Edger Allen Poe

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Edgar Allan Poe was born on January 19, 1809 as Edgar Poe. He was the second son to Elizabeth Arnold Poe and David Poe. Both parents were actors, and shortly after Poe's birth, his father left his family around 1810. Edgar become an foster child before the age of three years, when his mother died on December 8, 1811 in Richmond, Virginia at the age of twenty-four years. His father died at the age of twenty-seven years old. After his mother's death. John and Frances Allan took in Poe. His paternal grandparents took in Brother William Henry; and foster parents cared for sister Rosalie. Allan was a strict men and work as a tobacco seller and his wife wasn't a very good parent. Poe was help by the Allan's aid, in privates school, excelling in Latin, in writing verse and declamation. However he was looked down upon by the upper class of society, perhaps because Poe was never legally adopted by the Allan's, he was regarded as an outsider by the Richmond elite. However, being the child of former actor's could have also added to his reputation of not fitting in with Richmond's culture at that time.

The loss of his mother at an early age definitely affected Poe, "The angels, whispering to one another, Can find, among their burning terms of love, None so devotional as that of ‘Mother'In Tamerlane, he not only wrote about his father, but he wrote about his mother too. He had more respect for his mother than he did for his father. In Tamerlane he speaks much nicer of his mother. "O, she was worthy of all love! Love – as in infancy was mine – ‘Twas such as angel minds above Might envy; her young heart the shrine on which my every hope and thought…" He thought of life with his mother and how it might have been.

In 1831 Poe moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Maria Clemm.

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