Yet he owed more to
Coleridge than to any of the Romantics. He was himself a sort of
Coleridge without the piety, with the same keen penetrating
critical intelligence, the same lovely opium-shadowed dreams,
and, alas, with something of the same reputation as a deadbeat.
A child of strolling players, Poe happened to be born in Boston,
but he hated "Frog-Pondium"--his favorite name for the city of
his nativity--as much as Whistler hated his native town of
Lowell. His father died early of tuberculosis, and his mother,
after a pitiful struggle with disease and poverty, soon followed
her husband to the grave. The boy, by physical inheritance a
neurasthenic, though with marked bodily activity in youth, was
adopted by the Allans, a kindly family in Richmond, Virginia. Poe
liked to think of himself as a Southerner. He was sent to school
in England, and in 1826, at seventeen, he attended for nearly a
year the newly founded University of Virginia. He was a dark,
short, bow-legged boy, with the face of his own Roderick Usher.
He made a good record in French and Latin, read, wrote and
recited poetry, tramped on the Ragged Mountains, and did not
notably exceed his companions in drinking and gambling.
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