Many romanticists focused on the contemplation of the natural world, but few dared to journey down the road of the unexplainable into the supernatural realms. Only one man, Edgar Allen Poe, crossed the threshold between the real world and the dark and dreary habitat of his mind.
Unlike the masses, Poe disregarded the French revolutionary philosophy, humanitarianism, reform, the new interpretation of nature, and exploration of the past.
He worked on exploiting the purely imaginative faculty of his mind and focused on the realm of mystery and horror (Blankenship, 216). He treaded the rich and sometimes dank soil of the Gothic and grotesque. His tales littered with distraught narrators, deranged heroes, and doomed heroines caused the atmosphere of his work to fall somewhere between a nightmare and hallucination (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). All of his fictions contain an evident irritation with the commonplace and a penchant for intellectual and emotional extremes (Conn, 133). Poe distinguished himself from many of his contemporaries and successors with his feverish search of perfection. To Poe literature was a serious vocation expressing the beauty and poignancy of life and to be effective required flawlessness. One of his few weaknesses however was his intellectual detachment from his time and environment (Blankenship, 216). Poe is most noted for his incredible short stories of the bizarre and insane (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). Poe does not invent the short story, but he is one of the first to distinguish between a story that is short and a short story by defining one. Poe simply states that a short story should emphasize unity or the totality of the impression and brevity because the unity of the story is lost in a mass of details. Also...
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...Death, 1). The story is shrouded in a great amount of symbolism. For instance the seven rooms are symbolic of the seven stages of life including death--the black velvet chamber. The Prince must pass from the blue room through all of the other rooms to the black chamber to catch up with the Masque of the Red Death. The ebony clock symbolizes our internal clocks with its "clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical (1403)" chiming. The theme of the story is chilling--death cannot be avoided it is internal demon that holds an "illimitable dominion over all (1406)."
Edgar Allen Poe explored the dark side of romanticism and made the line between sanity and insanity virtually vanish. His life and literature are best summed up by his own words, "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only dream by night (American Romanticism, 145)"
Edgar Allen Poe is known for his dark yet comedic approach toward the his theme of his stories. Likewise, Poe’s themes have gathered many fans due to his impression of reasoning in his stories. The author uses thinking and reasoning to portray the theme. Poe’s unique diction comprehends with the theme of the story. Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery, and terror, and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from, surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words.
Even though a good number of critics despise Edgar Allen Poe with a passion, almost all who read his creations gave him credit for being a genius. He was the first to write a detective story and tales that dealt with split personality or divided consciousness way before the matter was well known by the common people. He managed to capture the imagination of the public by exploring the mysterious psychological world of the individual -- madness, despair, pain, inner chaos, etc. His works, which lack a sense of right or wrong, had great influence upon some types of popular fiction, with a detective story on the lead. Ranging from French symbolists, like Rimbrad and Mallarme, to American writers, such as Bierce, Melville, and Faulkner, were influenced by Poe's writings. He even inspired well-known Philosophers like Frederick Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. Just to mention a few, gothic architecture, psychological abnormalities, hidden...
In “The Fall of the House of Usher” the gloomy house was symbolic of the Ushers and their own isolation. The narrator’s first impression was symbolic of events to come. He felt “a depression of the soul… a sinking, sickening of the heart.” He found Roderick to be “a bounden slave… to an anomalous species of terror.” In “The Tell Tale Heart” the narrator’s description of his isolated observation of the old man night after night increases the sense of terror, especially for the victim. The symbol was the old man’s “evil eye”. Another symbol was the sound of the beating heart that caused him to rush to kill the man. Fear sent Prospero and his friends into hiding in one of his secluded abbeys to escape the Red Death. Terror is evident from the narrator’s description of the dying. That fear was in the hearts of all who attempted to find “security within.” There are many symbols in the story like the eight rooms that represented the stages of life. The black room represented the final stage of life. The sound of the ebony clock that caused the masqueraders nervously to “pause” was like a foreshadowing. The “masked figure” in the Red Death mask was a symbol of death for all who hid from
Poe's creativity was, perhaps, due to the lifestyle in which he lived. It was obviously different, much more harsh and filled with heartache and death. His influence on the arts was different from that of his contemporaries as well. "He influenced the course of creative wiring and criticism by emphasizing the are that appeals simultaneously to reason and to emotion and by insisting that the work of art is not a fragment of the author's life, nor an adjunct to didactic purpose, but an object created in the cause of beauty—which he defined in its largest spiritual implication" (1236).
...story writers all over the world. Although he had an unusual, unique, and peculiar way of writing he still had a great influence and impact on society during his time, up to the present day. Poe’s writing has changed the way present day writers write about love, pride, beauty and death.
Poe is renowned for his authorship of tales dealing with morbid psychology. Critiquing his work, Edmund Clarence Stedman says of Poe: "His strength is unquestionable in those clever pieces of ratiocination...and especially in those with elements of terror and morbid psychology added". Stedman goes on to say, "His artistic contempt for metaphysics is seen even in those tales which appear most transcendental. Th...
The life of Edgar Allan Poe, was stuffed with tragedies that all affected his art. From the very start of his writing career, he adored writing poems for the ladies in his life. When he reached adulthood and came to the realization of how harsh life could be, his writing grew to be darker and more disturbing, possibly as a result of his intense experimenting with opium and alcohol. His stories continue to be some of the most frightening stories ever composed, because of this, some have considered this to be the reason behind these themes. Many historians and literature enthusiasts have presumed his volatile love life as the source while others have credited it to his substance abuse. The influence of his one-of-a-kind writing is more than likely a combination of both theories; but the main factor is the death of many of his loved ones and the abuse which he endured. This, not surprisingly, darkened his perspective considerably.
During the American Renaissance, writers were put into one of two categories. The categories were the Dark Romantics and the Transcendentalists. Some Dark Romantics include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The Dark Romantics stories included creepy symbols, horrific themes, and psychological effects of guilt and sin. The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving gives a few examples as to why life is meaningless to some people.Humans are not all good, there are some cruel people in this world. The Pit and the Pendulum tells you exactly why.
During the American literary movement known as Transcendentalism, many Americans began to looking deeper into positive side of religion and philosophy in their writing. However, one group of people, known as the Dark Romantics, strayed away from the positive beliefs of Transcendentalism and emphasized their writings on guilt and sin. The most well-known of these writers is Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was a dark romantic writer during this era, renown for his short stories and poems concerning misery and macabre. His most famous poem is “The Raven”, which follows a man who is grieving over his lost love, Lenore. In this poem, through the usage of tonal shift and progression of the narrator’s state of mind, Poe explores the idea that those who grieve will fall.
Best known for his poems and short fiction, Edgar Allan Poe deserves more credit than any other writer for the transformation of the short story into a respected literary work. He virtually created the detective story and perfected the psychological thriller. He also produced some of the most influential literary criticism of his time. Although he contributed so much to the writing world, little is known about the Poe himself. Historians have been trying for years to piece together the life of this literary genius. In almost every biographical publication Poe’s life is divided into three sections: his early life, his career, and his death.
His stories had an immense importance among authors such as Stephen King, along with helping to establish the genres of science fiction and the detective story, which got him the named father of the detective story. When writing his work “Poe was concerned above all with the “effect” of his tale on the reader. This effect, he thought, should be single and unified. When readers finished the story, they ought to be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story--character, style, tone, plot and so forth--should contribute to this effect” (Wright). So Poe sought to give his readers emotional and aesthetic pleasure, but also to get them to believe that his stories had a reality of their own. Poe’s early career path had him harboring two aspirations, one was writing and the other the army. The army aspiration didn’t last long and Poe began to focuses solely on writing full time. Poe began working for a magazine, writing reviews of his contemporaries and developed a reputation as a cutthroat critic, but while working for the magazine he also published some of his own works in it. In later years Poe worked as an editor, a poet, a critic and would publish several poems, short stories, and collections of stories. Poe was one of the more famous Dark Romantic writers, leading his works to have Dark Romantic elements such
D. H. Lawrence wrote an essay that extensively describes Edgar Allen Poe’s writing style. Lawrence looks at Poe’s work as a scientific and mechanical way of writing. The tales Poe writes are not really tales at all. The only reason they are even considered as tales is because they are a concatenation of cause and effect. Lawrence saw Edgar’s stories as more than just a tales. They are love stories. Poe does not write looking at the human part of someone’s life. The characters are looked at as inanimate objects with human qualities, rather than the characters being human with inorganic qualities.
Edgar Allen Poe was one of the most fanciful American poets and short story writers of the nineteenth century. His work always kept us wanting
Edgar Allan Poe was classified as a brooding romantic. Brooding romantics believed that humans had a capacity for evil. Even though brooding romantics has the opposite of romanticism belief, both happened during the same time period. Poe’s short story The Fall Of The House of Usher is gothic literature through the use of grotesque characters, bizarre situations and violent events.
Edgar Allan Poe led a strange and unusually hard life, but through his experiences he produced many outstanding and wonderful works which have with out a doubt contributed to American Literature in several different areas. His stories are treasured by an immense readership. Although, Poe was quiet popular for his gothic tales, he was also well known for being and accomplished humorist, which is seen in many of his short stories. Poe was credited for singlehandedly inventing the detective story. No other played a more crucial role in shaping and developing the aesthetic theory, in the nineteenth-century, than Edgar Allan Poe. Thus, Poe remains a permanent fixture of our literary culture.