Comparing Edgar Allan Poe And Thomas Cole

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This essay will be about comparing Edgar Allan Poe, the father of detective novels, and Thomas Cole, founder of the Hudson Valley River school. Though these two have very different backgrounds, they have some similarities in their works. This discussion will be explaining how their works compare and also give evidence on where it is similar. Then we will look at three sets of works from each of them as proof to these sameness. Edgar Allan Poe's “The Fall of House of Usher” and Thomas Cole's “The Vesper Hymn” are the first two art works that will be compared. After that, Poe's “The Gold Bug” and Cole's “Titan's Goblet” are the next to be analyzed. Then Poe's “The Masque of The Red Death” and Cole's “Destruction of Empire” will …show more content…

While he was still in his twenties, Cole was made a fellow of the National Academy (thomascole.org). Many artists started following in Cole's footsteps and this was the beginning of the Hudson River School. Hudson River School was an art movement that was influenced by romanticism. In 1829-1831, Cole returned to Great Britain for study, to attend to family business and to travel to France and Italy (thomascole.org). Wealthy Americans traveled to Europe to discover their identity around the same time. This benefited Cole greatly because his reputation increased and his wealth as well. Cole became one of the most famous landscape artists. His best-known series of paintings, also my favorite, came after he returned from Europe in 1832. The series was known as “ The Course of Empire.” This series displayed some of Cole's darker and realistic paintings. Thomas Cole married Maria Bartow around the same time that Cole's father and his patron Luman passed away. A few years later Cole became more religious and started developing another series of paintings called “The Cross and the World.” And on February 11, 1848, Thomas Cole died from lung problems. Even with such a short life, Cole had a successful career as an artist. He was considered the founder of the Hudson River School and he developed numerous works of arts that are still studied to this …show more content…

At the young age of thirteen, Poe already had enough poetry to create a book. This just shows the extremely high artistic skills and intelligence Edgar Allan Poe had. Poe's young adult life was a depressing point in his life. It starts with Poe moved out of Richmond to attend the University of Virginia. He excelled in his classes but he accumulated a huge amount of debt. This was caused by the fact that Mr. Allan sent Poe to college with less than a third of the money needed to attend the college. In attempt to get by, Poe took up gambling to raise money but this ended up in a failure. His situation was so severe that he burned his furniture to keep warm (poemuseum.org). Poe felt humiliated by his his poverty and was angry with his foster father for not helping him with funding. He returned to Richmond to find out his fiancée Elmira Royster became engaged to another while Poe was away at school. With all these problems in his life, Edgar Allan Poe final stormed out of his home in Richmond to pursue his dream to become a great poet. He accomplished the first objective by publishing his first book Tamerlane when he was only eighteen

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