Edgar Allan Poe wrote, “They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night.”
Edgar Allan Poe born in Boston in 1809
Parents died when he was two.
He wrote many poems while in the army and at West Point.
He described Longfellow and Whittier as nincompoops.
Married his fourteen year old cousin who developed tuberculosis like his parents, and he began to write darker stories.
He invented Gothic Horror Stories.
He made about $4 per article and $15 per story, and the magazines were notoriously late with their paychecks. There was no international copyright law at the time, and so his stories were printed without his permission throughout Europe.
It was under these conditions, suffering from alcoholism, and watching his wife grow slowly worse in health, that he wrote “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher,” considered some of the greatest Gothic horror stories in English literature.
Near the end of his wife’s illness, he published his most famous poem, “The Raven,” about a young man visited by a raven in the middle of the night, and who comes to believe that the bird is possessed by the spirit of his dead lover, Lenore.
It begins,
“Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore —”
For many years after his death, Poe was considered by critics in this country to be a mere sensationalist writer of Gothic tales. But much of his work was translated into French, where he inspired a generation of surrealist poets and fiction writers, including Charles Baudelaire, who said that he prayed every morning to God, to his father, and to Poe.
Today Poe is credited with having invented the psychological horror story and the detective story.
The Vibrant Channeled Creator 