After seeing
Planet Zacchaeus clogged with
people's papers, I thought the least I could do is contribute. Here's something I wrote about Edgar Allan Poe when I was in tenth grade. The beginning is missing because it was saved in Appleworks format (oh, my foolishness!) so I can't recover it all.
After living with the Allans in the United States for a while, he moved with them to England. Poe was sent off to a private school and studied hard. However, he did not enjoy his schooling there. Since he was away from the Allans, he felt as if he were not really a part of their family. He stayed there five years. After the tobacco market in England crashed, the Allans closed their business there, and he left with them to go back and live in America.
Poe continued schooling in the U.S. During his years of high school there, he studied hard and became proficient in Latin and French. His talents also included writing many poems, and he almost published them in a book. After high school, Poe entered the University of Virginia. Studying there, he was an excellent student. However, he had financial troubles. Even though the Allans were well off because of their business, John Allan refused to help out Poe financially. Poe then turned to gambling to help pay off school-related expenses. After running up large debts, Poe left for a break and was prevented by Allan from returning to the University.
Poe kept writing all this time. He compiled a volume of poetry, Tamberlane and Other Poems, which contained many poems he had written in his early teens. He published it anonymously, simply as "A Bostonian."
John Allan wanted Poe to become a lawyer, but Poe was set on literature and becoming a writer. This could have been a key point in the disagreements between the two of them. After another bout of misunderstandings, Poe left the Allan household. After leaving, he enlisted in the army for five years. During his time in the army, he met and became very close to a certain Lieutenant Howard. They became good friends, but after serving in the army for a while, Poe became tired of it. This could have been because he joined the army simply to defy and get away from John Allan, and he had no real desire to serve his country in that manner. Whatever the case may be, he was bound to serve the whole five years for which he had enlisted. Seeing Poe's predicament, Lt. Howard offered his help. He promised to honorably discharge Poe from the army if he would try to rebuild his broken relationship with John Allan.
Accepting Lt. Howard's offer, Poe wrote Allan a letter asking forgiveness. In his letter he also asked for help to try to enroll in the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, Allan never responded. Seeing that Poe had tried, Howard kept his word, honorably discharging Poe. Soon afterward, Allan's wife died. This shook Allan's world and prompted him to soften up to Poe, mostly because Allan's late wife had loved Poe so much. Allan proceeded to forgive Poe and agreed to help him get into West Point.
The application to West Point was not easy. Forty-seven people were ahead of Poe in applying and competing for a small number of available spots. Poe went ahead anyway, undaunted. As the process went slowly, however, John Allan grew impatient.
Poe was finally accepted into West Point, which made him glad. However, much of the reason he went there was to reconcile with John Allan. After he had been enrolled in the Academy for a while, he received news that John Allan had remarried. Poe took this hard. Allan's wife had loved him a lot, and now that Allan was remarried, it seemed it would be easier for Allan to forget Poe and go on into his new life. Poe's request's for money were almost always met with refusal. In a letter to Poe, Allan said he wished for "no further communication with you on my part." Poe responded by writing Allan, accusing him of abandoning Poe and his well being.
Before going into West Point, Poe had written a poem called "Al Aaraaf." It was a complex poem that consisted of references to astronomy, religious myths, and love. It was very hard to follow and understand, but it showed Poe had a lot of creativity and imagination. Poe asked a friend if it was any good, and his friend sent him to a critic. The critic thought it was not good enough to be published, but a while later it appeared in The Yankee, being described as "though nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense." This encouraged Poe greatly, and he published a collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamberlane, and Other Minor Poems.
After a while, it became clear that Poe's relationship with John Allan could not be salvaged. Since Poe was enrolled in West Point mostly because of Allan, this realization left him with little will to stay. Ignoring his studies, he sank to a rank of seventy-four out of eighty-six. After committing several offenses, he was court-martialed. Wishing to leave, Poe plead guilty and was expelled.
After leaving West Point, Poe went to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm, in Baltimore. They later moved to Richmond in 1835. The next year, Poe married her daughter, Virginia Clemm, on May 16th, 1836. She was fifteen at the time, although Poe said she seemed to be as old as twenty-one. He released a volume called
Poems later with money he had collected from his fellow West Point cadets. Critics called it "promising, but bizarre and obscure." In it, Poe wrote a lot about death and the afterlife. He also emphasized the importance of originality.
Poe published his first five stories in 1832. The next year, one of them won a prize, and Poe started to get recognition. That recognition got him a job as the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger, which became quite a success. After working there for quite some time, he offended the owner by writing scathing reviews of other popular writers, and was forced to leave. In 1837, Poe moved to New York. He spent a year and a half there before moving to Philadelphia. There he worked, editing two magazines. As an editor, Poe came up with and wrote about several theories regarding literature that were quite influential. Most of them concerned poetry and short stories, his specialties.
In 1840, Poe published a collection of short stories called
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. It did not meet with much success financially or critically, but contained some of his best work. Four years later, Poe moved again, back to New York, and stayed there for the rest of his life. He wrote many short stories there and worked hard as an editor.
As Poe stayed in New York, his stories grew more and more popular, and his reputation grew. He also went back and began to write more poetry after spending years focusing mostly on perfecting his short story writing. "The Raven," which he published there, was instantly recognized as a great poem.
Since Poe had severed ties with the wealthy Allan family, he knew that he could no longer ask them to provide financial support, and thus writing was his sole means of earning a living. Even so, he made much of his writing deeply personal, relating to his emotions. Poe also tried to support himself by attempting to start his own magazine, which he called The Penn. However, increasing financial difficulties stopped him from successfully starting the magazine.
In 1847, Poe's wife Virginia died. This had a profound impact on Poe and caused him to sometimes turn to alcohol. As an effect, his reputation started to slide, and his career suffered. Even though his alcoholism gave him a bad reputation, many people who knew him said that he would work hard and rarely get drunk. His main problem was that he had an extremely low tolerance for alcohol, leading to terrible effects even when he would drink just a small amount.
During Poe's last few months, he traveled all around to different cities collecting money for his planned magazine, which he had renamed The Stylus. He became engaged to marry Sarah Sheldon around the same time in 1849. Going to pick up his aunt, he had a stop in Baltimore. The only certain thing is that he was found unconscious in that city on October third, and four days later he passed away in a hospital. Since death certificates were not required at the time, the cause of death is unsure. The vague reason given was "congestion of the brain," although what that means is unclear.
Poe's life was full of hardships. He never escaped from the poverty he was born into. He had few reasons to be cheery and full of smiles. Most of his best works are about death. His life was troubled with family troubles, drinking problems, and sickness of loved ones. Yet, posthumously, his works are extremely popular and influential. Part of what made Poe a great writer was that he had found an ability to tap into his emotional pain and the hard parts of his life to turn them into a source of emotion in his writings. That is what makes his work so moving, dreadful, or just interesting, depending on the work.
