Poe, 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 selfidentity. 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 pertains to the earliest model 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. Poe played (so the theory goes) Byron in his earliest poems, then Thomas Moore, Shelley, and Coleridge. Yet, at the same time he played the role of the dreamy romantic poet, he also played the contradictory role of the mechanical calculating machine.
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