Reflections on Poe

          Before I began my research on Poe I already knew some things about him. I knew that Poe liked a not so great life when he was young. I also knew that he has written many poems and short stories. Thanks to my 6th grade Language Arts teacher, Mrs. Stamp, I am very familiar with the short story "The Raven". The things I knew about Poe are very few compared to the information that I have gained from my research. I had no idea that his parents died while he was young. Or that he had siblings. I have never really read of his stories because I didn't have an interest in them. After doing my research I am defiantly going to check that out.

         There are different ways that Poe's life could've affected his writing. Poe's early life was not  that great. Edgar Allan Poe has some dark or unhappy pieces of writing and that could be because of the rough events that he went through as a child and a young adult. An example would be "The Tale Tell Heart". "The Tale Tell Heart" is a short story about a man who kills another man because of his vulture like eye. This story doesn't give you a very happy or joyful feeling. In the first 3 years of Poe’s life his parents died causing him to live in Virginia with a rich tobacco merchant named John Allan and his Wife Prances Valentine. When Poe was 20 years old the only mother he ever knew, Frances Allan, died of tuberculosis. All of these deaths that he has gone through might be the cause of "The Tale Tell Heart".

          After doing my research on Edgar Allan Poe I have learned a lot about him. I've learned that he married his younger cousin. Which, let me just add, is weird and gross in my opinion. I also learned that he was once so poor that he had to burn his furniture to keep warm. Another thing that new that I learned is that Poe published his first book at the age of 18. Which is pretty cool if you ask me. I learned that Edgar Allan Poe Published 3 stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Gold Bug”, and “The Black Cat”, in the same year as the first telegraph line. I knew that Edgar Allan Poe wrote those stories a long time a go and that the first telegraph line happened a long time ago, but I didn’t know they happened in the same year. I also learned that Edgar Allan Poe was in Richmond to give a lecture and see his friends in the same year as the Carolina Gold Rush. That is just a little bit of what I learned from all of my research. There is so much new knowledge in my mind it's unbelievable!