Edgar Allan Poe (redirected from Edgar A. Poe)

Poe, Edgar Allan 

Born Jan. 19, 1809, in Boston; died Oct. 7, 1849, in Baltimore. American writer and critic.

Born into a family of actors, Poe was orphaned at an early age and raised by a Richmond merchant, J. Allan. From 1815 to 1820 he lived in Great Britain. In 1826 he entered the University of Virginia. He served in the army from 1827 to 1829, and from 1830 to 1831 he studied at the military academy at West Point, from which he was expelled for infractions of the disciplinary code.

Poe’s early romantic verses appeared in the collections Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827, published anonymously), Al Aa-raaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829), and Poems (1831). He published his first stories in 1832. After 1836, he devoted himself entirely to journalistic work, publishing critical articles and short stories. The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, the theme of which is a journey to the South Pole, came out in 1838. The two-volume collection of stories Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840) is distinguished by deep poetic feeling, lyricism, and tragic anxiety.

Loneliness is an important motif in romantic short stories by Poe, whose life, as Gorky pointed out, was tragic in the deepest sense of the word.

Poe was the originator of detective literature (for example, the stories “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” and “The Gold Bug”).

In Eureka (1848), a philosophical prose poem, Poe anticipated the genre of fictional science prose. He also wrote a number of science fiction stories. The collection The Raven and Other Poems (1845) won him wide renown. Certain features of his work, including irrationality, mysticism, and a penchant for depicting pathological states, anticipated decadent literature.

One of the first professional American literary critics, Poe influenced the development of American aesthetics with his theory that a literary work should produce a unity of effect and impression (“Philosophy of Composition,” 1846, and “The Poetic Principle,” 1850). Poe’s short stories had an influence on A. C. Doyle, R. L. Stevenson, A. Bierce, and G. K. Chesterton. The French and Russian symbolist poets regarded Poe as their teacher, and the composers C. Debussy and S. V. Rachmaninoff turned to his works for inspiration.

WORKS

The Complete Works, vols. 1–17. Edited by J. A. Harrison. New York, 1965.
In Russian translation:
Poln. sobr. poem i stikhotvorenii. Moscow-Leningrad, 1924.
Poln. sobr. rasskazov. Moscow, 1970.
Izbr. proizvedeniia, vols. 1–2. Moscow, 1972.

REFERENCES

Istoriia amerikanskoi literatury, vol. 1. Moscow-Leningrad, 1947.
Bobrova, M. N. Romantizm ν amerikanskoi literature XIX v. Moscow, 1972.
Davidson, E. H. Poe: A Critical Study. Cambridge, Mass., 1964.
Poe: A Collection of Critical Essays. Edited by R. Regan. Englewood Cliffs, N.J. [1967].
Quinn, A. H. E. A. Poe: A Critical Biography. New York, 1969.
Moss, S. P. Poe’s Literary Battles. Durham, N.C., 1963.