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Period: to
poes death
Poe dided in a Bailtamore hospital pennieless. They found Poe in a gutter -
England
The Allan family sails to London, where Edgar enrolls in school.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
first poem
A fifteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe pens his first known poem: "Last night, with many cares & toils oppres'd,/ Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
College
A fifteen-year-old Edgar Allan Poe pens his first known poem: "Last night, with many cares & toils oppres'd,/ Weary, I laid me on a couch to rest. (http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
west point
Poe is appointed to the U.S. Military Academy at West Point. A few months later he publishes his second book of poetry, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems. (http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
marriage
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Moves North
Poe moves his new wife and mother-in-law to New York and then to Philadelphia.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
Death of wife
Poe's wife Virginia dies of tuberculosis at their home in the Bronx. Poe has been so despondent during the final months of her illness that friends thought he was going insane. The loss of his wife sends Poe into a downward spiral of alcoholism.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
Engagement
Poe proposes to a poet named Sarah Helen Whitman, who agrees on the condition that he quit drinking. Poe can't live up to the promise, and Whitman calls off the engagement a month later.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
Engaged Again
Poe travels to Richmond and convinces his childhood sweetheart, Elmira Royster Shelton, to become his fiancée. He joins the Sons of Temperance, an organization that forbids drinking (sort of like a nineteenth-century equivalent of Alcoholics Anonymous). The next month, Poe travels to Baltimore.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
Death
After being found unconscious in a Baltimore gutter, Edgar Allan Poe is taken to the hospital and pronounced dead of causes still unknown. He is buried at Westminster Presbyterian Church in Baltimore.(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/timeline.html) -
Why was he important?
Poe revitalized American literature, producing perfectly crafted stories and poems while creating whole new genres (we have Poe to thank for the detective story, for example).(http://www.shmoop.com/poe/)
