Example Of Romanticism In Edgar Allan Poe

to the lengthy ones Byron wrote. The Romantic movement profoundly influenced Poe as well. He was familiar with the works of British and American Romantic writers, including William Wordsworth, Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Percy Shelley, and Henry David Thoreau. However, in one of his reviews, Poe claimed that Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, another widely popular Romantic literary figure, was a plagiarist. On the other hand, he reviewed and admired the works of Hawthorne. While Poe’s brand of Romanticism mirrored his contemporaries, most of his works centered on what was later to be known as the “gothic” genre. For example, one of the main characteristics of Romanticism was the rejection of human reason in favor of emotion. Throughout

For example, a large portion of Poe’s fiction includes thoughts about death and questions about the afterlife. In stories such as “The City in the Sea” “The Bells”, and “The Conquerer”, Poe emphasizes that death is a part of life that not even the most powerful person in society can avoid. However, Poe does not always come to the same conclusion about the afterlife. For example, “Lenore” and “The Raven” are two poems that center on a deceased female’s name, yet share two opposing viewpoints about the afterlife. Another motif that appears constantly is love and loss. Stories that center around this theme often involves a young woman dying at the height of her youth, leaving a depressed young man who is possibly her lover behind to mourn. Parallels are drawn between the female in question and the untimely death of Virginia Clemm, as Poe often depicts the female as childlike or naive. For Poe, the strongest and most lasting love generally belonged to the young and innocent heroine of “Annabel Lee”, an attitude in line with many other contemporary writers of the Romantic Era. Whenever the young woman dies, many of Poe’s protagonists have such a strong bond with that woman to the point of obsession. In fact, the narrator of “Ulalume” wanders absentmindedly through the woods but is drawn to her tomb, and sleeps every night next to her grave close to the sea. Impermanence and uncertainty is also emphasized as a common theme. In “A Dream Within A Dream”, Poe tells readers that reality is not permanent and is merely just a dream, as the narrator first leaves his longtime love and struggles with his inevitability of the end, as in “The Conqueror Worm”, one of Poe’s least optimistic poems, which asserts that all men are controlled by evil forces until their inevitable and tragic downfalls, often resulting in death. Poe often associated nature with good, just like in “Tamerlane”, where Tamerlane