“I maintain that the phrase ‘a long poem’ is simply a flat contradiction in terms.” Here, as elsewhere, he lobbied for unity as the defining feature of major literary works, calling it “the vital requisite of all works of Art.”

Poe’s reputation as a writer has certainly suffered from the melodramatic quality of his life, which has made him a prime target for biographers. Born in Boston in 1809, where his parents were acting in a traveling repertory company, he was soon set adrift. His father abandoned his mother before his first birthday, and his mother died when he was three. Fortunately, a prosperous merchant, John Allan, adopted him because his wife had been a friend of the deceased Mrs. Poe, although Poe later came to detest his stepfather as much as he adored his stepmother.

The Allans took young Edgar to England in 1815, and he was put into a strict English boarding school—a setting that Poe later used for “William Wilson,” his story about a double identity that Robert Louis Stevenson apparently used as a source for Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. (Stevenson also used Poe’s story “The Gold Bug” as a model for Treasure Island.)

Back in Baltimore in his early teens, Poe developed a crush on Mrs. Jane Stannard, the young mother of a schoolmate, and her death a year after they met affected him deeply. Young Poe brooded incessantly on Mrs. Stannard, and these thoughts seemed to have morbidly shaped his imagination. In his poems he would often dwell on the early deaths of beautiful women and would specialize in melancholic laments for their passing.

In 1826 Poe entered the University of Virginia, but wild drinking and gambling led to his early withdrawal and added to the tensions that already existed between him and his stepfather. In 1827 he worked intermittently at odd jobs and managed to get a small Boston firm to print his first book of poetry: Tamerlane and Other Poems. The book made no impression on the literary world, and Poe resorted to joining the army. After rising to the rank of sergeant-major, he was honorably discharged in 1829, the same year that he published a second slim volume: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Once again, he escaped public notice as a poet.

In what must count as one of the more peculiar turns in his life, he was appointed as a cadet at West Point in 1830. There he found himself drowning in expenses that his obviously skeptical stepfather refused to pay. “The army does not suit a poor man,” he noted wryly in a letter. A year later he was court-martialed and expelled for unbecoming behavior. But he had by this time made such an impression on his fellow cadets by writing witty satirical poems about the Academy that they took up a collection to finance the publication of his third book of poems, published as The Poems of Edgar A. Poe in New York in 1831. (When the cadets got their copies, they were furious because it did not contain the poems they had remembered.) Not until 1845 would he publish another volume, The Raven and Other Poems—the book that finally made his name as a poet

On leaving West Point, Poe turned to prose, hoping to make a living by his pen. Book reviews, humorous anecdotes, fantasy, travel essays, and short stories poured forth, though he seemed always to be short of cash. To survive, he went to live with his favorite aunt, Mrs. Maria Clemm, and her nine-year-old daughter, Virginia, with whom he fell in love. They were married five years later—shortly before her fourteenth birthday.

Poe’s unusual marriage to his cousin and his adoration of her mother are enough to drive any Freudian critic mad with speculation. In fact, biographers have little to go on here, apart from a few letters by Poe and the testimony of his friends. By every account, the young writer was devoted to his wife and aunt, and they were similarly fond of him. Virginia’s tragic death a decade later was a dreadful, insurmountable obstacle in Poe’s emotional life. When the French poet Charles Baudelaire published a translation of the American poet’s work some years later, he dedicated the volume to Mrs. Clemm, “the woman who was always so gentle and kind to him—as you bound his wounds with your love, so he will preserve your name with his glory.”

It is clear that Virginia’s death in January 1847 had dire consequences on the emotional life of Edgar Poe, who died less than three years later. The years after Virginia were chaotic for him: he drank heavily, tried vainly to woo various matrons of society, and wrote little. In the summer of 1849 he made a sentimental journey to Richmond, where he had lived for many years with Virginia, and by chance encountered Sarah Royster, a woman he had once loved many years before.