Poe never really knew his parents. His father left his family early on. His mother died when he was three years old. He was separated from his siblings and went to live with John and Frances Allan, a Tabaco merchant and his wife, in Richmond, Virginia. He and Frances formed a sort of bond, but he never really connected with John. Poe reportedly wrote poems on the back of some of John’s business papers. Money was an issue between Poe and John. When he went to college, Poe didn’t receive enough funds from John to cover all of the costs, so Poe resorted to gambling, which lead to him going into debt. When he returned home, Poe found that his neighbor and fiancée had gotten engaged to someone else. Frustrated, Poe left the Allan’s. Poe moved in with his aunt and her daughter Virginia in Baltimore. There he fell in love with his young 13 year old cousin and married her. After returning to Richmond, Poe went to work for a magazine. There he developed a reputation as a cut-throat critic. Poe also published some of his own works in the magazine. Poe left the magazine after his aggressive reviewing style and combative personality caused tension in his relationship with the publication.
As we can see, Poe had had a rough past, most likely leading to his poignant and often morbid stories and poems. Often his stories are disturbing and off-putting due to the feelings with which he writes them. Often it seems he writes his stories with a depressed, angry feeling that can easily come from the hard past that he suffered.
In his poem, The Raven, Poe has more of a paranoid feeling. He was portraying this feeling this due to LaNoire. LaNoire is the deceased wife of the character in the poem. The Raven in the poem is saying “Nevermore” to every question asked by the character. The use of rhyme and alliteration really brought this poem to life. The way he incorporated it into the poem show how much of a literary genius he was. This poem had more of an eerie, depressed feeling, which makes sense being that it is evident that the story is more personal to him. We can see that when he was writing this, he was mourning the loss of his wife, leading to the depressed, fearful, ominous, paranoid feeling that he wrote this story with.
In his story The Masque of the Red Death, Poe uses disease to show how people can be selfish and only think about themselves. When he was writing this, he had a more aggravated point