Shadowing Practice: The God of Horror - Learn English Speaking with Video
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And neither the angels in heaven above, nor the demons down under the sea,
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can ever dishever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee. But beauty doesn't last.
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It fades, it rots.
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And when it's gone, it leaves a space you can't fill.
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Nothing lasts, everything ends.
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What makes life a blessing when we are destined to lose it all?
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For most of us, Death is an intruder, but for our main character Edgar Allan Poe, it was the only companion who never abandoned him.
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He met at young, lost to it often and fell in love with it.
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That love, or obsession, became the heartbeat of his work
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and turned him into one of the most influential writers of all time.
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For Poe, Death wasn't a shadow following him, it was a shadow he kept chasing and the closer he got,
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the stranger the light till the light became so bright that we don't know how his story ended.
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Historically Fact, Part 13.
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Edgar Allan Poe.
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You've probably heard the name.
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The author behind the most disturbing gothic stories, the inventor of the mystery genre and part time owner of a dark, messy and disturbing mind.
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So let's rewind to where it all started and see if we can understand what drove him, well, to what happened.
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Life was gifted to the small boy in 1809.
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Born in Boston and, worse yet, born to parents who were both failing actors, Edgar's life started already horrendous.
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He and his two siblings had it rough and love was a luxury they couldn't afford.
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Cursed be my fortune!
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How I would exchange my lot for another household!
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Sign here!
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tuberculosis this time.
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That makes Poe a Batman.
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But unlike Batman, Poe didn't inherit a mansion and a butler.
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He got shipped off to the home of John Allen, a wealthy merchant in Richmond, Virginia.
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Sounds like an upgrade, right?
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Yeah, not quite.
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Firstly, say goodbye to your siblings.
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Each one got shipped off to a different family in the country, which scarred Edgar massively.
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Sure, tobacco trade money, but generosity?
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Nuh uh.
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Allen saw Poe less as a child and more as an investment.
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One that was supposed to pay off by becoming a respectable businessman.
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Poetry, according to John Allen, was about as useful as legally adopting your orphan.
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Which, by the way, he never did.
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So officially Edgar Allen Poe is actually just Edgar Poe.
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While Poe was given social circle, none of it made him feel at home.
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To Poe, the "Allen Middle" name was like an expensive suit he was allowed to wear, but never actually owned.
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A reminder that his place and love in the family was conditional.
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So like all children do, he instead found happiness and love in books.
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He devoured the classics, the romantics and anything with words that bled.
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While John Allen was busy counting tobacco shipments, Poe was scribbling By the time Poe hit his teenage years,
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the cracks between him and John Allen were starting to look more like Kenyans.
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Poe wanted Poe a tree, very fittingly, while John Allen wanted John Prophet.
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Poe wanted to romance language, Allen wanted him to romance ledgers.
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And so began one of the most passive aggressive, father not officially son relationships in American history.
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Sounds great, until you realize John Allen literally set him up for failure.
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Allen gave him less than one third of what Po needed to buy books, uniforms and what not.
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It was as if being broke was some kind of motivational challenge.
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And so young Po, literally having no other way to fund his studies, turned to gambling to make ends meet.
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Big shock, the house always wins and Po left with empty pockets.
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When Po came crawling back to Richmond, John Allen basically looked at him and said "Wow, and you write poetry?
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Congratulations, you're useless.
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And that was the final straw.
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Poe was done with Alan's cold, transactional brand of parenting.
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Poe decided if John Alan wouldn't give him a home, he would build one himself.
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And just like many 18 year olds trying to escape toxic family life, he did the most dramatic thing possible.
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He joined the US Army.
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Enlisting under a fake name, Edgar A.
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Perry, he told them he was 22, though he was 18, and signed up for a 5 year stint.
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Ironically, the military life gave him something he would never had: structure.
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He excelled, moving up to the rank of Sergeant Mayor of Artillery in less than two years.
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But discipline only went so far.
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It was nice and all, but poetry and writing stories?
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That's what really made him feel alive.
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For the first time in basically ever, he felt fueled with a passion, with a reason to live.
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That feeling of wanting to exist was something new to Edgar Allan Poe.
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He looked for exits out of the military, something that wasn't too easy back then.
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Luckily Po found a loophole.
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He would get out of the army early if he could somehow get into West Point, a prestigious government ran military school.
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But without funding or backing, there is no way he could even apply, let alone attend.
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What to do?
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Hello, allow me to make things worse.
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Miss Ellen, mama to him, the only warm presence in the Ellen house, fell ill to tuberculosis in 1829.
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John Ellen, ever the paragon of tenderness, didn't even tell Poe his mother figure was dying until it was nearly too late.
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Edgar rushed to Richmond and arrived just in time to see her near the end.
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If his birth parents as a death had planted a seed of obsession with illness and parting, Miss Alice's passing watered it.
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That grief cracked him open.
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After the funeral, John Allen and Poe had a brief awkward truce.
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Enough for Poe to ask John Allen to help him aim higher.
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West Point, the prestigious military academy.
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John Allen agreed.
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seeing it was a final chance for Poe to become a worthy investment anyway.
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So Poe left the army early, traded his uniform for a cadet and stepped into West Point in 1830.
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But Allen, in true Allen fashion promptly cut off his funding again.
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Geez, thanks dad.
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I mean, person who took me in.
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I mean, Guy Wu's last name I still use for some reason.
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I'll just get court -martialed instead.
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Guess this is the part where I become a successful poet.
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Spoiler, successful poet is not exactly a stable career path in the 1830s America.
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Unless your definition of successful includes being broke, hungry and wondering if you should go back to the military.
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There, he was surrounded by actual affection again.
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His aunt, her mother and Maria's daughter, Virginia.
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Remember her, she will come back later as an underage lovey dovey.
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The home was poor, yes, but it wasn't cold.
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Don't get me wrong, Poe's life wasn't suddenly great or something, but at least he had an environment where he could finally delve into poets and writing without being scolded for it.
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This was it.
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His chance to make it big, Po sat down night after night, writing poem after poem, delving deeper and deeper into his scarred mind.
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Sick, twisted, even depressing poems came forth the world had never seen.
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And finally, in 1831, he published his grand work and… the book was a grand failure.
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No one liked his sickening approach to life.
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And you know what?
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Even death took it personal how much of a failure this book was.
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took away another person close to him, his brother this time.
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You know, the one we mentioned in the beginning.
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Though the brothers barely had contact in their lives, both felt extremely connected to him as they shared the same problems.
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Both struggled in their orphanage childhood, both ended up gambling, both started to drink and both were severely scarred by life.
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The only difference between them is that the brother, just like his mom and miss Alan,
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caught tuberculosis, And this was again an extremely painful reminder to Poe how fragile and temporary life actually is,
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yet death seems to be always around.
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With the book being a failure and another close person being claimed by death, Poe's voice and thoughts were starting to take shape as we know them.
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From that point on, Poe's pen was no longer content with sweet bliss.
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It wanted rot, claustrophobia and dread.
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He abandoned the soft touches of youthful verses and started slicing straight into the human psyche.
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And this was revolutionary at the time.
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You see, in the early 1800s, American literature was mostly sunny landscapes, noble farmers and heroic ideals.
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Bo looked at that and went, "Cool, now what if the farmer murdered his wife
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and buried his cold dead body under the cornfield?" Where other authors painted sunlit fields and gallant heroes, Bo stared into the attic and asked what was chained up there.
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He wasn't trying to scare people for the cheap thrill.
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His horror was so much psychological.
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He dug into guilt, obsession, grief, madness.
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The things people tried to ignore.
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The things that were heavily frowned upon.
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He wanted to hold up the mirror to the public to show the disturbing, twisted and disgusting side that people very much have, but never show.
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And that made him unpopular.
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Bo didn't care.
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If the mainstream wanted optimism, they should hug a tree or kiss a flower.
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His persistence began to pay off.
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In 1833, one else won a literary prize and his name started to circulate beyond just the rejected manuscript
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But the name alone didn't pay rent.
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He took on editorial work to survive.
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Not just correcting spelling, but sharpening entire magazines into weapons.
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Both pages became darker, sharper and more obsessive.
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And with every published piece, his voice, that unmistakable blend of beauty and decay, became harder to ignore.
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It was as if the darker and twisted his life became, so did his works.
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In 1836, love came to Poe's life.
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And not the normal one.
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He married Virginia Clem.
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Yes, the same Virginia from his aunt's house.
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She was 13, Poe was 27, and while that age gap turns heads now, at the time it raised just eyebrows.
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Especially since it ensured financial stability to poor households.
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To Poe, she was warmth in a world that had only ever given him cold hands.
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Children are often oblivious to the pains of reality.
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And that innocence attracted Poe to her.
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A beacon of blissful ignorance that can keep him from endlessly spiraling down the rabbit hole.
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She was his anchor, his muse, the one place where his mind could rest.
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But love alone couldn't quiet the storm.
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Bo was poor, his health was shaky, and rejection, both personal and professional, kept piling up.
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And when the pressure got too loud, he turned to alcohol.
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At first, a drink made him sharper, more confident.
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The second drink… well, that one knocked the edges off reality.
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By the third, the brilliance had girdled into self -sabotage.
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Poe was the kind of man who would write a masterpiece in the morning and ruin a career opportunity by nightfall.
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His friends noticed, his editors noticed, and Poe noticed and then poured another glass.
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The alcohol didn't make him necessarily a better writer, it just made the lows deeper.
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and the shadow is longer.
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Every time he went lower, his eyes opened more to the rotten side of humanity.
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A great source of material for his work, you could say.
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His fiction twisted deeper into obsession, madness and decay.
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His life and his art were now feeding each other in a perfect toxic loop.
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And somewhere in that loop, Poe became the writer who would change American literature forever.
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And for a while, things almost felt stable.
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They had little money, sure, and Poe's drinking was like a loaded pistol on the table.
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Sometimes untouched, sometimes suddenly fired.
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But Virginia's presence kept them from going fully over the edge.
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They laughed together, they sang and even played games.
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There are stories of Poe chasing her through the house in mock sword fights, paper hats and all.
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It was the closest thing to joy he'd had since childhood.
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But joy in Bo's world was never allowed to last.
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One winter afternoon while playing the piano, Virginia suddenly coughed and a bright drop of blood bloomed on her lips.
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Tuberculosis.
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The same deceased that has stolen his mother, his foster mother and his brother had now come for the only light he had left.
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Virginia's illness didn't just haunt him, it consumed him.
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The man who had once chased her in playful games now sat at her bedside, watching the life leave her little by little.
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every single day.
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And when she did have moments of strength, they both pretended, for her sake, that everything was fine.
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But Poe's pen betrayed him.
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The poems and stories from this period are some of the most suffocating, most desperate he ever wrote.
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Not just about death, but about the cruelty of knowing it's coming and being powerless to stop it.
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In 1843, he bled out the telltale heart.
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A fevered confession of a murderer driven mad by guilt, its heartbeat pounding like Virginia's fragile pulse in his ears.
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Soon after came the Pit in a Pendulum, a slow, claustrophobic descent into terror that mirrored the prison his life had become.
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And then, in 1845, the poem that would define him: The Raven.
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It wasn't just the story.
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It was Po bleeding directly onto the page.
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A man alone in his chamber visited by a raven.
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A creature that perches above his door and speaks only one word: never more.
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At first, the word feels like a riddle, a cruel joke.
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But as the narrator questions it, Nevermore becomes something else.
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A prophecy, a verdict, a reminder that love, happiness, even sanity, once gone, will nevermore return.
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Bose reader saw a gothic curiosity.
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Poe's friend saw a masterpiece, but Poe himself saw Virginia in that room, fading in the candlelight, and felt the raven's shadow stretch over them both.
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Nevermore wasn't fiction.
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It was the truth, the grand conclusion he'd been running from his entire life.
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Spelled out in one crushing word.
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Virginia's cuff grew bloodier, her steps shorter.
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She could no longer sing, barely speak, and Beau knew he would always known what was coming.
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Then, one January night in 1847, death came for her.
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And in that moment, something in Poe broke in a way it had never broken before.
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He had always written about death flirted with it, even courted it like an old friend.
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But now, in the silence after Virginia's last breath, He claimed to see it.
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Truly see it.
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standing there beside him.
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And to his horror, Death looked back.
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Not with the cold indifference he had imagined all his life, but with a warm, almost pitying smile, as if to say: "You knew I would come." From then on,
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Poe descended into a darkness so complete that maybe no other man had ever reached it.
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He drank more.
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He raved in the streets.
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Friends found him incoherent, wandering, sometimes dressed in clothes that weren't his.
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The man who had once held the world in his pen was now losing his grip on reality, on stability, on life itself.
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A lot of people have reached rock bottom in their life, but who in their right mind would sit down in
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that dark emptiness and continue to grab a shovel and dig deeper to understand it better?
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The human mind can only handle so much.
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And then, in October of 1849, Po vanished.
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Days later, he was found in a random park in Baltimore, delirious, wearing yet again another man's clothes and calling out a name no one recognized.
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He was rushed to the hospital by a bystander.
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The doctors however didn't know what was wrong with him.
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Alcohol poisoning, rabies, beating, there were signs of none.
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Then four days later, Edgar Allan Poe famously opened his eyes,
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filled with tears and despair Shortly after,
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death too, like it always did for each and every person he cared about, came for Poe.
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He died at age 40.
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Though his physical body passed on, his words refused to die.
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Poe's works didn't just influence literature anymore, they started to reshape it.
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He dragged horror out of the graveyard and into the human mind.
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He made us see that the scariest terrors weren't ghosts in the attic, they were thoughts we couldn't silence.
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He didn't just tell stories, he changed the rules, Poe laid the blueprint for modern horror, detective fiction and psychological thrillers.
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Sir Arthur Conan Doyle called him a model for all time.
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Lovecraft called him the god of the gothic.
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And filmmakers, novelists and poets still chased the shadow he cast nearly two centuries ago.
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Many people misunderstood Poe's greatest gift to humanity.
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It wasn't just in showing us horror, it was in showing us beauty and beauty inside horror.
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He told us that death is not the opposite of life.
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But it's reflection that the only reason death hurts is because life once felt so sweet.
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That love and loss are made of the same fabric and you can't have one without the other.
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And maybe that is why Annabelle Lee, discovered among his papers after his death, still breaks hearts today.
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It's not just about the beautiful maiden stolen away by the sea.
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It's about Virginia.
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It's about the grand truth Bo spent his life writing toward that love does not stop at the grave.
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And death does not win just by taking someone away.
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In the end, Poe didn't solve the mystery of death.
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He didn't try to.
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He looked straight at it and told us it was beautiful.
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Not because it ends life, but because it proves life ever existed at all.
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It just really, really hurts when it arrives.
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Because what is once lost will and can never return.
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Nevermore.
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Why practice speaking with this video?
The video titled "The God of Horror" serves as an engaging way for you to enhance your English speaking skills. As you listen to the emotional narrative of Edgar Allan Poe’s life, you have a unique opportunity to practice shadow speaking. This technique involves mimicking the sounds, rhythm, and intonation of the speaker, which can significantly improve your fluency and pronunciation. Not only does this immersive method allow you to grasp the emotional undercurrents of the text, but it also helps in mastering complex sentence structures that reflect the depth of the English language. Engaging with the material in this way means you'll not just learn words, but you'll also understand the context in which they are used, making your speaking more natural.
Grammar & Expressions in Context
This video is rich in various grammatical structures and expressions that exemplify eloquent English. Here are three key features to pay attention to:
- Conditional Clauses: The phrase "What makes life a blessing when we are destined to lose it all?" poses a hypothetical situation that can enhance your ability to form conditionals in your own speaking.
- Metaphorical Language: The metaphor "Death wasn't a shadow following him, it was a shadow he kept chasing" emphasizes a deeper understanding of language use in artistic contexts. This will not only expand your vocabulary but also boost your ability to express complex ideas.
- Direct Speech: The evocative line "Cursed be my fortune!" employs directness to convey emotion. Practicing these kinds of strong phrases can improve your expressiveness when speaking English.
Common Pronunciation Traps
As you listen and practice shadowing in this video, pay special attention to some potentially tricky words and phrases. Notably:
- “Companion” – Make sure to emphasize the second syllable: com-pan-ion.
- “Obsessed” – The ‘ss’ sound can be tricky; aim for a sharp pronunciation: ob-se-ssed.
- “Horrendous” – Note the stress on the second syllable: hor-rend-ous.
- Emotional Pauses: Listen for pauses that accompany emotional expressions. Incorporating pauses effectively can add dramatic emphasis to your speech.
By focusing on these linguistic elements and common pitfalls, you can use your shadowing practice, or shadowspeak, to foster a more authentic English-speaking style.
Grammar in this video
The structures the speaker uses most, with the exact words from the video:
| Structure | In the video |
|---|---|
| Passive voice be + past participle — the focus is on what happens, not who does it | are destined · was gifted · was given |
| Relative clauses who / which + clause — extra information about a person or thing | person who took · man who would · man who had |
| Present perfect have/has + past participle — a past action that still matters now | You've probably heard · has stolen · have reached |
What is the Shadowing Technique?
Shadowing is a science-backed language learning technique originally developed for professional interpreter training and popularized by polyglot Dr. Alexander Arguelles. The method is simple but powerful: you listen to native English audio and immediately repeat it out loud — like a shadow following the speaker with just a 1–2 second delay. Unlike passive listening or grammar drills, shadowing forces your brain and mouth muscles to simultaneously process and reproduce real speech patterns. Research shows it significantly improves pronunciation accuracy, intonation, rhythm, connected speech, listening comprehension, and speaking fluency — making it one of the most effective methods for IELTS Speaking preparation and real-world English communication.