Romanticism and Edgar A. Poe

790 Words2 Pages

The dictionary defines romanticism as a style of art, literature, etc.,during the late 18th and early 19th centuries that emphasized the imagination and emotions (Merrian-Webster). The Romantic period was an intellectual movement, a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance idealization. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, and the visionary. It was until 1818 that Romantic poetry started to be published in North America. Washington Irving, James Fenimore Cooper, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson can be taken as examples of American Romantic literature. The Romantic writer is often both praised and condemned for emphasizing the strange, the bizarre, the unusual, and the unexpected.
Born in Boston on January 19 of 1809 Edgar A. Poe was the most melodramatic of any of the major American Writers of his generation he is widely acknowledged as the inventor of modern detective story and an innovator of the science fiction genre. After his parents died he went to live with the Allan’s. He had to leave college before his first year was over because of drinking and gambling, later on he joined the army. He published some poems during that time that had very good acceptance. During his career he lived in Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and New York. He went back to drinking and gambling, because of this he got fired from his work and got distracted from the writing. He died in October 7 of 1849. With a large diversity of tales it’s been hard to classify them, even though his tales are really good, his true “passion” was poetry. The tale “The Cask of Amon...

... middle of paper ...

...ges in the country contribute to the end. Still is present in nowadays in American culture. The American Romanticism ended in 1865 but left us great literature that is timeless and never gets old or bad.
Edgar A. Poe had a very hard life, many of his writings are dark, sad and a little obscure. I do not think that he decided to write like this because of his past, but I do think it is related or maybe he just enjoyed inventing puzzles for his readers.
Like I said in previous works the Cask of Amontillado is one of the best short stories ever written. The combination of suspense, mystery and horror kept the reader intrigue until the end. Nowadays is hard to find a good short tale with the power to keep the reader interested.

.

Work Cited Page
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine. The Norton Anthology of American Literature. New York: W. W. Norton, 2012. Print.

Open Document