Edgar A. Poe Goes to West Point—and Gets Himself Thrown Out 

Try to picture Edgar Allan Poe at West Point. 

Uniform. 

Inspections. 

Military drills. 

Mathematics. 

Reveille. 

Rules. 

Lots and lots of rules. 

Now picture Poe. 

You can probably see the problem. 

Cadet Edgar A. Poe 

Poe entered the United States Military Academy at West Point in July 1830. 

This wasn’t his first encounter with military life. 

Several years earlier, broke and estranged from his foster father John Allan, Poe had enlisted in the U.S. Army under the name Edgar A. Perry. 

And here’s one of those inconvenient facts that complicates the popular image of Poe as incapable of functioning in the real world: 

He did remarkably well. 

He rose to the rank of sergeant major. 

Eventually he sought an appointment to West Point. 

Then things went wrong. 

Poe Discovers the Power of Not Doing Things 

By early 1831, Poe wanted out. 

There was a problem. 

Leaving West Point wasn’t quite as simple as packing a suitcase. 

So Poe apparently found another solution. 

He stopped doing what a cadet was supposed to do. 

He accumulated offenses for neglecting duties and disobeying orders. He was court-martialed and dismissed from the Academy. 

Which raises a delightful question: 

Was Poe a terrible cadet—or a very successful one? 

If his goal was to remain at West Point, he failed spectacularly. 

If his goal was to get himself expelled, things look rather different. 

One More Poe Trick 

Before leaving, Poe persuaded fellow cadets to contribute money toward the publication of a book of his poems. 

The resulting 1831 (Poems by Edgar A. Poe) volume was dedicated: 

“To the U.S. Corps of Cadets.” And 131 of the 232 cadets paid $1.25 to own a copy. 

The cadets may have expected something rather different from the serious poetry they received. Later stories claimed that Poe had entertained them with comic verses and satires. 

Whether every detail of those stories is true is another matter. 

With Poe, it usually is. 

THE SECRET 

Poe’s West Point adventure tells us something important about him. 

He wasn’t simply being buffeted helplessly through a disastrous life. 

Sometimes Poe engineered the disaster. 

He could adopt another name, enter the Army, excel at it, arrange his way out, enter West Point—and then apparently arrange his way out of that too. 

Failure? 

Perhaps. 

But before deciding, remember the first rule of Secrets of Poe: 

Always ask what Poe was trying to accomplish. 

Sometimes the apparent failure was the plan. 

Poe left clues. I followed them.