Dark Romanticism Assignment 6: Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's father left the family within a year of his birth, and both of his original parents were dead before he was three. He was taken in by John Allan, a Scottish tobacco merchant, and grew up in the Allan family. Because of this he traveled considerably as a young child, studying in England and Scotland for brief periods of time. He briefly attended the University of Virginia but ran out of money after a year, partly as a result of gambling; and his step father refused to pay his debts. At 26 he married his cousin, Virginia Clemms, she was 13 at the time.

Poe was probably very jaded by all of these events. This comes across in his writing, as he had a somewhat uneffected air through out his grotesque detailing of events, This is displayed in his story "The Black Cat", when he he is deciding how best to handle the corpse of his wife who has just killed for interfering with his murder of the cat which he hates; and afterword he is too pleased with the fact that he has rid himself of the cat to regret the murder of his wife. Poe never knew his parents and generally did not seem to get along well with his step family, he was never very close to anyone other than his wife, who died, because of this he was probably somewhat of a misanthrope.