Esta actividad reúne los conceptos centrales que hemos estado estudiando en relación a los

aspectos gramaticales de la lengua inglesa. Es importante haber leído el apunte referido a

ACTIVITIES:

1.- Read the biography.

2.- Identify these word categories and make a list.

Include 3 nouns, 3 verbs (in the past), 3 infinitives, 3 adjectives, 3 prepositions, 3 pronouns and
1 adverb (manner)

3.- Analyse the noun phrases underlined and study their meaning considering the context. Write
your interpretation in Spanish.

TEXT:

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts. Poe's father and
mother, both professional actors (1), died before the poet was three years old, and John and
Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan, a prosperous tobacco
exporter (2), sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where
Poe excelled academically. After less than one year of school, however, he was forced to leave the
university when Allan refused to pay Poe's gambling debts.

Poe returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated. In 1827, he moved
to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane, and
Other Poems, was published that year. In 1829, he published a second collection entitled Al
Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received significant critical or public
attention. Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy,
but he was again forced to leave for lack of financial support. He then moved into the home of his
aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia in Baltimore, Maryland (3).

Poe began to sell short stories to magazines at around this time, and, in 1835, he became the
editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin
Virginia. In 1836, he married Virginia, who was thirteen years old at the time. Over the next ten
years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton's Gentleman's Magazine
and Graham's Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during
these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer and an editor. He published
some of his best-known stories and poems, including "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Tell-
Tale Heart," "The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and "The Raven." After Virginia's death from
tuberculosis in 1847, Poe's lifelong struggle with depression and alcoholism (4) worsened. He
returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For
unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-
consciousness. Poe died four days later of "acute congestion of the brain." Evidence by medical
practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe's work as an editor, a poet and a critic had a profound impact on American and international
literature. His stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many
anthologies credit him as the architect of the modern short story. He was also one of the first
critics to focus primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work; as such, he has been
seen as a forerunner to the "art for art's sake" movement. French Symbolists such as Mallarmé
and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. Baudelaire spent nearly fourteen years
translating Poe into French. During the early 1950s, Argentine writer Julio Cortázar was
commissioned by UNESCO to translate Edgar Allan Poe's prose into Spanish. Cortázar's deep
knowledge of the English language and his acquaintance with the life and work of the American
writer (5) meant that, over the ensuing decades, he produced renditions which are still considered
to be among the most literary of all twentieth-century Spanish translations of Poe's work. At
present, Poe is remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in world
literature.
Selected Bibliography

Poetry

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)

Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)

Poems (1831)

The Raven and Other Poems (1845)

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848)

Fiction

Berenice (1835)

Ligeia (1838)

The Fall of the House of Usher (1839)

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1939)

Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841)

The Black Cat (1843)

The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)

The Purloined Letter (1845)

The Cask of Amontillado (1846)

The Oval Portrait (1850)

The Narrative of Arthut Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1850)