twitter

Wednesday, 7 October 2015

October 7 1849 Edgar Allan Poe, aged 40, dies a tragic death in Baltimore

 Never able to overcome his drinking habits, he was found in a delirious condition outside a saloon that was used as a voting place.

Personality and Individual Differences
Volume 54, Issue 1, January 2013, Pages 3–6
Review

Edgar Allan Poe: A psychological profile ☆

 


doi:10.1016/j.paid.2012.07.027
Get rights and content

Abstract

Edgar Allan Poe is often regarded as one of the most well-known American poets of the 19th century. He is best known for his dark, gruesome depictions of emotionally haunted characters. His most famous poem, The Raven, exemplifies this style. To understand what motivated this writing style, we must learn about the man behind the pen. Not surprisingly, Poe had a difficult upbringing, fraught with illness, loss, and poverty. This review will examine Poe’s personal life and discuss how early experiences and possible genetic predispositions may have contributed to his affect and behaviours as an adult.

Highlights

► Brief overview of Edgar Allan Poe’s personal life. ► Examine how early experiences and possible genetic predispositions contributed to adult behaviours. ► Compare Poe’s experiences with findings from past research.

Keywords

  • Edgar Allan Poe;
  • Childhood;
  • Personality development;
  • Depression;
  • Alcohol abuse
☆
Editor’s Note: In 2009, Gordon Claridge guest edited a special issue of PAID titled “Personality, Psychopathology, and Original Minds”. Among other articles in this issue, psychobiographical profiles of Salvador Dali, Anais Nin, Erik Satie, and Brian Wilson of the Beach Boys were presented as illustrative of the fine line that sometimes exists between creativity and psychopathology. Notably, all of the articles in this special issue were written or co-authored by undergraduates in Oxford’s Department of Psychology. The present paper – a psychological profile of Edgar Allan Poe – was likewise written by a Psychology undergraduate student (at the University of Western Ontario) and offers a fascinating account of Poe’s background and life and how these contributed to his own psychological problems and the ways in which they may have influenced much of his writing. The author of the present article was invited to contribute this to PAID as a paper that complements those that appeared in the 2009 special issue.

Tel.: +1 519 657 7562.
Copyright © 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.
Posted by at