Edgar Allan Poe

This 1845 portrait of Edgar Allan Poe by Samuel Stillman Osgood hangs in the National Portrait Gallery in Washington, DC

"Edgar Allan Poe is popularly known for his poem 'The Raven' (1844), and like the raven itself, Poe was a dark presence amid the optimism of early American culture. Not for him was the glorification of the individual or the celebration of nature as life-giving. Poe peeled back the underside of America to sketch a world in which nothing, especially human motivation, was transparent, predictable, or even knowable. In their dark, hallucinatory imagery, Poe's writings profoundly influenced such European poets as Baudelaire and Rimbaud. In America, his voice is still singular for the strength with which it spoke against the spirit of the Romantic age in which he lived. Poe's great subject was death, and he seemed to court it in his life as well as art, dying early after proving himself unable to function in the society he dissected so remorselessly." -- National Portrait Gallery