Indeed, one of the more-coherent explanations of Poe's fragmented life is that which casts him as an actor imitating various personalities. Poe, as the orphaned child of itinerant actors reared in the home of a tyrannical and unloving foster father, is said to have felt a lack of roots and self-identity. This lack of identity is supposed to have caused him to assume various unsuitable masks, or guises, and to spend his life in role-playing. He even refers to himself at least twice as a literary
histrio, a player.
The player analogy clearly pertains to the earliest models for his fiction, that of Blackwood's Edinburgh Magazine, which developed a cult of personality around its editors and contributors, who under code names played to a special audience of the intellectually elite. In another dimension, even Poe's satire and parody are supposed to show how dependent on imitation and playing he was for literary inspiration. In his poetry Poe is said to have borrowed not only the symbols of British Romantic writing but also the personalities of the Romantic poets.
