Research paper based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe Essay

Research paper based on the life of Edgar Allan Poe - Essay Example aware of his life story realize that he was orphaned at a very young age and was never able to achieve any sense of connection to his foster parents, the Allans. The author is also famous for his marriage to a young girl. At the age of 27, Poe decided to marry his 13-year-old cousin Virginia, the only girl he ever truly loved and who tragically died while still considered a young girl. Contributing both to his despair and his alienation from his foster father, Poe is known to have also engaged in a number of poor personal habits such as drinking, gambling and using opium, perhaps even as an addict. Despite these issues, he was able to find early commercial success as a writer. He published his first book of poems at the age of 19 and began publishing his short stories by the age of 23. Unfortunately, though, he never achieved the kind of financial success he felt his innovation and talent were entitled to and he remained a mostly disillusioned and miserable man through most of his li fe. Setting the rules for the art of the short story he’d brought into popularity, Poe said â€Å"If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression† (Mowery, 1997). Like many writers, though, Poe wrote of what he was most intimately familiar with, in this case his own inner demons, and his stories were thus themed primarily around the concepts of sorrow and loss. By examining works such as â€Å"The Fall of the House of Usher† or â€Å"Ligeia,† one begins to understand much about the author’s personality and inner character through the revelation of his anima. The term anima was introduced by Carl Jung’s work on dream analysis as a means of understanding the psyche on a different level than what had been proposed by Sigmund Freud. According to Neumann (1954), â€Å"the Anima is the personification of all feminine psychological tendencies within a man, the