The Tragic Trajectories of Poe

This piece will be shorter because I want to really dive deep into this idea in a longer form.

One of Poe's main issues is he lost three important female figures in his life to tuberculosis: his birth mother, foster/adopted mother, and his wife.

Poe had also a struggle with gambling and holding onto money.

Poe struggled with abandonment from his birth father and lack of approval from foster/step-father.

Note for the author: there's some inconsistencies to who adopted Poe--his aunt and uncle, or that he was fostered--and who his cousin ends up being in relation to him: Virginia Clemm. This will need to be researched further.

There are some ideas of potential epileptic seizures in his works, according to the scientific deep-dive study into Poe's works and life submitted to Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatr, a Brazillian, an open-source online scientific and medical journal of neurology.

There are many other neurological events portrayed in many of Poe's works--but this can be argued that is specifically to further Poe's plot.

One statement in the journal that states, "Poe's behavior, with recurring episodes of depression and behavioral changes, together with abuse of alcohol and other drugs, such as opium, laudanum and morphine, could suggest a diagnosis of bipolar affective disorder with periods of depression and hypomania..."suggest that there is also a bipolar disorder idea against Poe and that can connect both Poe and Woolf in their terms of theory and potential diagnosis. Another fact of the matter, is that bipolar disorder--in both men and women--is often misdiagnosed and suggests that maybe both authors suffered from Borderline Personality Disorder: a disorder typically caused by early childhood traumas, something that both authors reportedly suffered from.

Whether this really connects the two authors completely is another question entirely, and I want to play around with this idea more.

Source for this post:

Arquivos de Neuro-Psiquiatr. "Edgar Allan Poe and Neurology" Historical Notes, 72 (6), 8 Feb, 2014, edited June 2014 https://doi.org/10.1590/0004-282X20140048