POE, EDGAR ALLAN. - American poet and storyteller, b. in Boston on Jan. 9, 1809, d. in Baltimore on Oct. 7, 1849.
After a failed attempt at a military career, he entered journalism, in which he was never fortunate; an aunt had him marry her thirteen-year-old daughter, who died of consumption in 1847, leaving him in a state of depression from which he was never to recover. He sought to drown his sorrows in wine, and it was in a Baltimore tavern that he was found in extremely serious condition on Oct. 3, 1849; he died four days later of delirium tremens. The traces of an abnormal psyche are very evident throughout P.'s entire work (Poems, 1831; The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838; Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840; The Murders in the Rue Morgue, 1841; Tales, 1845; The Raven and Other Poems, 1845; Eureka, 1848; The Poetic Principle, 1849, etc.; there is no divergence between the poems and the tales, since his prose is cadenced and scanned and his poetry essentially narrative). Alcohol was not the only way out of the torments from which he suffered, but his culture was too eclectic and his transcendental ideas, whose foundations are to be sought in mesmerism and theosophy, appear exceedingly confused and incoherent: the supernatural world is identified in his work with a world of nightmares and phantoms. He nevertheless had a very vivid sense of the mysterious and enigmatic zones of human nature and incarnated it in impressive and unforgettable figures. His language is not impeccable, but as a seeker of musical and suggestive effects in prose and verse and as the author of short and intense compositions he was admired by the successive generations of decadents in Europe and particularly in France.