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Edgar Allan Poe was born on 19 January 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts, to traveling actors Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe and David Poe Jr. His father left the family early; his mother died of tuberculosis in Richmond, Virginia, in 1811, when Edgar was not yet three. The orphaned child was taken into the home of John Allan, a Scottish-born merchant in Richmond, and his wife Frances. He was never formally adopted, but he took the middle name Allan and was raised with the manners and expectations of a merchant’s household. Childhood years in England (1815–1820), schooling in Richmond, and a brief, brilliant stretch at the University of Virginia in 1826 shaped him: he read widely, ran up gambling debts, and quarreled with John Allan over money and independence.
In 1827 Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army under an assumed name and published his first volume, Tamerlane and Other Poems, almost unnoticed. A second collection followed in 1829. Appointment to West Point ended in deliberate dismissal; a break with Allan left him without a secure patron. Through the 1830s he wrote poems, tales, and criticism for magazines in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia, and New York, inventing a professional life as an American man of letters when few such careers existed. In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia Clemm; her long illness and death in 1847 darkened his later years and deepened the elegiac note in poems such as “Annabel Lee” and “Ulalume.”
Poe’s prose made him famous: reviews that could make or break a reputation, the ratiocinative detective tales that begin with “The Murders in the Rue Morgue,” and Gothic stories of premature burial, doubles, and obsessed narrators. His poetry aimed at beauty and effect—sound over argument—worked out in essays such as “The Philosophy of Composition” and “The Poetic Principle.” “The Raven” (1845) brought popular celebrity; collections and reprints spread his name in America and, through Baudelaire and others, in Europe.
He died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 under circumstances still disputed. The body of work he left—lyric poems of mourning and obsession, critical theory of pure poetry, and short fiction that founded detective and psychological horror traditions—remains among the most influential in American literature. This Poetry Catalog collection presents his poems in full public-domain texts, one by one, with original lineation preserved.