Portal:Edgar Allan Poe
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  Edgar Allan Poe (January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American poet, short story writer, editor, literary critic, and one of the leaders of the American Romantic Movement. Best known for his tales of mystery and the macabre, Poe was one of the early American practitioners of the short story and a progenitor of detective fiction and crime fiction. He is also credited with contributing to the emergent science fiction genre. Poe's legacy includes a significant influence in literature in the United States and around the world as well as in specialized fields like cosmology and cryptography. Additionally, Poe and his works appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, television, video games, etc. Some of his homes are dedicated as museums today.  "Ulalume" is a poem written by Edgar Allan Poe in 1847. Much like a few of Poe's other poems (such as "The Raven", "Annabel Lee", and "Lenore"), "Ulalume" focuses on the narrator's loss of a beautiful woman due to her untimely death. Poe originally wrote the poem as an elocution piece and, as such, the poem is known for its focus on sound. Additionally, it makes many allusions, especially to mythology, and the identity of Ulalume herself, if a real person, has been questioned. The poem takes place on a night in the "lonesome October" with a gray sky as the leaves are withering for the autumn season. In the region of Weir, by the lake of Auber, the narrator roams with a "volcanic" heart. He has a "serious and sober" talk with his soul, though he does not realize it is October or where his roaming is leading him: the vault of his "lost Ulalume". Unlike Poe's poem "Annabel Lee", the narrator here is not conscious of his return to the grave of his lover. The verses are purposefully sonorous, built around sound to create feelings of sadness and anguish. The poem employs Poe's typical theme of the "death of a beautiful woman", which he considered "the most poetical topic in the world". Biographers and critics have often suggested that Poe's obsession with this theme stems from the repeated loss of women throughout his life, including his mother Eliza Poe and his foster mother Frances Allan. The identity of Ulalume is questionable. If it really is a dead lover, Poe's choice to refer to Ulalume as "the thing" and "the secret" do not seem like endearing terms.  Portrait of Poe by Swiss artist Félix Vallotton: woodcut, 1895. Other selected pictures  Virginia Eliza Clemm Poe (born Virginia Eliza Clemm) (August 22, 1822 – January 30, 1847) was the wife of Edgar Allan Poe. The couple were first cousins and married when Virginia Clemm was 13 and Poe was 27. Some biographers have suggested that the couple's relationship was more like that between brother and sister than like husband and wife and that they never consummated their marriage. Beginning in January 1842, she struggled with tuberculosis and died of the disease in January 1847 at age 24 in their cottage outside New York City. Along with other family members, Virginia Clemm and Edgar Allan Poe lived together off and on for several years before their marriage. The couple often moved to accommodate Poe's employment, living intermittently in Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York. A few years after their wedding, Poe was involved in a substantial scandal involving Frances Sargent Osgood and Elizabeth F. Ellet. Rumors about alleged amorous improprieties on her husband's part affected Virginia Poe so much that on her deathbed she claimed that Ellet had murdered her. After her death, her body was eventually placed under the same memorial marker as her husband in Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, Maryland. The disease and eventual death of his wife had a substantial impact on Edgar Allan Poe; her struggle with illness and death are believed to have impacted his poetry and prose, where dying young women appear as a frequent motif. 
Did you know ...that Thomas Holley Chivers, who became an early biographer and defender of Edgar Allan Poe, was once asked by Poe to be a financial backer and co-editor of The Stylus, a journal that Poe intended to launch? Did you know ...the short story A Predicament and the poem "Bridal Ballad" are the only works by Poe that have a woman as the narrator? Did you know ...that the earliest film version of Poe's life was a silent film called The Raven in 1915 starring Henry B. Walthall? 1838: Poe's only finished novel The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket is released in New York by Harper & Brothers. July 4 – Fellow American author Nathaniel Hawthorne is born in 1804 in Salem, Massachusetts. Poe would review many of Hawthorne’s early works and would, in particular, praise his short stories. July 7 – Elizabeth Cairnes Poe, mother of Maria Clemm and Poe’s grandmother, dies in Baltimore in 1835. Elizabeth had been receiving a pension from the government for her husband's, "General" David Poe, involvement in the American Revolution. July 14 – Poe begins a lecture tour to raise money for The Stylus in Richmond in 1849. July 19 – Poe's short story "The Mask of the Red Death" is published with its now-standard title "The Masque of the Red Death" in the July 19, 1845 issue of the Broadway Journal. July 22 – On this date in 1820, Poe and the Allans board the Martha to return to America after five years in England. How dreadful is the present condition of our Literature! To what are things heading? We want... a well-founded Monthly Journal, of sufficient ability, circulation and character, to control, and to give tone to, our Letters. It should be, externally, a specimen of high, but not too refined Taste:-I mean, it should be boldly printed, on excellent paper, in single column, and be illustrated, not merely embellished, by spirited wood designs in the style of Grandville. Its chief aims should be Independence, Truth, Originality. It should be a journal of some 120 pp. and furnished at $5. It should have nothing to do with Agents or Agencies. Such a Magazine might be made to exercise a prodigious influence, and would be a source of wealth to its proprietors. ...letter from Poe to James Russell Lowell, dated March 30, 1844, outlining his plans for The Stylus
Poe Topics: Edgar Allan Poe Other People: Hervey Allen • Anne Lynch Botta • Charles Frederick Briggs • Nathan C. Brooks • William Evans Burton • George William Childs • Thomas Holley Chivers Select Poe-Related Media: American Review: A Whig Journal • Baltimore Saturday Visiter • "The Black Cat (Masters of Horror episode)" • Broadway Journal • Burton's Gentleman's Magazine • Closed on Account of Rabies • Castle of Blood • The Death of Poe (film) • An Evening with Edgar Allan Poe • Godey's Lady's Book • Graham's Magazine • The Grave Digger • House of Usher (film) • The Last Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe: The Troy Dossier • The Man with a Cloak • Maniac (1934 film) • Murders in the Rue Morgue (film) • New York Mirror • The Oblong Box • The Pit and the Pendulum (1961 film) Other Stuff: Edgar Allan Poe Cottage • Edgar Allan Poe House and Museum • Edgar Allan Poe Museum (Richmond) • Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site • The Imp of the Perverse • Westminster Hall and Burying Ground Works: Eureka: A Prose Poem |
