Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was orphaned at two, raised and disowned by a Richmond merchant, expelled from West Point, and lived by magazine work in Baltimore, Philadelphia and New York, dying at forty in circumstances never explained. He invented the detective story, perfected the tale of terror, and in The Raven wrote the most famous American poem of the century. The Poetic Principle, his last lecture, holds that a poem must be short and aim at beauty rather than truth, a doctrine Baudelaire and the French Symbolists took up and returned to America as modernism. The Poems the lists assign include The Raven, Annabel Lee and To Helen.