edgar allan poe biography wife

Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe Biography

Born In: Baltimore, Maryland

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Also Known As: Clemm

Died At Age: 25

Spouse/Ex-: Edgar Allan Poe (m. 1835)

father: William Clemm Jr.

mother: Maria Poe

siblings: Henry

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Died on: January 30 , 1847

place of death: Fordham, Bronx, New York City

City: Baltimore, Maryland

U.S. State: Maryland

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Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was the first cousin and childhood sweetheart of renowned author Edgar Allan Poe.

Virginia was a devoted animal lover and had a special fondness for cats.

Virginia had a deep appreciation for music and was known to have a beautiful singing voice.

Virginia was admired for her resilience and strength in the face of illness.

See the events in life of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe in Chronological Order

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Edgar Allan Poe Biography

Born: January 19, 1809 Boston, Massachusetts Died: October 7, 1849 Baltimore, Maryland American poet and writer

One of America's major writers, Edgar Allan Poe was far ahead of his time in his vision of a special area of human experience—the "inner world" of dreams and the imagination. He wrote fiction, poetry, and criticism and also worked as a magazine editor.

Orphaned at three

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts, on January 19, 1809, the son of David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, both professional actors. By the time he was three, Edgar, his older brother, and his younger sister were orphans; their father deserted the family, and then their mother died. The children were each sent to different families to live. Edgar went to the Richmond, Virginia, home of John and Frances Allan, whose name Poe was to take later as his own middle name. The Allans were wealthy, and though they never adopted Poe, they treated him like a son, made sure he was educated in private academies, and took him to England for a five-year stay. Mrs. Allan, at least, showed considerable affection toward him.

As Edgar entered his teenage years, however, bad feelings developed between him and John Allan. Allan disapproved of Edgar's ambition to become a writer, thought he was ungrateful, and seems to have decided to cut Poe out of his will. When, in 1826, Poe entered the newly opened University of Virginia, he had so little money that he turned to gambling in an attempt to make money. In eight months he lost two thousand dollars. Allan's refusal to help him led to a final break between the two, and in March 1827 Poe went out on his own.

Enlists in the army

Poe then signed up for a five-year term in the U.S. Army. In 1827 his Tamerlane and Other Poems was published at his own expense, but the book failed to attract notice. By January 1829, serving under the name of Edgar A. Perry, Poe rose to the rank of sergeant major. He did not want to serve out the full five years, however, and he arranged to be discharged from the army on the condition that he would seek an appointment at West Point Academy. He thought such a move might please John Allan. That same year Al Araaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems was published in Baltimore, Maryland, and it received a highly favorable notice from the novelist and critic John Neal.

Poe visited Allan in Richmond, but he left in May 1830 after he and Allan had another violent quarrel. The West Point appointment came through the next month, but, since Poe no longer had any use for it, he did not last long. Lacking Allan's permission to resign, Poe sought and received a dismissal for "gross neglect of duty" and "disobedience of orders." Poe realized that he would never receive financial help from Allan.

Marriage and editing jobs

The panic increased after 1837. Poe moved with Virginia and her mother to New York City, where he managed to publish The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym (1838), his only long work of fiction. The family then moved to Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, where Poe served as coeditor of Burton's Gentleman's Magazine. In two years he boosted its circulation from five thousand to twenty thousand and contributed some of his best fiction to its pages, including "The Fall of the House of Usher." In 1840 he published Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. But there was trouble at Burton's, and in 1841 Poe left to work as the editor of Graham's Magazine. It was becoming clear that two years was about as long as Poe could hold a job, and though he contributed quality fiction and criticism to the magazine, his drinking, his feuding with other writers, and his inability to get along with people caused him to leave after 1842.

Illness and crisis

"The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Man That Was Used Up" emerged in 1843, and a Philadelphia newspaper offered a one-hundred-dollar prize for his story "The Gold Bug," but Poe's problems were increasing. His wife, who had been a vital source of comfort and support to him, began showing signs of the consumption (or tuberculosis, an infection of the lungs) that would eventually kill her. When his troubles became too great, Poe tried to relieve them by drinking, which made him ill. Things seemed to improve slightly in 1844; the publication of the poem "The Raven" brought him some fame, and this success was followed in 1845 by the publication of two volumes, The Raven and Other Poems and Tales. But his wife's health continued to worsen, and he was still not earning enough money to support her and Clemm.

Poe's next job was with Godey's Lady's Book, but he was unable to keep steady employment, and things got so bad that he and his family almost starved in the winter of 1846. Then, on January 30, 1847, Virginia Poe died. Somehow Poe continued to produce work of very high caliber. In 1848 he published the ambitious Eureka, and he returned to Richmond in 1849 to court a now-widowed friend of his youth, Mrs. Shelton. They were to be married, and Poe left for New York City at the end of September to bring Clemm back for the wedding. On the way he stopped off in Baltimore, Maryland. No one knows exactly what happened, but he was found unconscious on October 3, 1849, near a saloon that had been used as a polling place. He died in a hospital four days later.

It is not hard to see the connection between the nightmare of Poe's life and his work. His fictional work resembles the dreams of a troubled individual who keeps coming back, night after night, to the same pattern of dream. At times he traces out the pattern lightly, at other times in a "thoughtful" mood, but often the tone is terror. He finds himself descending, into a cellar, a wine vault, or a whirlpool, always falling. The women he meets either change form into someone else or are whisked away completely. And at last he drops off, into a pit or a river or a walled-up tomb.

For More Information

Bittner, William R. Poe: A Biography. Boston: Little, Brown, 1962.

Meyers, Jeffrey. Edgar Allan Poe: His Life and Legacy. New York: Charles Scribner's Sons, 1992.

Quinn, Arthur H. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography. New York: Appleton-Century, 1941. Reprint, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.

Walsh, John Evangelist. Midnight Dreary: The Mysterious Death of Edgar Allan Poe. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1998.

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What are Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known works?

Edgar Allan Poe’s best-known works include the poems “To Helen” (1831), “ The Raven ” (1845), and “ Annabel Lee ” (1849); the short stories of wickedness and crime “ The Tell-Tale Heart ” (1843) and “ The Cask of Amontillado ” (1846); and the supernatural horror story “The Fall of the House of Usher” (1839).

Edgar Allan Poe is credited with initiating the modern detective story , developing the Gothic horror story , and being a significant early forerunner of the science fiction form. Poe’s literary criticism , which put great stress upon correctness of language, metre, and structure and the importance of achieving a unity of mood or effect, shaped literary theory.

Edgar Allan Poe turned up in a tavern in Baltimore, Maryland, on October 3, 1849, in bad shape and nearly unresponsive and was soon admitted to a hospital. He drifted in and out of consciousness, hallucinating and speaking nonsense. On October 7 he died, although whether from drinking ,  heart failure , or other causes remains uncertain .

Edgar Allan Poe (born January 19, 1809, Boston , Massachusetts , U.S.—died October 7, 1849, Baltimore , Maryland) was an American short-story writer, poet, critic, and editor who is famous for his cultivation of mystery and the macabre . His tale “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (1841) initiated the modern detective story , and the atmosphere in his tales of horror is unrivaled in American fiction. His “The Raven” (1845) numbers among the best-known poems in the national literature .

Poe was the son of the English-born actress Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe, Jr., an actor from Baltimore. After his mother died in Richmond , Virginia, in 1811, he was taken into the home of John Allan, a Richmond merchant (presumably his godfather), and of his childless wife. He was later taken to Scotland and England (1815–20), where he was given a classical education that was continued in Richmond. For 11 months in 1826 he attended the University of Virginia , but his gambling losses at the university so incensed his guardian that he refused to let him continue, and Poe returned to Richmond to find his sweetheart, (Sarah) Elmira Royster, engaged. He went to Boston, where in 1827 he published a pamphlet of youthful Byronic poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems . Poverty forced him to join the army under the name of Edgar A. Perry, but, on the death of Poe’s foster mother, John Allan purchased his release from the army and helped him get an appointment to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Before going, Poe published a new volume at Baltimore, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). He successfully sought expulsion from the academy, where he was absent from all drills and classes for a week. He proceeded to New York City and brought out a volume of Poems , containing several masterpieces, some showing the influence of John Keats , Percy Bysshe Shelley , and Samuel Taylor Coleridge . He then returned to Baltimore, where he began to write stories. In 1833 his “ MS. Found in a Bottle ” won $50 from a Baltimore weekly, and by 1835 he was in Richmond as editor of the Southern Literary Messenger . There he made a name as a critical reviewer and married his young cousin Virginia Clemm, who was only 13. Poe seems to have been an affectionate husband and son-in-law.

Poe was dismissed from his job in Richmond, apparently for drinking, and went to New York City. Drinking was in fact to be the bane of his life. To talk well in a large company he needed a slight stimulant, but a glass of sherry might start him on a spree; and, although he rarely succumbed to intoxication, he was often seen in public when he did. This gave rise to the conjecture that Poe was a drug addict, but according to medical testimony he had a brain lesion. While in New York City in 1838 he published a long prose narrative, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym , combining (as so often in his tales) much factual material with the wildest fancies. It is considered one inspiration of Herman Melville ’s Moby Dick . In 1839 he became coeditor of Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine in Philadelphia . There a contract for a monthly feature stimulated him to write “William Wilson” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” stories of supernatural horror. The latter contains a study of a neurotic now known to have been an acquaintance of Poe, not Poe himself.

Later in 1839 Poe’s Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque appeared (dated 1840). He resigned from Burton’s about June 1840 but returned in 1841 to edit its successor, Graham’s Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine , in which he printed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” —the first detective story. In 1843 his “The Gold Bug” won a prize of $100 from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper , which gave him great publicity. In 1844 he returned to New York , wrote “The Balloon Hoax” for the Sun , and became subeditor of the New York Mirror under N.P. Willis, thereafter a lifelong friend. In the New York Mirror of January 29, 1845, appeared, from advance sheets of the American Review , his most famous poem, “The Raven,” which gave him national fame at once. Poe then became editor of the Broadway Journal , a short-lived weekly, in which he republished most of his short stories, in 1845. During this last year the now-forgotten poet Frances Sargent Locke Osgood pursued Poe. Virginia did not object, but “Fanny’s” indiscreet writings about her literary love caused great scandal. His The Raven and Other Poems and a selection of his Tales came out in 1845, and in 1846 Poe moved to a cottage at Fordham (now part of New York City), where he wrote for Godey’s Lady’s Book (May–October 1846) “The Literati of New York City”—gossipy sketches on personalities of the day, which led to a libel suit.

Poe’s wife, Virginia, died in January 1847. The following year he went to Providence , Rhode Island, to woo Sarah Helen Whitman , a poet. There was a brief engagement. Poe had close but platonic entanglements with Annie Richmond and with Sarah Anna Lewis, who helped him financially. He composed poetic tributes to all of them. In 1848 he also published the lecture “ Eureka,” a transcendental “explanation” of the universe, which has been hailed as a masterpiece by some critics and as nonsense by others. In 1849 he went south, had a wild spree in Philadelphia, but got safely to Richmond, where he finally became engaged to Elmira Royster, by then the widowed Mrs. Shelton, and spent a happy summer with only one or two relapses. He enjoyed the companionship of childhood friends and an unromantic friendship with a young poet, Susan Archer Talley.

Poe had some forebodings of death when he left Richmond for Baltimore late in September. There he died, although whether from drinking, heart failure , or other causes was still uncertain in the 21st century. He was buried in Westminster Presbyterian churchyard in Baltimore.

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Virginia clemm poe.

Courtesy, The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana

Described as having bright eyes, and dark brown hair, Virginia’s face was “always animated and vivacious.”  Virginia lived in Baltimore with her grandmother, mother, and cousin William Henry Poe (Edgar’s brother). Virginia’s father died when she was four years old. Afterwards the family depended on the grandmother's small government pension of $240, which she received each year for her husband's service during the American Revolution. Edgar moved in with the family in early 1831 and would remain with them until he moved to Richmond, Virginia in 1835. Virginia’s grandmother died in the same year leaving her and her mother Maria, without a steady source of income.

Valentine to her Husband

My little darling wife, my poor virginia still lives, her life was despaired of.

Six years ago, a wife, whom I loved as no man ever loved before, ruptured a blood-vessel insinging. Her life was despaired of. I took leave of her forever & underwent all the agonies of her death. She recovered partially and I again hoped. At the end of a year the vessel broke again—I went through precisely the same scene. Again in about a year afterward. Then again—again—again & even once again at varying intervals. Each time I felt all the agonies of her death—and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity. But I am constitutionally sensitive—nervous in a very unusual degree. I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity. During these fits of absolute unconsciousness I drank, God only knows how often or how much. As a matter of course, my enemies referred the insanity to the drink rather than the drink to the insanity. I had indeed, nearly abandoned all hope of a permanent cure when I found one in the death of my wife. This I can & do endure as becomes a man—it was the horrible never-ending oscillation between hope & despair which I could no longer have endured without the total loss of reason. In the death of what was my life, then, I receive a new but—oh God! How melancholy an existence.”  

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

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With his literary career not generating revenue and his foster father not providing any support, a young Edgar Allan Poe in his early twenties roamed the eastern coast of the United States looking for ways to make a living. Read about Poe’s early-life family and educational troubles, HERE . He drifted through cities such as New York, Philadelphia and Richmond, before finally settling in with his aunt, Maria Clemm, who had a home in Baltimore, Maryland. From 1831 to 1835, Edgar Allan Poe would live with his aunt and her young daughter, Virginia.

While living with his aunt, Poe finally received some literary recognition when his piece, “MS. Found in a Bottle,” won a $50 prize from a contest in the Baltimore Saturday Visitor . Although the prize was some of the first acclaim Poe had received for his work, he had already published two books of poetry, Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827) and Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829). These books received little recognition at the time, even though modern observers believe the collections to contain masterpieces.

For Edgar Allan Poe, the best accomplishment he achieved during his stay with the Clemm family was the relationship he developed with his cousin, the young Virginia Clemm. When, in 1835, he was offered the position of editor at the Southern Literary Messenger of Richmond Virginia, he brought Maria and Virginia Clemm to live with him in his new home. The next year, in 1836, Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia were married. He was in his late twenties, at the time. Virginia, on the other hand, was only between 12 and 14 years of age.

The marriage would last for over a decade, but, tragically, Virginia died of tuberculosis in 1847. She was still in her early twenties at the time. Edgar Allan Poe grew darker after the death of his wife, and he quickly began to give way to his ongoing fight against depression and alcoholism.

In 1849, Edgar Allan Poe left Richmond Virginia, intending to arrive in Philadelphia. Mysteriously, he was found delirious in Baltimore and died on October 7, 1849. The cause of the great author’s death remains unknown and debated. There are many theories about the cause of death, including being beaten to death, rabies, poisoning, or even a case of fatal kidnapping.

Written by C. Keith Hansley.

• https://www.britannica.com/biography/Edgar-Allan-Poe
• https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/edgar-allan-poe
• https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edgar-allan-poe
• https://www.biography.com/people/edgar-allan-poe-9443160
• http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/still-mysterious-death-edgar-allan-poe-180952936/

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Inside The Heartbreaking Life And Death Of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, Edgar Allan Poe’s Child Bride

Virginia eliza clemm was just 13 years old when she married 27-year-old edgar allan poe — who was also her first cousin..

Wikimedia Commons The only known verified portrait of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, rendered shortly after her death at age 24.

When seven-year-old Virginia Eliza Clemm met her first cousin Edgar Allan Poe, the year was 1829 — and he’d just left the U.S. Army. He was hopeful his dream career as an author and poet would follow.

Indeed it did — but so did a scandalous marriage between the two cousins, when a still-struggling, 27-year-old Poe married 13-year-old Virginia in 1836. Although the history books mainly portray Virginia as a controversial side note in the life of her famous husband, she was more than a child bride.

Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe was a gifted singer, musician, and linguist. Animated and bright, she was known for her kindness and humble nature. Many thought of her as a comforting, yet somehow “unearthly” presence. She remained childlike in her nature even as she grew older.

Tragically, most of her life was not well documented unless it pertained to her husband. In fact, the only verifiable likeness captured of Virginia is a post-mortem painting created after her untimely death at age 24.

The Early Years Of Virginia Eliza Clemm

The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington/Wikimedia Commons An alleged portrait of Virginia Eliza Clemm, which has been subjected to questions about its authenticity.

Virginia Eliza Clemm was born to a couple in mourning, entering the family just 10 days after the tragic death of her two-year-old sister.

William Clemm Jr. and Maria Poe Clemm named their new baby, arriving on August 15, 1822, after their recently deceased child.

Virginia’s father died in 1826 when she was just four, and her mother was soon put in charge of supporting the family at their home in Baltimore, Maryland. Others in the home included Virginia’s grandmother Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, who was paralyzed and bedridden, and Virginia’s brother, Henry.

Despite having a tragic start to life and a lack of formal education, Virginia Eliza Clemm soon found joy in singing and playing various musical instruments. She especially excelled at playing the piano.

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Edgar Allan Poe And Virginia Eliza Clemm’s Relationship As First Cousins

Wikimedia Commons A photo of Edgar Allan Poe, taken just months before the writer’s death at age 40 in 1849.

In 1831, Edgar Allan Poe was two years removed from the U.S. Army, and had just left a brief stint at the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. Homeless and destitute, he reached out to his brother, who happened to be living with his aunt Maria, his grandmother Elizabeth, and his now nine-year-old cousin Virginia. Before long, Poe had moved into the Baltimore household.

Poe soon began to spend a lot of time with Virginia. He tutored her, went on walks with her, and even instructed her to leave notes for a neighbor whom he was interested in. Poe called Virginia “Sissy,” and she called him “Eddie.” Clearly, the newly reunited cousins had become very close.

But before long, tragedy struck. First, Edgar Allan Poe’s brother died. And then, his grandmother died in 1835, ending the family’s only dependable income, the annual $240 pension of her deceased husband (who had served in the American Revolution). The loss of Elizabeth Cairnes Poe made the family’s already precarious financial situation even more dire.

That same summer, Poe made a career move to Richmond, Virginia to write for the Southern Literary Messenger . He reportedly missed his cousin Virginia greatly during this time period, and some of his family members began to suspect that he had intentions of marrying the young girl.

Another cousin of Virginia’s, Neilson Poe, reportedly believed that Virginia was far too young to get married. He offered his home to her so that she could attend school and perhaps have a better chance of escaping poverty.

When Edgar Allan Poe learned of Neilson’s offer, he wrote hysterical letters to his aunt Maria, one reading: “I am blinded with tears while writing this letter — I have no wish to live another hour… you know I love Virginia passionately… Oh Aunty, Aunty you loved me once — how can you be so cruel now? You speak of Virginia acquiring accomplishments, and entering into society — you speak in so worldly a tone. Are you sure she would be more happy — Do you think any one could love her more dearly than I?”

Shortly thereafter, Poe either lost his new job or quit, and then promptly returned to Baltimore — determined to wed his young cousin Virginia.

The Marriage Of Edgar Allan Poe And Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe

Wikimedia Commons A copy of Edgar Allan Poe and Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s marriage bond.

Though it wasn’t taboo for first cousins to marry in the 1830s, Virginia Eliza Clemm was considered an extremely young bride — even for the time. Nonetheless, Poe applied for a marriage license on September 22, 1835.

They held the wedding in Richmond on May 16, 1836. Virginia’s age was listed as 21 on the marriage bond, but she was really only 13 years old at the time. And Poe was 27 years old. (Shockingly, they may have even had a secret private wedding before the ceremony that was held in public.)

Some say the wedding took place at Mrs. Yarrington’s boarding house, while others state it took place at the home of Amasa Converse. The Poes would then travel to the city of Petersburg, Virginia for a honeymoon.

From there, Poe biographers differ in their speculations and interpretations of the nature of Edgar Allan Poe’s relationship with his child bride.

Some say that Poe and Virginia’s relationship was purely platonic. Others suggest that the married couple did not consummate their union until Virginia was 16 years old. Yet others believe that Poe never had any sexual interest in women, and that his bride ultimately died a virgin.

Wikimedia Commons A Valentine poem that Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe wrote in 1846.

Still, Poe biographer Kenneth Silverman maintains: “Poe cared about the public impression he might create by marrying a child. He sometimes handled the problem by simply misrepresenting her age.” Silverman adds that Poe sometimes also claimed he was younger than his actual age.

After the wedding, Poe struggled to provide for Virginia and her mother. While living in New York, they were so impoverished that they couldn’t even afford blankets. Poe reportedly gave Virginia his old military jacket to keep her warm. He also made sure Virginia always had access to a piano.

By most accounts, Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe idolized her husband. She stayed close to him whenever he wrote, and kept his pens clean and his papers organized so that his workspace would always be tidy.

Poe was said to be enamored with his young wife, and one of his employers, George Rex Graham, remembered, “His love for his wife was a sort of rapturous worship of the spirit of beauty.” However, Poe was also accused of having extramarital affairs while he was married to Virginia, which reportedly caused Virginia a great amount of distress and anguish.

Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s Illness And Death

Wikimedia Commons Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s final home was in the Edgar Allan Poe Cottage in the Bronx, New York.

The first sign of Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s health troubles occurred in January 1842. She began to cough up blood while singing one day. Poe initially believed the bloody cough was due to a broken blood vessel, but the truth soon became evident. Virginia had contracted tuberculosis.

Her condition worsened, and she was soon housebound. The family moved around to find a place where Virginia would be most comfortable, and her final home would be a cottage in the Bronx, New York (which still stands today and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places).

By the fall of 1846, Virginia’s condition had become even more severe. She struggled to eat, had an unstable pulse, and suffered from frequent fevers, night sweats, chest pains, and coughing up blood. Poe was reportedly beside himself with grief, as it was clear that she would not live much longer. Up until that point, with each slight remission of Virginia’s suffering, he wrote , “I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.”

Virginia’s nurse, Marie Louise Shew, later remembered some of Virginia’s tragic final moments: “The day before Mrs. Poe died I left to make some arrangements for her comfort. She called me to her bedside, took a picture of her husband from under her pillow, kissed it, and gave it to me.”

Reportedly, Virginia’s final wishes were for Poe’s loved ones to look after him when she was gone, and she asked her mother to never leave his side. Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe died on January 30, 1847. She was just 24.

How The Death Of Edgar Allan Poe’s Wife Affected The Writer

Wikimedia Commons Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s gravestone in Baltimore.

After Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe’s death, Edgar Allan Poe realized that he possessed no likeness of his wife from when she was alive, so he commissioned a watercolor portrait just after she perished.

To say that Virginia’s passing greatly affected Poe seems to be an understatement. Poe’s friend, Charles C. Burr, recalled his enduring grief: “Many times, after the death of his beloved wife, was he found at the dead hour of a winter-night, sitting beside her tomb almost frozen in the snow, where he had wandered from his bed weeping and wailing.”

Another friend of the author’s was quoted as saying, “The loss of his wife was a sad blow to him. He did not seem to care, after she was gone, whether he lived an hour, a day, a week, or a year.”

As Virginia had requested just before she died, her mother Maria stayed close to Poe. However, Poe himself would not live much longer. He died under mysterious circumstances after suffering from hallucinations in 1849 at the age of 40, just a couple of years after Virginia’s passing.

After learning about Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe, Edgar Allan Poe’s child bride, read about some more shocking examples of child marriages . Then, go inside some of the strangest deaths of famous and historical figures .

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The Truth About Edgar Allan Poe's Wife

That whole "marrying your cousin" thing, frowned upon these days, wasn't always considered such a bad choice. There are plenty of examples on Mental Floss : Jesse James married his first cousin, Zerelda "Zee" Mimms (she was even named after his mother); Albert Einstein 's second wife was his second cousin, Elsa; and at the ripe old age of 27, Edgar Allan Poe married his first cousin, Virginia Clemm, who was herself a stately 13 years of age that year of 1836.

Poe had some miles on him at that point. He was 3 years old when his mother died of tuberculosis. His father, an actor, had already abandoned the family, and Poe went to live with the Allans, eventually taking their name as his middle name. He served in the Army, rising to the rank of sergeant major, and attended the Military Academy at West Point, though he was dismissed after a year for being less than dutiful. He went on to mixed success as a writer, both as a journalist and in fiction. He found more success as a critic — Biography tells us he earned the nickname "The Tomahawk Man" for his scathing critiques.

The marriage of cousins in those days was not unusual; Virginia's age probably raised an eyebrow or two, but it still wasn't utterly scandalous. They seemed to have been genuinely devoted to one another — as Women in History relates, he called her "Sissy" and she called him "Eddy."

He was 27; she was 13

The same blog further explains that some think the marriage was never actually consummated. (As Morehead State Public Radio puts it, "Biographers disagree as to the nature of the couple's relationship.") Others say the couple began (happily) to share a marital bed once she turned 16.

Just as people of that time married at a young age, death often came at a young age. Virginia Poe was one example. In January 1842, Virginia was singing and playing the piano when she began to cough up blood. It was a very visible symptom of tuberculosis — the same incurable disease which had killed Edgar's mother. After five years of suffering, Virginia died, age 24.

There's no question but that Edgar was devastated by the death of his wife. As the American Literary Blog points out, Virginia's death did not drive Edgar to drink. On the contrary, he'd been drinking far too much earlier in their marriage. After Virginia's death he rose from his depression to seek help with his alcohol abuse. He joined a temperance society and basically sobered up.

Virginia Clemm Poe was just 24 years old when she died in 1847. Edgar's mother also died of tuberculosis at age 24. Edgar followed Virginia in 1849 — to this day, his death is clouded in mystery.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston. Poe’s father and mother, both professional actors, died before the poet was three years old, and John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter, sent Poe to the best boarding schools and, later, to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and Other Poems  (George Redway), was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems  (Hatch & Dunning). Neither volume received significant critical or public attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter, Virginia, in Baltimore.

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and “The Raven.” After Virginia’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe’s lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of “acute congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s work as an editor, poet, and critic had a profound impact on American and international literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short story. He was also one of the first critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement. French Symbolists such as Stéphane Mallarmé and Arthur Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Charles  Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years translating Poe into French. Today, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world literature.

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Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe’s stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the “art for art’s sake” movement in 19th-century European literature. Whereas earlier critics predominantly concerned themselves with moral or ideological generalities, Poe focused his criticism on the specifics of style and construction that contributed to a work’s effectiveness or failure. In his own work, he demonstrated a brilliant command of language and technique as well as an inspired and original imagination. Poe’s poetry and short stories greatly influenced the French Symbolists of the late 19th century, who in turn altered the direction of modern literature.

Poe’s father and mother were professional actors. At the time of his birth in 1809, they were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died, and he was raised in the home of John Allan, a prosperous exporter from Richmond, Virginia, who never legally adopted his foster son. As a boy, Poe attended the best schools available, and was admitted to the University of Virginia at Charlottesville in 1825. While there he distinguished himself academically but was forced to leave after less than a year because of bad debts and inadequate financial support from Allan. Poe’s relationship with Allan disintegrated upon his return to Richmond in 1827, and soon after Poe left for Boston, where he enlisted in the army and also published his first poetry collection,  Tamerlane, and Other Poems.  The volume went unnoticed by readers and reviewers, and a second collection,  Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems,  received only slightly more attention when it appeared in 1829. That same year Poe was honorably discharged from the army, having attained the rank of regimental sergeant major, and was then admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point. However, because Allan would neither provide his foster son with sufficient funds to maintain himself as a cadet nor give the consent necessary to resign from the Academy, Poe gained a dismissal by ignoring his duties and violating regulations. He subsequently went to New York City, where  Poems,  his third collection of verse, was published in 1831, and then to Baltimore, where he lived at the home of his aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm.

Over the next few years Poe’s first short stories appeared in the Philadelphia  Saturday Courier  and his “MS. Found in a Bottle” won a cash prize for best story in the Baltimore  Saturday Visitor.  Nevertheless, Poe was still not earning enough to live independently, nor did Allan’s death in 1834 provide him with an inheritance. The following year, however, his financial problems were temporarily alleviated when he accepted an editorship at  The Southern Literary Messenger  in Richmond, bringing with him his aunt and his 12-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836.  The Southern Literary Messenger  was the first of several journals Poe would direct over the next 10 years and through which he rose to prominence as a leading man of letters in America. Poe made himself known not only as a superlative author of poetry and fiction, but also as a literary critic whose level of imagination and insight had hitherto been unapproached in American literature. While Poe’s writings gained attention in the late 1830s and early 1840s, the profits from his work remained meager, and he supported himself by editing  Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine  and  Graham’s Magazine  in Philadelphia and the  Broadway Journal  in New York City. After his wife’s death from tuberculosis in 1847, Poe became involved in a number of romantic affairs. It was while he prepared for his second marriage that Poe, for reasons unknown, arrived in Baltimore in late September of 1849. On October 3, he was discovered in a state of semi-consciousness; he died four days later without regaining the necessary lucidity to explain what had happened during the last days of his life.

Poe’s most conspicuous contribution to world literature derives from the analytical method he practiced both as a creative author and as a critic of the works of his contemporaries. His self-declared intention was to formulate strictly artistic ideals in a milieu that he thought overly concerned with the utilitarian value of literature, a tendency he termed the “heresy of the Didactic.” While Poe’s position includes the chief requisites of pure aestheticism, his emphasis on literary formalism was directly linked to his philosophical ideals: through the calculated use of language one may express, though always imperfectly, a vision of truth and the essential condition of human existence. Poe’s theory of literary creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered successful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest detail of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the author. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader’s sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, strangeness, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in “tales of ratiocination” or works evoking “terror, or passion, or horror.”

Aside from a common theoretical basis, there is a psychological intensity that is characteristic of Poe’s writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories—which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. In his Gothic tales, Poe also employed an essentially symbolic, almost allegorical method which gives such works as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “Ligeia” an enigmatic quality that accounts for their enduring interest and links them with the symbolical works of Nathaniel Hawthorne and  Herman Melville . The influence of Poe’s tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P. Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. In addition to his achievement as creator of the modern horror tale, Poe is also credited with parenting two other popular genres: science fiction and the detective story. In such works as “The Unparalleled Adventure of Hans Pfaall” and “Von Kempelen and His Discovery,” Poe took advantage of the fascination for science and technology that emerged in the early 19th century to produce speculative and fantastic narratives which anticipate a type of literature that did not become widely practiced until the 20th century. Similarly, Poe’s three tales of ratiocination—“The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” “The Purloined Letter,” and “The Mystery of Marie Roget”—are recognized as the models which established the major characters and literary conventions of detective fiction, specifically the amateur sleuth who solves a crime that has confounded the authorities and whose feats of deductive reasoning are documented by an admiring associate. Just as Poe influenced many succeeding authors and is regarded as an ancestor of such major literary movements as Symbolism and Surrealism, he was also influenced by earlier literary figures and movements. In his use of the demonic and the grotesque, Poe evidenced the impact of the stories of E.T.A. Hoffman and the Gothic novels of Ann Radcliffe, while the despair and melancholy in much of his writing reflects an affinity with the Romantic movement of the early 19th century. It was Poe’s particular genius that in his work he gave consummate artistic form both to his personal obsessions and those of previous literary generations, at the same time creating new forms which provided a means of expression for future artists.

While Poe is most often remembered for his short fiction, his first love as a writer was poetry, which he began writing during his adolescence. His early verse reflects the influence of such English romantics as  Lord Byron ,  John Keats , and  Percy Bysshe Shelley , yet foreshadows his later poetry which demonstrates a subjective outlook and surreal, mystic vision. “Tamerlane” and “Al Aaraaf” exemplify Poe’s evolution from the portrayal of Byronic heroes to the depiction of journeys within his own imagination and subconscious. The former piece, reminiscent of Byron’s “Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,” recounts the life and adventures of a 14th-century Mongol conqueror; the latter poem portrays a dreamworld where neither good nor evil permanently reside and where absolute beauty can be directly discerned. In other poems—“ To Helen ,” “Lenore,” and “ The Raven ” in particular—Poe investigates the loss of ideal beauty and the difficulty in regaining it. These pieces are usually narrated by a young man who laments the untimely death of his beloved.  “ To Helen” is a three stanza lyric that has been called one of the most beautiful love poems in the English language. The subject of the work is a woman who becomes, in the eyes of the narrator, a personification of the classical beauty of ancient Greece and Rome. “Lenore” presents ways in which the dead are best remembered, either by mourning or celebrating life beyond earthly boundaries. In “The Raven,” Poe successfully unites his philosophical and aesthetic ideals. In this psychological piece, a young scholar is emotionally tormented by a raven’s ominous repetition of “Nevermore” in answer to his question about the probability of an afterlife with his deceased lover.  Charles Baudelaire  noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven” : “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair; it lacks nothing: neither the fever of ideas, nor the violence of colors, nor sickly reasoning, nor drivelling terror, nor even the bizarre gaiety of suffering which makes it more terrible.” Poe also wrote poems that were intended to be read aloud. Experimenting with combinations of sound and rhythm, he employed such technical devices as repetition, parallelism, internal rhyme, alliteration, and assonance to produce works that are unique in American poetry for their haunting, musical quality. In “The Bells,” for example, the repetition of the word “bells” in various structures accentuates the unique tonality of the different types of bells described in the poem.

While his works were not conspicuously acclaimed during his lifetime, Poe did earn due respect as a gifted fiction writer, poet, and man of letters, and occasionally he achieved a measure of popular success, especially following the appearance of “ The Raven .” After his death, however, the history of his critical reception becomes one of dramatically uneven judgments and interpretations. This state of affairs was initiated by Poe’s one-time friend and literary executor R.W. Griswold, who, in a libelous obituary notice in the  New York Tribune  bearing the byline “Ludwig,” attributed the depravity and psychological aberrations of many of the characters in Poe’s fiction to Poe himself. In retrospect, Griswold’s vilifications seem ultimately to have elicited as much sympathy as censure with respect to Poe and his work, leading subsequent biographers of the late 19th century to defend, sometimes too devotedly, Poe’s name. It was not until the 1941 biography by A.H. Quinn that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author’s life and his imagination. Nevertheless, the identification of Poe with the murderers and madmen of his works survived and flourished in the 20th century, most prominently in the form of psychoanalytical studies such as those of Marie Bonaparte and Joseph Wood Krutch. Added to the controversy over the sanity, or at best the maturity of Poe (Paul Elmer More called him “the poet of unripe boys and unsound men”), was the question of the value of Poe’s works as serious literature. At the forefront of Poe’s detractors were such eminent figures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T.S. Eliot, who dismissed Poe’s works as juvenile, vulgar, and artistically debased; in contrast, these same works have been judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as Bernard Shaw and  William Carlos Williams . Complementing Poe’s erratic reputation among English and American critics is the more stable, and generally more elevated opinion of critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of Charles Baudelaire in the 1850s, Poe’s works were received with a peculiar esteem by French writers, most profoundly those associated with the late 19th-century movement of Symbolism, who admired Poe’s transcendent aspirations as a poet; the 20th-century movement of Surrealism, which valued Poe’s bizarre and apparently unruled imagination; and such figures as Paul Valéry, who found in Poe’s theories and thought an ideal of supreme rationalism. In other countries, Poe’s works have enjoyed a similar regard, and numerous studies have been written tracing the influence of the American author on the international literary scene, especially in Russia, Japan, Scandinavia, and Latin America. Today, Poe is recognized as one of the foremost progenitors of modern literature, both in its popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in its more complex and self-conscious forms, which represent the essential artistic manner of the 20th century. In contrast to earlier critics who viewed the man and his works as one, criticism of the past 25 years has developed a view of Poe as a detached artist who was more concerned with displaying his virtuosity than with expressing his soul, and who maintained an ironic rather than an autobiographical relationship to his writings. While at one time critics such as  Yvor Winters  wished to remove Poe from literary history, his works remain integral to any conception of modernism in world literature. Herbert Marshall McLuhan wrote in an essay entitled “Edgar Poe’s Tradition”: “While the New England dons primly turned the pages of Plato and Buddha beside a tea-cozy, and while Browning and Tennyson were creating a parochial fog for the English mind to relax in, Poe never lost contact with the terrible pathos of his time. Coevally with Baudelaire, and long before Conrad and Eliot, he explored the heart of darkness.”

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Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short story writer, editor, and critic. Credited by many scholars as the inventor of the detective genre in fiction, he was a master at using elements of mystery, psychological terror, and the macabre in his writing. His most famous poem, “The Raven” (1845), combines his penchant for suspense with some of the most famous lines in American poetry. While editor of the Richmond-based Southern Literary Messenger , Poe carved out a philosophy of poetry that emphasized brevity and beauty for its own sake. Stories, he wrote, should be crafted to convey a single, unified impression, and for Poe, that impression was most often dread. “The Tell-Tale Heart” (1843), for instance, memorably describes the paranoia of its narrator, who is guilty of murder. After leaving Richmond, Poe lived and worked in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, and New York, seeming to collect literary enemies wherever he went. Incensed by his especially sharp, often sarcastic style of criticism, they were not inclined to help Poe as his life unraveled because of sickness and poverty. After Poe’s death at the age of forty, a former colleague, Rufus W. Griswold, wrote a scathing biography that contributed, in the years to come, to a literary caricature. Poe’s poetry and prose, however, have endured.

Early Years

Edgar Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, to traveling actors David Poe Jr. (a Baltimore, Maryland, native) and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins (an emigrant from England). Poe was the couple’s second of three children. His brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, was born in 1807, and his sister, Rosalie Poe, was born in 1810. On December 8, 1811, when Poe was just two years old, his mother died in Richmond. His father, who had left the family in 1810, died of unknown circumstances. Henry, as William Henry Leonard was known, lived with his grandparents in Baltimore, while Rosalie and Edgar remained in Richmond. William and Jane Mackenzie adopted Rosalie, and Edgar became the foster son of John and Frances Allan. Poe received his middle name from his foster parents.

In 1815 Allan, a tobacco merchant, moved with his wife and foster son to England in an attempt to improve his business interests there. Poe attended school in Chelsea until 1820, when the family returned to Richmond. John Allan had always hoped that Poe would join his own mercantile firm, but Poe was determined to become a writer and, in particular, a poet. In 1826, he attended the University of Virginia in Charlottesville. Although he distinguished himself academically, Allan denied him financial support after less than a year because of Poe’s gambling debts and what Allan perceived to be his ward’s lack of direction. Without money, Poe returned briefly to Richmond, only to find that his fiancée, Sarah Elmira Royster, under the direction of her family, had married an older and wealthier suitor, Alexander Shelton.

Disheartened and penniless, Poe left Richmond for Boston where, using the name “A Bostonian,” he authored Tamerlane and other Poems (1827), a collection of seven brief, lyrical poems. In particular, “The Lake” employs what would become typical Poe-esque symbolism, with calm waters representing the speaker’s repressed emotions, always threatening to dangerously swell. The book’s sales were negligible.

Still unable to support himself, Poe enlisted in the United States Army on May 26, 1827, under the pseudonym “Edgar A. Perry.” (He was eighteen at the time but claimed to be twenty-two.) During his military service, he was stationed at Fort Moultrie on Sullivan’s Island in Charleston, South Carolina—a site he would later appropriate as the setting for his story, “The Gold Bug”—and then at Fort Monroe in Hampton, Virginia. On February 28, 1829, while Poe was in Virginia, his foster mother, Frances Allan, died.

Despite having been promoted to sergeant major, Poe became dissatisfied with army life and appealed to his foster father for help in releasing him from his five-year commitment. In a December 1, 1828, letter to Allan, Poe worried that “the prime of my life would be wasted” in the army and threatened “more decided measures if you refuse to assist me.” During this tumultuous period, Poe compiled a second collection of verse, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems (1829), but it, too, received little attention. Critics described the poems in terms ranging from “incoherent” to “beautiful and enduring.”

With Allan’s help, Poe left the army and was admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point, which he attended from 1830 until 1831. Poe thrived academically, but again experienced financial problems, this time running afoul of both his foster father and school officials. Expelled from West Point and disowned by Allan, Poe traveled to Baltimore to reside with his aunt, Maria Clemm, and her young daughter, Virginia. The events of Poe’s life from 1831 until 1833 remain relatively obscure.

Out of Obscurity

While living in Baltimore, Poe turned in earnest to his literary efforts. His third volume of verse, Poems (1831), hints at the Gothic sensibility—in particular, a preoccupation with death and psychological instability—that would become his trademark. For instance, “Irene” (revised as “The Sleeper”) features a distraught young man who, at midnight, mourns over his lover’s corpse: “Strange is thy pallor! strange thy dress, / Strange above all, thy length of tress, / And this all solemn silentness!” Poe received some help and encouragement from the literary editor and critic John Neal, but his poems continued to attract scant notice.

In an effort to improve his financial position, Poe turned to fiction. Because they sold the best, he wrote mostly Gothic-style horror and suspense stories and, in 1831, entered five of them in a contest sponsored by the weekly newspaper, the Philadelphia Saturday Courier . Although he won no prize, the tales were published anonymously during 1832. In October 1833, Poe’s story “MS. Found in a Bottle”—about a midnight accident at sea and a mysterious ship that appears out of the “watery hell”—won a competition sponsored by the Baltimore Saturday Visiter . His poem “The Coliseum” would have been awarded best poem, as well, but the judges preferred not to offer both prizes to a single author.

One of the competition’s judges was John Pendleton Kennedy, a Whig Party politician, literary editor, and author of Swallow Barn, or a Sojourn in the Old Dominion (1832). In 1835, Kennedy encouraged Poe to apply for an assistant editor position at the Southern Literary Messenger , a Richmond-based magazine founded the previous year by Thomas Willis White. Poe received the job and was soon promoted to editor despite clashing with White over his—Poe’s—excessive drinking.

In May 1836, for the first time feeling financially secure enough to marry, Poe wed his thirteen-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm. Historians disagree over whether they consummated their marriage. Virginia’s mother, Poe’s aunt, kept house for the couple and continued to do so for Poe after Virginia’s death.

Poe’s work at the Messenger helped him climb out of literary obscurity. Under his direction, the journal’s circulation increased and Poe began to develop contacts with the northern literary establishment. He turned these successes to his advantage, publishing revised versions of his own stories and poems. Still, he became best known for his caustic literary criticism, such as a December 1835 review of Theodore S. Fay’s novel, Norman Leslie : “We do not mean to say that there is positively nothing in Mr. Fay’s novel to commend—but there is indeed very little.” And about Morris Mattson’s Paul Ulric , he wrote, in February 1836: “When we called Norman Leslie the silliest book in the world we had certainly never seen Paul Ulric .”

That Fay was a darling of the New York literary establishment helped provoke a long-running feud between Poe and Lewis Gaylord Clark, editor of New York City’s Knickerbocker Magazine and an ardent defender of northern literary sensibilities. Poe and Clark insulted one another in print for years, with Clark, in 1845, calling Poe “‘nothing if not critical,’ and even less than nothing at that.”

A New Literary Sensibility

Poe’s sharp-tongued criticisms may have won him lifelong enemies, but they also served to articulate an important new literary sensibility. Poems should be short, he argued, and poems should be beautiful. In his “Letter to Mr. B—,” published in the Messenger (July 1836), Poe mocks William Wordsworth for his “long wordy discussions by which he tries to reason us into admiration of his poetry,” and then, after quoting the poet on the subject of a “snow-white mountain lamb,” sarcastically rejoinders: “Now, we have no doubt this is all true: we will believe it, indeed we will, Mr. W. Is it sympathy for the sheep you wish to excite? I love a sheep from the bottom of my heart.”

True literature, meanwhile, should celebrate beauty for its own sake and not be burdened with the sort of purposefulness one might find in a Sunday morning sermon. Here, Poe both echoes Nathaniel Hawthorne—who famously complained of those inclined “relentlessly to impale the story with its moral, as with an iron rod”—and pokes fun at his Puritan sensibilities: “I see no reason, then, why our metaphysical poets should plume themselves so much on the utility of their works, unless indeed they refer to instruction with eternity in view; in which case, sincere respect for their piety would not allow me to express contempt for their judgment … ”

“The Tell-Tale Heart” Over the years, Poe also argued that the short story was the supreme form in fiction, meant to be tightly constructed and convey a single, unified impression. In Poe’s case, that impression was most often fear, foreboding, and dread, as evidenced in short stories like “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), which describes an excruciatingly slow plan of revenge. And for such unified impressions to take hold, brevity—a term Poe calculated to mean a work that took no longer than ninety minutes to read—was crucial. “As the novel cannot be read at one sitting,” he wrote in 1842 in an admiring review of a Hawthorne collection, “it cannot avail itself of the immense benefit of totality . Worldly interests, intervening during the pauses of perusals, modify, counteract and annul the impressions intended.”

Poe did not limit his fiction to Gothic tales, however. From 1833 until 1836, he attempted and failed to find a publisher for his collection of satirical stories, Tales of the Folio Club . In the book, club members meet monthly to critique each other’s stories, all of which turn out to be caricatures of the styles of popular writers from Poe’s day. His critical ax never dull, Poe still managed to place a number of the stories in journals such as the Messenger and the Philadelphia Saturday Courier .

After Richmond

After years of battling the northern literary elite, Poe left the Messenger in January 1837 and moved north himself, working in various editorial posts, most notably at Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia. Sometime between November 1839 and January 1840, his two-volume collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque was published, providing a broader audience to many of his previously published stories. In stories such as “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Poe rebutted charges of “Germanism and gloom,” Germany being a preferred literary source for his Gothic sensibility. “If in many of my productions terror has been the thesis,” he wrote, “I maintain that terror is not of Germany but of the soul—”

His famous opening to “Usher” suggests that he more than walked the walk of his literary philosophy, expertly compressing Teutonic gloom into a single storm cloud of a sentence: “During the whole of a dull, dark, and soundless day in the autumn of the year, when the clouds hung oppressively low in the heavens, I had been passing alone, on horseback, through a singularly dreary tract of country; and at length found myself, as the shades of evening drew on, within view of the melancholy House of Usher.”

Graham’s , meanwhile, featured some of Poe’s most assertive original fiction. In “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” (April 1841), for instance, Poe introduced the detective story prototype that Sir Arthur Conan Doyle would make so famous with his Sherlock Holmes episodes: an uncannily observant detective solves the crime while accompanied by his friend, who also narrates the events. In “The Masque of the Red Death” (May 1842), Poe traded the hyper-logic of detectives for the psychological horror of disease and inevitable death, describing a masquerade ball set in a plague-stricken Italian castle.

Later Years

By 1844, Poe had relocated to New York, home of any number of his most bitter literary enemies and where he became the editor and then owner of the literary weekly, Broadway Journal . In January 1845, the New York Evening Mirror published his poem, “The Raven,” a disturbing account of its grief-stricken narrator’s encounter with a bird that knows but one word: “Nevermore.” The poem’s opening lines— “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary / Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore,”—are among the most famous in the English language and brought Poe wide and almost instant acclaim. Nevertheless, they failed to deliver him from his persistent financial troubles.

Nor did Poe’s unpredictable moods and pugilistic criticism help him make friends in literary circles. In October 1845, he annoyed a Boston audience prepared for a talk about poetry by instead reciting his long and obscure poem “Al Aaraaf.” He continued to lampoon in print his fellow writers, including Thomas Dunn English, whom he worked with in Philadelphia. Some critics have even suggested that Poe used his feud with English as motivation for his revenge fantasy in “The Cask of Amontillado.”

When Broadway Journal went under in January 1846, Poe lost the most reliable venue for his attacks. And having alienated so many of his fellow writers and editors, he found it difficult to publish and, therefore, to make money. Then, in January 1847, his wife Virginia died of tuberculosis, sending Poe into bouts of depression and torturous grief, during which he reportedly sought the comforts of alcohol. Some historians have speculated that his alcohol use was complicated by either diabetes or hypoglycemia, which would have resulted in violent mood swings. This, in turn, might help to explain later portraits of Poe—in particular from the pen of Rufus W. Griswold, who had succeeded him as editor at Graham’s —as an irreclaimable alcoholic.

In 1849, Poe traveled to Richmond to read his poetry and lecture on “The Philosophy of Composition,” which had been published in the April 1846 issue of Graham’s as a critical explication of his writing of “The Raven.” While there, he reunited with his one-time fiancée, Elmira Shelton, who was now widowed and wealthy. Poe decided to marry her and move to Richmond, and late in September departed for Fordham, New York, where he would arrange to move his aunt Maria to Virginia.

Edgar Allan Poe (Audio) The move never happened, however. A few weeks later, Poe was found unconscious and dangerously ill outside a Baltimore tavern. He died in the hospital on October 7, 1849, and received a swift burial in his grandfather Poe’s cemetery lot in the Westminster Presbyterian Church Cemetery in Baltimore. Historians have long disagreed about the exact cause of his death, suggesting everything from rabies to alcoholism.

Poe had given Griswold a memorandum from which to write a biography of him, but the editor’s use of this work was distinctly unflattering—even treacherous. Griswold quickly produced a polemic obituary and soon after undertook to publish a multivolume edition of Poe’s writings, The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe (1850–1856) , as well as an unjust and inflammatory fifty-page memoir detailing Poe’s life. This sketch, subsequently used by many later biographers, helped in part to create the caricature of Poe that has survived in American literary legend—as a death-obsessed, drug-addled debaucher.

Poe’s room on the West Range at the University of Virginia is open for viewing by the public. In Richmond, the Poe Museum, which first opened in 1922, features a large collection of the writer’s manuscripts, letters, first editions, and personal belongings.

Major Works

• Tamerlane and Other Poems: By a Bostonian (1827)
• Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
• Poems, By Edgar A. Poe (1831)
• The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, of Nantucket (short novel, 1838)
• Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
• Prose Romances: The Murders in the Rue Morgue and The Man That Was Used Up (1843)
• The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
• Tales (1845)
• Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)
• The Literati (1850)
• Politan: An Unfinished Tragedy (1923)

The Poe Museum

The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore

University of Virginia Library Electronic Text Center

The Poe Studies Association

• Antebellum Period (1820–1860)
• Fisher, Benjamin F. Ed. Poe and His Times: The Artist in His Milieu. Baltimore: The Edgar Allan Poe Society, 1990.
• Hayes, Kevin J., ed. The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe . Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002.
• Quinn, Arthur Hobson. Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Biography . New York: Appleton-Century, 1941; reprinted with a new foreword by Shawn Rosenheim. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998.
• Thomas, Dwight, and David K. Jackson. The Poe Log: A Documentary Life of Edgar Allan Poe 1809–1849 . Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987.
• Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford University Press, 1963.
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Edgar Allan Poe | Biography of the Famous American Writer

Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century American writer, editor and literary critic who is regarded as one of the greatest poets and short story writers of his era . After his father abandoned the family and his mother died, Poe was raised by his foster parents, John Allan and his wife Frances Allan . Though Poe wanted to become a writer from an early age, circumstances forced him to join the army at the age of 18. It was only in the early 1830s that Poe was able to dedicate his time to a full time writing career. He went on to work for a number of newspapers including Southern Literary Messenger, Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, Graham’s Magazine and Broadway Journal . On January 29, 1845, Poe’s poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror . It became an immediate popular sensation making Edgar Allan Poe a household name . Despite this success, Poe struggled financially throughout his life . Moreover, his life was marred by tragedies including the death of his wife Maria Clemm in 1847 . Poe died two years later under mysterious circumstances . Know about the family, education, career, marriage and death of Edgar Allan Poe through his biography.

Early Life And Family

Edgar Poe was born on 19th January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts . Both his parents, David Poe Jr. and his wife Elizabeth Hopkins Arnold Poe , were professional actors . He also had an elder brother named William Henry Leonard Poe and a younger sister named Rosalie Poe . Poe never got the chance to know his parents since his father abandoned the family in 1810 and his mother passed away the following year after suffering from Pulmonary Tuberculosis . At this time Poe was only three years old . Following this, Poe was separated from his brother and sister; and was taken to Richmond, Virginia where he lived with a rich tobacco merchant John Allan and his wife Frances Allan . Though he was never formally adopted by them, they served as his foster family and gave him the name Edgar Allan Poe .

Poe had a close relationship with his foster mother Frances Allan but he could never get along with his foster father John Allan. John wanted Poe to follow him into his family business but Poe preferred poetry and writing from an early age . In fact, by the age of 13, he was a prolific poet. However, his writing talent was discouraged by his headmaster and his foster father.

The Allans moved to Britain in 1816 and, for a brief period, Poe attended the grammar school in Irvine, Scotland . He joined them in London in 1816. In London, Poe attended a boarding school in Chelsea till 1817 and then entered the Reverend John Bransby’s Manor House School at Stoke Newington . In 1820, Poe moved back with his foster parents to Richmond and continued schooling there.

In February 1826 , Poe enrolled in the University of Virginia to study ancient and modern languages . He excelled at his curriculum but due to his differences with John Allan, he did not receive any financial support to cover his costs. Poe tried to gamble himself out of this situation but instead ended up in debt . All this forced Poe to drop out of college . Another setback greeted Poe when he returned home as he learned that his neighbor and fiancee, Sarah Elmira Royster , had become engaged to someone else . Depressed and heartbroken, Poe moved to Boston in April 1827. At Boston, he sustained himself with odd jobs including that of a clerk and a newspaper writer . During this period, he also started using the pseudonym Henri Le Rennet , possibly out of embarrassment.

Early Years In The Army

At the age of 18, on May 27th 1827 , Poe enlisted in the United States Army as a private to support himself. His service commenced at Fort Independence in Boston Harbor at a remuneration of $5 a month . This was also the year when he published his first collection of poetry, a 40-page book title called Tamerlane and Other Poems . It turned out to be a failure and only 50 copies of it were ever printed.

Poe served for two years in the army attaining the rank of Sergeant Major for Artillery . He then tried to end his five-year enlistment early. His commanding officer agreed to discharge him only on the condition that he reconciled with his foster father . However John Allan ignored his letters. Around this time, Poe learned that his foster mother was dying of tuberculosis . Unfortunately by the time he returned to Richmond, she had already passed away . The death of Francis was followed by a brief period of peace between Poe and John Allan. This allowed Poe to be discharged from the army on April 15, 1829.

In 1829 , Poe published a second collection of poetry titled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems but it was also unsuccessful. Following this, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy at West Point . In October 1830 , John Allan remarried . This led to bitter quarrels between Poe and his foster father; and ultimately John Allan disowned Poe . This was followed by Poe leaving West point by purposely getting court-martialed in 1831.

After leaving West Point, Poe decided to focus on writing full-time. In February 1831, Poe left for New York and released a third volume of poems, simply titled Poems . This volume too couldn’t get Poe the success he desired. In March 1831, Poe returned to Baltimore to live with his aunt Maria Clemm , her daughter Virginia and his brother Henry Leonard Poe . Another tragedy befell on Poe as his brother died on August 1, 1831.

After his brother’s death, Poe decided to re-focus on his writing career. He traveled extensively in search of new opportunities, living in multiple cities such as New York, Baltimore, Philadelphia and Richmond . Apart from poetry, Poe also turned his attention to prose. He submitted a few short stories to the Philadelphia Publication House while simultaneously working on his drama Politian . He was finally able to create substantial buzz around his work when Baltimore Saturday Visitor awarded him a prize for his short story titled MS. Found in a Bottle in October 1833 . In August 1835 , Poe was also able to secure the position of editor in the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, Virginia and he remained at the magazine till January 1837 .

Over the next ten years, Edgar Allan Poe edited a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia; and the Broadway Journal in New York City. He also sold his work to Alexander’s Weekly Messenger , among other journals. As an editor and writer, Poe developed a reputation of a ruthless critic due to his vicious reviews of his contemporaries .

On January 29, 1845 , Poe’s poem The Raven appeared in the New York Evening Mirror and became an immediate popular sensation . It was soon reprinted, parodied and illustrated; and it made Edgar Allan Poe a household name . The Raven is one of the most famous poems in English literature and it influenced numerous later works including the famous painting Nevermore by Paul Gauguin. Interestingly, Poe was only paid $9 for the publication of The Raven .

Despite finally achieving fame and becoming a popular writer, Poe continued to struggle financially. Among other things, he advocated for higher wages for writers and an international copyright law. Furthermore, Poe publicly accused the popular writer Henry Wadsworth Longfellow of plagiarism . This resulted in a backlash against Poe and alienated him from other writers.

Marriage And Death

In the early 1830s, while Poe was living in his aunt’s house, his cousin Virginia became his literary inspiration as well as his love interest . On 16th May 1836 , Edgar Allan Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in Richmond . Poe was 27 years old at the time. Although Virginia was only 13 , a witness falsely attested her age to be 21 . In 1847 , at the age of 24 , Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe died due to tuberculosis . This was the same age at which Poe’s mother and brother had died.

Poe was devastated after his wife’s death. His lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism worsened ; and he was known to be increasingly unstable with bouts of heavy drinking and erratic behavior. Around a year after his wife’s death, Poe re-started a relationship with his childhood sweetheart, the widowed Sarah Elmira Royster . However, her children disapproved and her dead husband’s will stipulated that remarriage would remove three-quarters of her estate . Poe pressed Sarah to marry him before he left Richmond but she wanted time to consider his proposal.

Poe left Richmond on September 27, 1849. On October 3, 1849 , he was found in an acutely disturbed state of mind in the streets of Baltimore. Joseph W. Walker , the person who found him, described Poe to be “in great distress and in need of immediate medical assistance.” Poe was admitted at the Washington Medical College and he died four days later on October 7, 1849 . He was 40 years old .

The cause of Edgar Allan Poe’s death remains a mystery . At the time of his death, newspapers reported that he had died of “congestion of the brain” or “cerebral inflammation” . These phrases were common euphemisms to report a death from disreputable causes such as alcoholism . However, it is difficult to confirm this fact and no one knows his actual cause of death. A range of theories to explain his death have been proposed since then, including rabies, epilepsy, alcoholism, delirium tremens, heart disease, syphilis, cholera, carbon monoxide poisoning and even murder.

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Biography of Edgar Allan Poe

by Robert Giordano , 27 June 2005 This is a short biography. Unlike many biographies that just seem to go on and on, I've tried to compose one short enough to read in a single sitting.

Poe's Childhood

Edgar Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. That makes him Capricorn, on the cusp of Aquarius. His parents were David and Elizabeth Poe. David was born in Baltimore on July 18, 1784. Elizabeth Arnold came to the U.S. from England in 1796 and married David Poe after her first husband died in 1805. They had three children, Henry, Edgar, and Rosalie. Elizabeth Poe died in 1811, when Edgar was 2 years old. She had separated from her husband and had taken her three kids with her. Henry went to live with his grandparents while Edgar was adopted by Mr. and Mrs. John Allan and Rosalie was taken in by another family. John Allan was a successful merchant, so Edgar grew up in good surroundings and went to good schools. When Poe was 6, he went to school in England for 5 years. He learned Latin and French, as well as math and history. He later returned to school in America and continued his studies. Edgar Allan went to the University of Virginia in 1826. He was 17. Even though John Allan had plenty of money, he only gave Edgar about a third of what he needed. Although Edgar had done well in Latin and French, he started to drink heavily and quickly became in debt. He had to quit school less than a year later.

Poe in the Army

Edgar Allan had no money, no job skills, and had been shunned by John Allan. Edgar went to Boston and joined the U.S. Army in 1827. He was 18. He did reasonably well in the Army and attained the rank of sergeant major. In 1829, Mrs. Allan died and John Allan tried to be friendly towards Edgar and signed Edgar's application to West Point. While waiting to enter West Point, Edgar lived with his grandmother and his aunt, Mrs. Clemm. Also living there was his brother, Henry, and young cousin, Virginia. In 1830, Edgar Allan entered West Point as a cadet. He didn't stay long because John Allan refused to send him any money. It is thought that Edgar purposely broke the rules and ignored his duties so he would be dismissed.

A Struggling Writer

In 1831, Edgar Allan Poe went to New York City where he had some of his poetry published. He submitted stories to a number of magazines and they were all rejected. Poe had no friends, no job, and was in financial trouble. He sent a letter to John Allan begging for help but none came. John Allan died in 1834 and did not mention Edgar in his will. In 1835, Edgar finally got a job as an editor of a newspaper because of a contest he won with his story, " The Manuscript Found in a Bottle ". Edgar missed Mrs. Clemm and Virginia and brought them to Richmond to live with him. In 1836, Edgar married his cousin, Virginia. He was 27 and she was 13. Many sources say Virginia was 14, but this is incorrect. Virginia Clemm was born on August 22, 1822. They were married before her 14th birthday, in May of 1836. In case you didn't figure it out already, Virginia was Virgo. As the editor for the Southern Literary Messenger , Poe successfully managed the paper and increased its circulation from 500 to 3500 copies. Despite this, Poe left the paper in early 1836, complaining of the poor salary. In 1837, Edgar went to New York. He wrote "The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym" but he could not find any financial success. He moved to Philadelphia in 1838 where he wrote " Ligeia " and " The Haunted Palace ". His first volume of short stories, "Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque" was published in 1839. Poe received the copyright and 20 copies of the book, but no money. Sometime in 1840, Edgar Poe joined George R. Graham as an editor for Graham's Magazine . During the two years that Poe worked for Graham's, he published his first detective story, " The Murders in the Rue Morgue " and challenged readers to send in cryptograms, which he always solved. During the time Poe was editor, the circulation of the magazine rose from 5000 to 35,000 copies. Poe left Graham's in 1842 because he wanted to start his own magazine. Poe found himself without a regular job once again. He tried to start a magazine called The Stylus and failed. In 1843, he published some booklets containing a few of his short stories but they didn't sell well enough. He won a hundred dollars for his story, " The Gold Bug " and sold a few other stories to magazines but he barely had enough money to support his family. Often, Mrs. Clemm had to contribute financially. In 1844, Poe moved back to New York. Even though " The Gold Bug " had a circulation of around 300,000 copies, he could barely make a living. In 1845, Edgar Poe became an editor at The Broadway Journal . A year later, the Journal ran out of money and Poe was out of a job again. He and his family moved to a small cottage near what is now East 192nd Street. Virginia's health was fading away and Edgar was deeply distressed by it. Virginia died in 1847, 10 days after Edgar's birthday. After losing his wife, Poe collapsed from stress but gradually returned to health later that year.

In June of 1849, Poe left New York and went to Philadelphia, where he visited his friend John Sartain. Poe left Philadelphia in July and came to Richmond. He stayed at the Swan Tavern Hotel but joined "The Sons of Temperance" in an effort to stop drinking. He renewed a boyhood romance with Sarah Royster Shelton and planned to marry her in October. On September 27, Poe left Richmond for New York. He went to Philadelphia and stayed with a friend named James P. Moss. On September 30, he meant to go to New York but supposedly took the wrong train to Baltimore. On October 3, Poe was found at Gunner's Hall, a public house at 44 East Lombard Street, and was taken to the hospital. He lapsed in and out of consciousness but was never able to explain exactly what happened to him. Edgar Allan Poe died in the hospital on Sunday, October 7, 1849. The mystery surrounding Poe's death has led to many myths and urban legends. The reality is that no one knows for sure what happened during the last few days of his life. Did Poe die from alcoholism? Was he mugged? Did he have rabies? A more detailed exploration of Poe's death can be found here .

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Why Edgar Allan Poe’s Death Remains a Mystery

More than a century and a half after his untimely demise, there are still rumors and legends about how the master of macabre met his end.

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Edgar Allan Poe was one of the first great American-born authors, a master of macabre and mystery whose name alone evokes an eerie chill. His works continue to inspire present-day horror tales, such as the popular Netflix series The Fall of the House of Usher that’s loosely based on the author’s short story of the same name.

Tragically but fittingly, Poe’s death on October 7, 1849, in Baltimore remains cloaked in mystery as well. According to the Poe Museum in Richmond, Virginia, there are at least 26 published theories regarding his demise. There are also myriad legends and rumors that each seem more ghastly than the next.

Poe was missing for a week before his death

Much of what we think of Poe is actually at least somewhat fabricated. Several people had agendas that used Poe to either advance their own causes or simply taint the author’s name. Amongst the most pernicious was that of a man named Rufus Wilmot Griswold , a rival who was the executor of his literary estate and a major figure in the mystery that surrounds Poe’s death all these years later.

Things were looking up for Poe in October 1849. He was a star author who commanded great audiences for his readings, and he was about to marry his first love, Elmira Royster Shelton, following a short trip from Richmond to Philadelphia and then New York. Poe got as far as Baltimore before suddenly going off the grid, disappearing for nearly a week before turning up on October 3 in what was said to be a delirious state outside a tavern known as Gunner’s Hall.

Poe was first found by a man named Joseph Walker, who recognized the famed author, deduced that he shouldn’t be dressed in someone else’s threadbare, ill-fitting clothing or convulsing in a gutter and offered to help. Walker asked Poe if he knew anyone nearby that he could contact and Poe mentioned an editor named Joseph Snodgrass. Walker wrote Snodgrass a letter urging his assistance. It read as follows:

“Dear Sir, There is a gentleman, rather the worse for wear, at Ryan’s 4th ward polls, who goes under the cognomen of Edgar A. Poe, and who appears in great distress, & he says he is acquainted with you, and I assure you, he is in need of immediate assistance. Yours, in haste, JOS. W. WALKER To Dr. J.E. Snodgrass.”

From there, Poe was taken to Washington College Hospital, at which point things got murky both for the patient and the history books. Poe was kept alone in a windowless room with only one attendant physician, Dr. John Moran, to watch over him through what would be his final days. The week that he spent missing, the hysterical and haggard condition in which he was found, and the unreliability of the witnesses to his final moments and keepers of his legacy all contribute to over a century and a half of speculation and uncertainty.

Poe died on October 7 at age 40, supposedly after uttering the last words “Lord, help my poor soul.” Theories about Poe’s death began cropping up almost immediately after it was announced.

There are no records remaining about his last hospitalization, but Poe was listed as succumbing to phrenitis, or congestion of the brain—a polite term often used for alcohol or drug overdoses at the time. There is suspicion around that cause of death, both due to the era’s less-than-precise medical treatment as well as the motivations of people involved.

Character assassination shaped Poe’s reputation following his death

Poe was, by many accounts, a lightweight when it came to liquor. People who knew him didn’t recall him as a heavy drinker —it seemed that he would go long stretches without taking a sip—but when he did imbibe, it didn’t take much for him to fall into a stupor. The death of his wife, Virginia, from tuberculosis in 1847 did send him into a long spiral, but he eventually recovered. After experiencing some close-calls and receiving advice from a doctor, Poe pledged his sobriety and joined the Sons of Temperance just a few months before his death.

Snodgrass was a major advocate of the temperance movement and toured the country using Poe as an example of the dangers of booze; Snodgrass wrote that when he found Poe at the bar in Baltimore, the author was “utterly stupified with liquor” and could only produce “mere incoherent mutterings” in place of actual speech. Further, Griswold, who had an up-and-down relationship with Poe, used his position as the executor of his estate to write a libelous and, unfortunately, authorized biography that suggested the legendary author was an opium addict and drunkard.

Moran, the Baltimore doctor who cared for Poe, saw this campaign in motion and did his best to clarify the circumstances surrounding Poe’s death. He said that Poe was in no way drunk when he showed up at the bar, and decades later, he wrote a book titled Edgar Allan Poe: A Defense , which described a sober, steady Poe reciting poetry on his deathbed.

There are plenty of other theories about Poe’s death

So if Poe didn’t succumb to the bottle, what did kill him? Again, we’ll never know—there was no autopsy performed to go back and review, and no contemporary accounts remain. But there have been theories for nearly as long as Poe has been dead, some of them more credible than others.

Some have speculated that Poe, who adored cats and had one as a pet, died of rabies. The symptoms seemed to match his delirious fits and the pattern of his decline in the hospital. In 1996, a researcher and professor at the University of Maryland Medical Center named Dr. R. Michael Benitez earned national attention for this theory, which was worked out for a medical conference.

It was, in part, based on Moran’s accounts of Poe’s time in the hospital, which indicated that Poe’s madness had ebbs and flows, with periods of lucidity in between spikes in feverish mania. Moran also noted that Poe was reluctant to drink water, which Benitez said also matched up with symptoms of rabies.

Still, Moran was something of an unreliable narrator, as comparisons of his various accounts reveal quite a few inconsistencies, partly because he wrote them so many years later. If the reality of what happened differed from what Benitez read, rabies might be another false theory.

In could have been a case of the flu that advanced into pneumonia. Before his fateful, tragedy-shortened trip, the author did visit the doctor complaining of an illness.

“His last night in town, he was very sick, and his [soon-to-be] wife noted that he had a weak pulse, a fever, and she didn’t think he should take the journey to Philadelphia,” Chris Semtner, the curator of the Poe Museum in Richmond, told Smithsonian Magazine . “He visited a doctor, and the doctor also told him not to travel, that he was too sick.”

Other theories include carbon monoxide or heavy metal poisoning, though both have largely been discounted. And then there is also the theory that he was beaten into a slow death, though that sounds like something out of a Poe story more than reality.

A voter fraud scheme could be to blame

In his 2023 book A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe , author Mark Dawidziak surmises that Poe suffered from tuberculosis meningitis, which causes swelling in membranes around the brain. There was an explosion in tuberculosis cases in the United States at the time, and his symptoms, like fever and delusions, also match the disease.

A Mystery of Mysteries: The Death and Life of Edgar Allan Poe

However, there’s another unexpected element to Dawidziak’s theory: An election-rigging scheme known as “cooping” might have exacerbated Poe’s illness and contributed to his death. This tactic involved kidnapping a man off the street, confining and potentially drugging him, then releasing him to repeatedly vote for a preferred candidate.

After all, Poe was found on October 3, an election day for Marylanders to choose their Congressional representatives. One of the polling places was none other than Gunner’s Hall. Perhaps his odd clothing was part of a scheme to disguise his identity, The Washington Post reported .

“This was cold, damp early October in Baltimore,” Dawidziak told the newspaper. “If something was physically wrong with Poe, being cooped—kept in chilly and spartan conditions—could have been disastrous for his system. Add any amount of alcohol to the mix, and the effects would have been devastating.”

Examining Poe’s remains—specifically, his skull—for signs of markings caused by meningitis could potentially give credence to the physiological aspects of Dawidziak’s theory. But, for now, the hypothesis is just one of many in a mystery that continues to bewilder admirers of the literary great.

Tyler Piccotti first joined the Biography.com staff as an Associate News Editor in February 2023, and before that worked almost eight years as a newspaper reporter and copy editor. He is a graduate of Syracuse University. When he's not writing and researching his next story, you can find him at the nearest amusement park, catching the latest movie, or cheering on his favorite sports teams.

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