Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most abiding American writers, a creative thinker that composed poems that still astonish readers 200 years later. Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in 1809, only to be orphaned at age two, Poe had a difficult childhood. (Buckwalter 93). A couple in Richmond, Virginia, John and Frances Allan brought young Poe into their home as a foster child (McLeod 63). John Allan financed Poe’s education, while Poe used Allan’s money to pay gambling debts. With no money, had to Poe drop out of college and worked for one of John Allan’s businesses to learn valuable skills (“Tamerlane”). Since Poe was a young child he loved to write poetry, and this love spread into his professional career. He took jobs as a critic and an editor while writing his own works on the side (McLeod 64). …show more content…
When she died it deeply affected him (Buckwalter 93-94). Throughout his life he still struggled to make money off his publications, causing him to fight off poverty and turn to drinking to numb his pain (McLeod 64). In 1849, Poe died “raving, shattered in body and mind” with an unofficial cause of death (Taylor). In Poe’s poetry he uses rhyme, alliteration, and repetition to convey his themes of loneliness, lost love, and inevitable death. Poe was deeply impacted by the premature death of his wife, Virginia Clemm Poe; he also struggled with financial debt, alcoholism, and very little pay for his work for his entire life contributing to his dark and depressing themes. In the scope of literature Poe is important to be studied because he is a modern writer in the sense that he wrote with a range of human emotions that exploring the darker parts of the human psyche, he wrote for effect, as a struggling writer he worked for rights of the writer, and he influenced other famous writers and our pop culture