Edgar Allen Poe

Introduction

Poe is important in the history of the short story because he helped give it a recognizable form, endowing it with an Aristotelian plot structure and conferring upon it unity of tone. On the other hand his theory of poetry, which virtually dispenses with all forms except the short lyric, has been too restrictive for most poets, and it is remembered today only in the classroom. Still Poe as a practicing critic had few peers in his time; none in America. He was an analytic critic and at his best made a close examination of the work at hand. This approach alone would make him a precursor of an important strain of. twentieth-century criticism, the "new" criticism introduced by John Crowe Ransom , Allen Tate , Cleanth Brooks , Robert Penn Warren , and others some forty-odd years ago (Thomas, p. 732). If Poe was not the most distinguished writer in America during the nineteenth century--some would claim that he was--he was surely the most versatile, well worth reading today.

Discussion & Analysis

Younger, Middle & Late years of Poe

Born to David and Elizabeth Arnold Poe on 19 January 1809, Edgar Poe from the cradle onward seemed destined for a public career. His mother, Elizabeth Arnold, daughter of an English actress, had been brought to America when she was only nine years old; and from that age she was a stage performer at a time when acting was less than a respectable profession. She married Charles Hopkins at fifteen and was widowed at eighteen. Poe's father, David, from Baltimore, had gone on the stage against the wishes of his family and had become Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins's second husband. David disappeared in 1810, leaving Elizabeth with three small children to support. Henry, the eldest, was sent to David's family in Baltimore, while Edgar and his young sister, Rosalie, remained briefly with their mother. The young actress died on 8 December 1811 in Richmond, Virginia, where her theater company was performing. Edgar and Rosalie were taken by two respectable Richmond families, the Allans and the Mackenzies (Stovall, p. 172).

John Allan, Edgar Poe's foster father (the boy was never legally adopted), was a native of Scotland, whence he had come to Richmond at fifteen to work for his wealthy uncle, William Galt. When he took the child Edgar, nearly three years old, into his home, John Allan was prospering as a partner in the firm of Ellis and Allan, an import-export company engaged chiefly in the exportation of Virginia tobacco to England. In several ways Edgar was fortunate in being with the Allans. John Allan had no literary aspirations, but he was fond of literature, particularly of Shakespeare and Sir Walter Scott , and a file of the literary journal Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine was kept in the Ellis-Allan warehouse. It was from this magazine that Edgar Poe was to derive his first notions of fiction and literary criticism. A legend printed by several of Poe's biographers has the child Edgar standing on a table ...