Edgar Allan Poe Essay On Tuberculosis

Tuberculosis is defined by Dictionary.com as “an infectious disease that may affect almost any tissue of the body, especially the lungs” (1). In many of his works, Edgar Allan Poe demonstrated the hardships of losing people to sickness, especially tuberculosis. Poe’s life was hard and catastrophic; he showed this struggle through the writing of many of his poems. Poe’s most famous writings paralleled his life tragedies. Edgar Allan Poe’s early childhood demonstrated the hardships of absent and sickly parents. When Poe was just one year old, his father abandoned the family and left Poe fatherless. Not long after, when Poe was two years old, he received the tragic message that his mother had tuberculosis. On December eighth, his twenty-four-year-old

Following his mother’s death, Poe was adopted and raised by John and Francis Allan. Poe became an athletic young man and a natural leader. His adolescent first love was diagnosed with cancer and later died. He later finds out that his foster mother has tuberculosis. She passed away when Poe was 19. While Mrs. Allan was on her deathbed Poe’s foster father was having multiple affairs, and some even in the house; this infuriated Poe. John Allan sent Poe off to the University of Virginia; he had only given him enough money to get to the university, so Poe was left with no money for food or other necessities. Poe was a great writer and artist at the university, but could not find financial stability. He began to gamble thinking it would help; however, it just got worse. Poe stacked up two thousand dollars in debt, and ran off to join the army under a fake

The themes of Poe’s poems were firmly rooted in his life reality. He was a seeker of forbidden knowledge, especially the mystery of death. Poe lived a struggling and catastrophic life, so he began to reveal this through his writing. Poe wrote and published “ The Murder in the Rue Morgue”, “The Tell Tale Heart”, “The Mask of the Red Death”, “The Raven”, and “Annabel Lee”. “The Tell Tale Heart” approached modern psychoanalysis and showed a tortured narrator being driven to a confession by guilt. “The Mask of the Red Death” showed his struggle with losing people to tuberculosis; tuberculosis caused its victims to bleed from the inside out and Poe used “The Mask of the Red Death” to personify tuberculosis after he had lost many loved ones due to it. “The Raven” pictured a narrator longing for his lost love; Poe wrote this as he was aware that he would soon relate to this narrator when Virginia passed away. “Annabel Lee” was written as a memorial to his lost love who also fell victim to