Edgar Allen Poe Essay

Submitted By yahoo_12345
Words: 627
Pages: 3

Edgar Allen Poe It is normal for authors to use their personal life as an inspiration to their literature. Like Edgar Allen Poe, he used his personal experiences in life to write his short stories and poems. As a reader it is our job to be able to understand what the author is trying to portray, and with a little background information I was able to make the connection between Poe’s life and his literary work. One story I was able to find Poe’s biological connections was in “The Fall of the House of Usher.” For example the character Roderick Usher was going through a rough and depressing time, much like Poe’s life. Roderick’s sister, Madeline, was incredibly sick and what was said to be “a settle apathy, a gradual wasting away of the person, and frequent although transient affections of a partially cataleptical character.” Poe had been dealing with death his whole life, for example at the time he had lost his mother, step mother, brother, and his wife to tuberculosis. One can only imagine how much that could take a toll on a person’s life, which explains this dark and scary story. Another connection would be about the family branch of the Ushers, in the book it states “had put forth, at no period, any enduring branch.” This quote is saying that in the Usher generation they did not marry outside of the family, which is now considered incest. However Poe did something similar, he married his first cousin Virginia. Hearing this sounds pretty bizarre, not even taking into degree that she was only thirteen while he was a twenty six year old man. Both instances were not really socially accepted. The year Poe had passed away, he wrote a popular love poem called “Annabel Lee.” This poem could reflect on Poe’s love life with his wife, or cousin, Virginia. Poe never had a hard time finding love, but he never could seem to keep it. He received a lot of heartbreak through death, and sure enough Virginia had died due to tuberculosis. Since he wrote this poem the year he died, his marriage with her was long in the past and this is the same with Annabel Lee and her lover stating, “It was many and many a year ago, in the kingdom by