10. Edgar Allen Poe is assigned multiple MBTI types
The innovative and dark writer and poet Edgar Allen Poe continues to be enigmatic over a century and a half after his mysterious death. Poe, a well-known and successful writer and editor, invented the modern detective story, wrote short stories still read for their ability to shock, and was a poet of renown. Many of his works dealt in the macabre, and his poetry often reflected the author’s own somber state of mind. He drank, heavily at times, including absinthe, and may have used opium. Among his lesser-known works is an essay, Eureka: A Prose Poem, in which he proposed a theory of the universe that first predicted the Big Bang Theory. He died in Baltimore, found incoherent and in someone else’s clothes, in October 1849. The cause of his death remains unknown, with speculation including alcohol poisoning, rabies, syphilis, and heart disease, among others.
A complex, talented, entrepreneurial, and tragic man, Poe is assigned several different MBTI types, depending on the source. Some have him as an INTP (Introverted, Intuitive, Thinking, Perceiving). Others assign him as an INFP (F meaning Feeling). Still, others claim different types for him. Maybe that’s best when considering the man and his life. He enjoyed many creative heights during his career and many personal tragedies in his life. He often poured his personal grief over the loss of loved ones, particularly women, into his work. Read Annabel Lee or The Raven and it’s impossible not to sense his personal pain. Perhaps the INFP designation is the correct one, as he was obviously a man who felt loss deeply and expressed it in his work.
