, notably “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Purloined Letter.” Poe influenced such diverse authors as Swinburne, Tennyson, Dostoyevsky, Conan Doyle, and the French symbolists.

Bibliography

See his collected poems and stories (3 vol., 1969–78); his letters, ed. by J. W. Ostrom (2 vol., 1948, repr. 1966); biographies by J. Symons (1981), D. Thomas and D. K. Jackson (1987), K. Silverman (1991), and J. Meyers (1992); studies by D. Hoffman (1972), B. L. Knapp (1984), J. G. Kennedy (1989), and D. Stashower (2006).

(1809-1849)

1827	Tamerlane and Other Poems. Poe's first collection of verse is published anonymously. The Byronic title poem concerns the Mongol conqueror's dying confession of a love affair and is based on Poe's relationship with Sarah Elmira Royster. Also included are "Visit of the Dead," "The Lake," "Evening Star," and "Imitation."
1829	Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Other Poems. Poe's second collection of poetry contains the humorous poem "Fairyland" and "Al Aaraaf," an allegorical poem depicting Poe's conception of this place from Arabic mythology--a star on which the "Idea of Beauty" was born. The poem concerns Angelo, a passionate young man, who hopes to enter Al Aaraaf, but an earthbound love keeps him from hearing his call from Nesace, the presiding spirit.
1831	Poems by Edgar Allan Poe, Second Edition. A collection of verse containing early, unrevised versions of some of Poe's most significant poems, including "To Helen, Israfel," and "The Doomed City." Although little noticed outside the circle of West Point cadets to whom Poe dedicated the book, biographer Kenneth Silverman notes that its "most marked feature is a preoccupation with death and the afterlife." Also significant is the preface, "Letter to B," in which Poe begins to build his critical theories, borrowing liberally from Coleridge.
1833	"MS. Found in a Bottle." Poe's tale, based on the legend of the Flying Dutchman, depicts a seaman forced to stay at sea until Judgment Day. It wins the Baltimore Saturday Visitor's $50 prize for the best story and introduces Poe to John Pendleton Kennedy, one of the contest's judges, who would assist Poe with his publishing endeavors, most notably by introducing him to the T. W. White, the editor of the newly established Southern Literary Messenger.
1835	Politian: A Tragedy. Three scenes of Poe's unfinished blank-verse drama based on the Beauchamp-Sharp murder case known as the Kentucky Tragedy but set in sixteenth-century Rome are published in the Southern Literary Messenger. It would be published in its entirety in 1923.
1835	"Berenice." Poe's first story to be published in the Southern Literary Messenger after John Pendleton Kennedy had introduced him to the editor, T. W. White. In the story Egaeus is captivated by the white teeth of his beloved cousin Berenice, and when she falls into a trance after an epileptic seizure, he believes she has died and removes her teeth. Although White feared the story too grotesque for the magazine, Poe had convinced him that articles that are "ludicrous heightened into the grotesque" sell magazines. This initial publication would lead to Poe's numerous story contributions, critical reviews, and editorship of the Messenger. Poe also publishes "Morella" in the Southern Literary Messenger; it would be later included in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Poe's story, regarded as a preliminary workup of his later work "Ligeia," concerns a dying woman who vows to return to life to punish her unloving husband. Poe's tale "The Unparalleled Adventures of One Hans Pfaal," describing a trip to the moon, is published in the Southern Literary Messenger and is one of the earliest examples of American science fiction.
1838	"Ligeia." One of Poe's most famous stories and the one its author cited as his best is the tale of a woman who becomes ill and dies, though she has great desire to live. After her husband marries a woman he does not love, Rowena, Ligeia's powerful will to live brings her back into the body of Rowena. First published in the Baltimore Museum, it would be included in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840). Poe also publishes The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket, a fictional tale based partially on fact concerning the sea adventures of a young boy who stows away on a New Bedford whaler, which sails from Nantucket to the South Seas in 1827. Poe had used J. N. Reynolds's "Report of the Committee on Naval Affairs" (1836) and Benjamin Morell's Narrative of Four Voyages to the South Seas and Pacific (1832) as sources for the work.
1839	"The Haunted Palace." Written when Poe's financial situation forced him to write tales instead of verse, this is considered one of his best poems. Originally published in the Baltimore Museum, it would later be included in "The Fall of the House of Usher." The poem is an allegory of mental states, with the palace taking the form of a human head that is attacked by evil.
1839	"The Fall of the House of Usher." Poe's classic horror story concerns the last remaining members of a cursed family, a twin brother and sister who die simultaneously. It is the most significant work that Poe contributed to Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, which he coedited during his most prolific literary period. Poe also publishes "William Wilson." Considered one of Poe's best stories, it concerns a man haunted since his youth by his alter ego, whom he eventually kills in a sword fight. At his death, his double tells Wilson, "In me didst thou exist--and in my death, see by this image, which is thine own, how utterly thou hast murdered thyself." The story would be a source for Robert Louis Stevenson's The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1885).
1840	Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. Poe's first collection contains twenty-five short stories including "MS. Found in a Bottle," "William Wilson," "Ligeia," and "The Fall of the House of Usher." Although favorably received and a boost to Poe's national reputation, slow sales meant that Poe received no royalties. Though the title page reads 1840, the collection is actually published in Philadelphia in 1839. Poe also publishes "The Journals of Julius Rodman, Being an Account of the First Passage Across the Rocky Mountains of North America Ever Achieved by Civilized Man," a work of fiction written by Poe but kept anonymous. The story of exploration beyond the Rocky Mountains is purportedly taken from the journal of Rodman, a fictional English immigrant whose heirs find his writings. The descriptions of land and travel experiences are based largely on Irving's Astoria and the accounts of Lewis and Clark and of Sir Alexander Mackenzie. Many readers believe the tale to be nonfiction.
1841	"A Descent into the Maelstrom." First published in Graham's Magazine and to be included in Prose Tales (1843), Poe's adventure story describes a Norwegian sailor and his brother who are drawn into a massive whirlpool. Poe also publishes "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" in Graham's Lady's and Gentleman's Magazine, where he is editor. This story is the pioneer work of modern detective fiction. The detective, Auguste Dupin, analyzes evidence to solve the murder of a mother and daughter.
1842	"Review of New Books:" Twice-Told Tales. Poe's review of Hawthorne's collection sets forth Poe's theory of the short story. He argues that the form is the most "advantageous field of exertion" since a short story can be read in one sitting. He further states that the effect of a tale should be known to the author before commencing, and all should contribute to the "preconceived effect." Poe's analysis supplies the theoretical underpinnings for the evolution of the modern short story.
1842	"The Masque of the Red Death." One of the author's finest stories is an allegorical tale of Prince Prospero's attempt to escape the plague by hiding away with his friends in an isolated castle. Published in Graham's Magazine, it illustrates that death cannot be escaped. The Red Death appears at a masquerade Prospero is holding in his castle and kills everyone in attendance. Poe also publishes "The Mystery of Marie Roget." The sequel to "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," it is a detective story based on an actual New York murder case. Poe's story "Eleonora," a romantic tale about a youth who falls in love with his cousin, also appears in this year.
1843	"The Black Cat." One of Poe's finest horror stories is a psychological tale first published in the U.S. Saturday Post and later included in Tales (1845); it has been much anthologized. In the story a man murders his wife and entombs her in a cellar wall, accidentally enclosing a cat with her. The cat's cries reveal his guilt. Poe also publishes "The Gold Bug," a tale of Captain Kidd's buried treasure on Sullivan's Island, South Carolina, and its discovery by a poor Southern gentleman. The suspenseful tale is one of the first to employ a buried treasure theme and a hidden message in a cipher. It wins a great deal of attention for the struggling author and the $100 first prize in the Dollar newspaper literary contest. In the same year "The Pit and the Pendulum" appears in the Gift. The story describes the tortures of the Spanish Inquisition in a thrilling horror tale. Poe also publishes "The Tell-Tale Heart," in which a madman betrays his crime when he thinks he hears the beating heart of the man he has murdered.
1844	"The Raven." Submitted to the New York Evening Mirror, where Poe had been undertaking the menial tasks of a "mechanical paragraphist," the poem concerns the loss of a beloved woman and brings Poe celebrity status. It would be first published in the American Whig Review in 1845 and lead to his important critical essay "The Philosophy of Composition," to be published in the April 1846 issue of Graham's, in which he describes his writing process.
1844	"The Balloon Hoax." Poe's story first appears in the New York Sun in the guise of an actual article reporting on a balloon crossing of the Atlantic.
1845	The Raven and Other Poems. A collection containing all of Poe's verse to date. Biographer Hervey Allen would write that it "may be said to have been the finest contribution to poetry so far by an American."
1845	Tales. Evert A. Duyckinck collects Poe's previously printed works, including "The Black Cat" and "The Purloined Letter."
1846	"The Cask of Amontillado." First published in Godey's Lady's Book, the work is the last of Poe's famous and frequently anthologized psychological crime stories. Set in an Italian city during Carnival, it follows Montresor as he leads Fortunato into his underground vaults with promises of a premium wine, but then walls him in to die.
1846	The Literati of New York. A series of sketches frankly critiquing the writing, personalities, and appearances of New York authors, including Caroline Stansbury Kirkland, Epes Sargent, the members of the Knickerbocker group, and others. His negative remarks about Thomas Dunn English bring a bristling response; Poe would respond by suing the New York Mirror for libel. Poe also publishes "The Philosophy of Composition." Among the most famous works of literary criticism, this essay is published in Graham's Magazine and describes the process of writing poetry, primarily discussing Poe's procedures in composing "The Raven." Poe explains the importance of keeping a poem brief enough to read in one sitting and his use of a refrain. He declares that poems should be about beauty, and the death of a beautiful woman is therefore "the most poetical topic in the world."
1848	Eureka: A Prose Poem by Edgar A. Poe. In a metaphysical treatise inspired by the scientists Isaac Newton and Pierre-Simon Laplace, Poe reconciles conflicting theories of the origin of the universe by suggesting that there is an order to the cosmos, but that annihilation is a component of the order. The work would influence many writers, including France's Paul Valéry.
1848	The Poetic Principle. Poe sets forth his precepts of poetry in this 1848 lecture that would be published posthumously in 1850. He asserts the importance of emotion in lyrical endeavors and presents eleven American and English poems that he considers works of art.

Quotes:

"Thank Heaven! the crisis --The danger, is past, and the lingering illness, is over at last --, and the fever called Living is conquered at last."

"To be thoroughly conversant with a man's heart, is to take our final lesson in the iron-clasped volume of despair."

"All that we see or seem, is but a dream within a dream."

"Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there, wondering, fearing, doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before."

"Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night."

"Man's real life is happy, chiefly because he is ever expecting that it soon will be so."

See more famous quotes by Edgar Allan Poe