Edgar Allan Poe - 1809-1849

Edgar Allan Poe: 1809-1848

Edgar Allan Poe was an important figure of American literature. He excelled in several types of writing, publishing tales of terror and supernatural agency, detective stories, romantic and narrative poetry, burlesques, hoaxes, and literary criticism. The facts of his life have been hard to determine because many legends about him circulated even before he died, some spread by Poe himself. Yet we know that his parents Elisabeth Arnold and David Poe Jr. were actors. Edgar, second of three children, was born in Boston on January 19, 1809.

Two years later, his parents died, and John Allan and his wife took Edgar in and renamed him Edgar Allan, but they never adopted him legally. He started studying at the University of Virginia in 1826, but there were hostilities between him and his foster father. He began to drink and to gamble to pay his debts, so he had to leave the university after his first year was completed. Then he joined the army, and in 1827 he paid for the printing of Tamerlane and Other Poems. Released from the army with the rank of sergeant major, he was admitted to West Point in 1830 but was expelled in 1831. Some friends among the cadets collected funds to publish his Poems, which appeared in May of the same year.

Poe went to Baltimore where he married his cousin Virginia Clemm and where he published “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “William Wilson”. He continued writing and publishing many collections of short stories and collections of his poetry until he died on October 7, 1849, “of congestion of the brain”.

The Fall of the House of Usher

(Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine, September 1839)

It is a short story of terror written in narrative prose. The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving in front of what he calls the “melancholy” House of Usher and while he’s contemplating the House, he’s pervaded by a sense of gloom, a depression of soul. He notices a thin crack extending from the roof down the front of the building and into the adjacent lake.

The owner of the House is Roderick Usher, an old friend of the narrator, who has sent him a letter asking for help. Even though many years have passed since their last meeting, the narrator felt bound to help Roderick because of the content of his letter in which he wrote about his bodily illness. Poe wrote this story before the invention of modern psychological science, but we can describe Roderick’s condition as a form of nervous agitation, mental idiosyncrasy, and anxiety.

In the first pages of the story, we mostly find the description of the House, which continues to provoke strange sensations to the narrator. He is oppressed by the atmosphere hanging in the mansion and all the domain, and the description of Roderick, of his attitude and his illness. He is presented as a wan being, cadaverous of complexion, with an excessive nervous agitation. His actions change from vivacious to sullen until he starts describing...