How Did Shakespeare Influence Edgar Allan Poe

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People all over the world are genealogically connected to all other people that live on earth. This hypothesis may be proven both biblically and scientifically. In the Bible, the first two people created by God were Adam and Eve, so technically, we all are related to Adam and Eve. In theory of evolution, there had to be a first man and woman created; again, we would all be related in some sort of fashion. The same principle applies to William Shakespeare and Edgar Allan Poe, not genealogically, but in a literary sense. Shakespeare and Poe may not have lived in the same century as one another, but the influence Shakespeare’s literary works had on Poe changed literature into what it is today. William Shakespeare’s and Edgar Allan Poe’s personal …show more content…

Edgar Allan Poe, at the age of two, he and his family were abandoned by his father. On top of that, his mother died, in December 1811, later the same year (Lemco “Poe, Edgar Allan”). Although Poe was never officially adopted, he eventually became part of the Allan family of Richmond, Virginia. In comparison to William Shakespeare, Poe grew up in a phenomenal educational environment, and he had a passion for literature from the time he started school. “Poe considered John Allan a miserly and abusive father to him because of his love for literature” (Lemco). After many years of traveling and studying at various schools, Edgar Allan Poe went to live with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. Once more in comparison to Shakespeare, in 1831 Poe’s biological brother, William Henry, died of alcoholism. Shortly after his brother’s death, he married his cousin Virginia, who at the time was thirteen years old (Lemco). As time passed, Edgar Allan Poe began working for local journalists, and he also started to write many of his well-known short stories and …show more content…

Eventually, he became sober and flourished into a phenomenal writer while composing one of his best-published poems, “The Raven.” “‘The Raven,’ a poem of anguished lose and bereavement, was Poe’s all-time major achievement” (Lemco). “The Raven” is about a drunken man visualizing and listening to a raven talk about his long lost love, Lenore, because the man is hallucinating. “Respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore! Oh, quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!” (Poe 840). “The Raven,” is an insight of the experiences Edgar Allan Poe suffered from because of his treacherous

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