The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
The Life and Writings of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe’s life seemed to be cursed almost from the day he was born. Abandoned by his father and losing his mother to pneumonia both happened before Edgar turned three years old. His wife died only ten years after marriage. Two important people in Poe’s life died and one abandoned him. So Poe was a lonely person. Poe’s loneliness was shown in his writings of short stories and poems.
Poe’s father left him when he was just a baby. The feeling of abandonment shows in one of Poe’s first writings. In The Gold-Bug, Edgar Allan Poe writes about a man who abandons his family to start a new life, “…Mr. William Legrand. He was of an ancient Huguenot family, and had once been wealthy: but a series of misfortunes had reduced him to want. To avoid the mortification consequent upon his disasters, he left New Orleans, the city of his forefathers and took up a his residence at Sullivan’s Island, near Charleston, South Carolina”(The Gold-Bug). In Tamerlane (he wrote while attending college) Poe repeatedly refers to “father” which is his way of talking to his own father even though he could not remember who his father was. “Unshelter’d - and the heavy wind Rendered me mad and deaf and blind”(Tamerlane). Poe never was homeless in his childhood but the feeling of not having a home can come from the fact that his father left him and never made an attempt to contact him (www.search). Poe did not seem to have high respect for his father. “Kind solace in a dying hour! Such, father, is not (now) my theme…I would not call thee fool, old man. But such is not a gift of thine”(Tamerlane). Edgar Allan Poe also had a feeling of resentment against his father.
“From childhood’s hour I have not been
As others were; I have not seen
As others saw; I could not bring
My passions from a common spring.
From the same source I have not taken
My sorrow; I could not awaken
My heart to joy at the same tone;
And all I loved, I loved alone.” (Alone).
Poe was telling his father in this poem that he might have been a different person had his father not...