Themes in the Writing of Edgar Allan Poe that Mirror his Personal Life

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This essay will discuss the themes in Poe’s writing that mirror his personal life and, in addition, the fear and supernatural motivators for his characters. First, I will discuss Poe’s background and explore how he became best known as a poet for his tales of mystery and macabre.

In retrospect he was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. His father an actor abandoned the family when he was one years old and his mother an actress died of tuberculosis when 2 yrs old. His foster parents cared for him as a young child and their last names were Allan. This is where his full name Edgar Allan Poe comes from. When he was in college he wrote all of his walls and came of gloomy and depressed to some classmates. He removed his self from the college because of gambling debts. He marries his very young cousin Virginia Clemm when she was 13yrs old; she dies in 1847 from a long and hard battle with tuberculosis. After one year of his beloved wife death, he tries to commit suicide and has more of a weakness to drink. He was known to be unable to take even a little alcohol without a change of personality.

Furthermore in the poem “the raven” the story is basically about a poor guy whose wife died, and who goes insane, accompanied by the hallucination of a raven that comes through the window, sits above the door and crows “nevermore”. Considering the poem the raven was published in January of 1845 and his wife died in 1847 so the poem couldn’t be talking about her death and how he feels. But it could be talking about how he felt when she diagnosed with tuberculosis in January of 1842. So when the raven was published she was more than likely very sick and he knew she going to die. Poe probably couldn’t take watching her sickening and ro...

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^ Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Perennial, 1991: 312–313. ISBN 0-06-092331-8

^ Rust, Richard D. "Punish with Impunity: Poe, Thomas Dunn English and 'The Cask of Amontillado'" in The Edgar Allan Poe Review, Vol. II, Issue 2 – Fall, 2001, St. Joseph's University.

^ Reynolds, David F. "Poe's Art of Transformation: 'The Cask of Amontillado' in Its Cultural Context", as collected in The American Novel: New Essays on Poe's Major Tales, Kenneth Silverman, ed. Cambridge University Press, 1993. ISBN 0521422433 pp. 96–7

^ a b Benton, Richard P. (June 1996). "Poe's 'The Cask of Amontillado': Its Cultural and Historical Backgrounds". Poe Studies 29: 19–27.

^ Burton R. Pollin (1970). "Notre-Dame de Paris in Two of the Tales". Discoveries in Poe. Notre Dame, Indiana: University of Notre Dame Press. pp. 24–37.

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