Questions to ask Edgar Allan Poe

Poe's life in twelve facts

1. Born 19 January 1809 in Boston to two touring actors, David Poe Jr. and Eliza Arnold Poe.
2. His father left the family; his mother died in Richmond, Virginia, in December 1811, when he was two.
3. Taken in, though never legally adopted, by the Richmond merchant John Allan and his wife Frances.
4. Schooled in England and Scotland from 1815 to 1820.
5. One term at the University of Virginia in 1826, ending in gambling debts and a break with John Allan.
6. Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827), published as “by a Bostonian”; very few copies survive.
7. Enlisted in the army in 1827 as Edgar A. Perry; entered West Point in 1830 and got himself dismissed in 1831.
8. Married his cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836, when she was 13 and he was 27.
9. The Murders in the Rue Morgue, the first modern detective story, in Graham's Magazine, April 1841.
10. The Raven, published in January 1845, made him famous almost overnight.
11. Virginia died of tuberculosis on 30 January 1847.
12. Found delirious in a Baltimore tavern on 3 October 1849, in clothes that were not his; died 7 October, aged 40.

Separate Poe from the Poe legend first

Two days after Poe died, an obituary signed “Ludwig” in the New-York Tribune called him a man with few friends and no moral sense. The author was Rufus Wilmot Griswold, a rival editor who became Poe's literary executor and, in his 1850 memoir, altered some of Poe's letters to make him look worse. A lot of the drunk, mad Poe of popular culture starts there.

So for your interview, build answers from his letters, essays and reviews, not from the gloomy narrators of his tales. The narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart is not Poe. For a wax museum, try the Poe of 1845: 36, in New York, suddenly famous for The Raven, editing the Broadway Journal, with Virginia seriously ill.

Questions about childhood and the Allans

What the record says: John Allan paid for his schooling but never adopted him, and their letters are full of quarrels about money. Allan left him nothing in his will when he died in 1834. Frances Allan, whom Poe loved, died in 1829.

1. What do you remember of your mother, the actress Eliza Poe?
2. Why did John Allan never adopt you?
3. What happened at the University of Virginia, and were the gambling debts your fault?
4. Why did you join the army under a false name?
5. How did you get yourself thrown out of West Point?

Questions about making a living from magazines

What the record says: Poe was one of the first Americans to try to live by writing alone, at a time when American publishers could reprint British books without paying for them. He edited the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond (1835 to 1837) and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia (1841 to 1842), where his reviews were famous for their savagery. His prize money tells the story: 50 dollars for MS. Found in a Bottle in 1833, 100 dollars for The Gold-Bug in 1843.

1. Why could a writer as well known as you not pay his rent?
2. Why were your reviews so harsh, and did you make enemies on purpose?
3. What happened in your public quarrel with Longfellow in 1845?
4. Why did you dream of starting your own magazine, The Stylus?

Questions about The Raven and how he wrote

What the record says: in The Philosophy of Composition (Graham's Magazine, April 1846) Poe claimed he had written The Raven step by step, choosing its length, its sad tone, the refrain “Nevermore” and a talking bird by reasoning, like solving a problem. He also wrote there that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world. Many critics think the essay is partly a performance. In 1842 Poe had reviewed Charles Dickens's Barnaby Rudge, which has a talking raven called Grip, and the two writers met in Philadelphia that year.

1. Did you really write The Raven by method, or is The Philosophy of Composition a trick on the reader?
2. Why “Nevermore”?
3. Did Dickens's raven Grip give you the idea?
4. Why do so many of your poems mourn a dead young woman?
5. Do you think a poem should teach a lesson? (In The Poetic Principle he said no.)

Questions about detectives, codes and science

What the record says: C. Auguste Dupin, the detective of The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841), The Mystery of Marie Rogêt and The Purloined Letter, solves crimes by reasoning, with a friend narrating, the pattern later used for Sherlock Holmes. In 1839 to 1840 Poe challenged readers of a Philadelphia weekly to send him ciphers to crack, and The Gold-Bug turns on a cipher. His book Eureka (1848) imagines the universe expanding from a single original particle and one day collapsing back.

1. How did you come up with Dupin?
2. How did you crack the ciphers readers sent you?
3. In Eureka you describe a universe that began from one particle. Where did that idea come from?

Questions about Virginia, grief and despair

What the record says: in 1842 Virginia burst a blood vessel while singing, the first sign of the tuberculosis that killed her five years later. Poe's letters describe the strain of those years, and his drinking. Her age at the marriage (13) is a fact your project should state plainly, without romanticising it. In November 1848, after her death, he took an overdose of laudanum, as his own letters record.

1. What was Virginia like, in your words?
2. How did her illness change how you lived and wrote?
3. Who looked after you both? (His aunt and mother-in-law Maria Clemm, whom he called Muddy.)

If anyone in your group finds these subjects hard, choose other questions. If you or someone you know is struggling, please talk to a trusted adult or a local helpline.

Sample answers from his letters

Question: How did those years of Virginia's illness affect you? Poe answered this himself, describing the years after her first collapse:

Question: After so much poverty, do you regret becoming a writer?

Question: Why do you prefer short stories to novels? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in his 1842 reviews of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales in Graham's Magazine, he argued that a tale short enough to read at one sitting lets the writer aim every sentence at a single effect.

Question: Should poems have a moral? A sourced answer, in paraphrase: in The Poetic Principle (a lecture of 1848 to 1849, printed 1850) he attacked what he called the heresy of the didactic, saying a poem should exist for its own sake.

What Poe could not answer

• How he died. Theories include alcohol, a beating, rabies, and “cooping” (gangs forcing men to vote many times on election day, which 3 October 1849 was). His medical records and death certificate do not survive.
• Sherlock Holmes, born in 1887 from the Dupin pattern.
• The Baltimore Ravens, the American football team named after his poem.
• The Big Bang theory, which his Eureka is often said to resemble.

Where to read Poe's own words

Project Gutenberg has the five-volume Raven Edition of his works and a separate edition of The Raven. The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore publishes nearly all his writings online, including his letters, reviews and The Philosophy of Composition, with dates of first printing. Wikisource has his tales and poems as first published.

To rehearse an interview, try Yuga's Edgar Allan Poe, an AI recreation built from his writings and the historical record. It is not Poe and can be wrong, so cite his letters and essays directly. For another American poet with a very different life, see questions to ask Emily Dickinson.