Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 in Boston MA. His mother died when he was only two years of age, and Edgar went to live with an adoptive family, the Allans’. Edgar didn’t have enough money to pay for college so he had to leave. Edgar started becoming shunned by his father and had to look for a job. He had no skills, and no money. When he was about eighteen he joined the U.S. army in Boston. Edgar’s adoptive mother soon died. Edgar’s adoptive father tried to become friendly towards Edgar. He also had to sign an application for West point, but then he didn’t come up with enough money.  Edgar didn’t have many friends to help him so he tried to make a living as a writer. He soon became a newspaper editor and started to submit poems and stories. Some examples of his work are “The Raven” or “The Tell-Tale Heart”. In his personal life he married his thirteen year old cousin and they moved to Virginia. After his wife died his health declined and all this time he was a heavy drinker. Found in Baltimore after taking the wrong train and not being able to tell what had happened to him, he was taken to the hospital and died at the age of 40. He died on October, 7,1848.

Edgar Allan Poe was a great horror story writer because in the poem “The Tell-Tale Heart” he uses a lot of description. For example this part of a paragraph talks about the reason the narrator does not like the old man’s eye – “I think it was his eye! yes, it was this! He had the eye of a vulture –a pale blue eye, with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold; and so by degrees — very gradually –I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye forever”. An example  of good vocabulary is placed in this sentence – “Above all was the sense of hearing acute.” Acute is the descriptive word in the sentence.He also uses words that we would not technically use today in are own writing; words like Hearken for example  He also has a way of making his poems scary. For example, in “The Tell-Tale Heart” he focuses on how he wants to kill the old man. Murder and a sense of evil is what makes his poems scary,but what makes Edgar Allan Poe a successful writer and where does he get his inspiration for his characters?

I think “The Tell-Tale Heart was will chosen for the poem because it’s about a servant and an old man and how the old man has a evil eye that the creeps the servant out. The servant doesn’t like the eye so he plans to kill the man. At the end when the old man is dead and the police arrive the servant is confident that the police will find no trace of murder because he hit the old man from sight,but all of a sudden he hears the beating of the old mans heart. Now this drives him insane and he finally confesses to the murder.One of the things that makes Edgar Allan Poe a successful writer is this – He is very descriptive and uses words that are in someways very violent like murder and kill and these words make the poem all the more horrific. In a lot of Edgar Allan Poe’s poems and stories their are usually a lot of interesting characters. I think he gets his inspiration for these characters is from his childhood of family or maybe he just made them up. He also comes up with a lot of interesting plots like in “The Tell-Tale Heart” he talks about how he wants to kill and old man because he doesn’t like his eye. Just by observation I notice that a lot of his work includes a death of an evil thing that haunts him. Personally no ,but if someone got me to read a poem that I really like while scanning through it it might make me want to read it a little.

This picture is from flickrcc

Here is a portrait of Edgar Allan Poe by Chris Watkins