Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most famous American poets and short story writers during the early 19th century. Poe believed that the audience should be able to read stories in one sitting, which are tightly controlled and highly compressed narrative. These narratives should cover topics that every reader can relate to. Poe’s childhood events plays a drastic role in influencing him to write stories full of suspense. After we analyze some of Poe’s stories, we will come to know that Poe is a master of suspense because of the various techniques he uses in his writing, such as sound effects,ironies,figurative language, different sights, detailed description, unreliable narrator and repetition to create suspense.
Born to a family of actors, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809. Within a year after his birth, his father abandoned their family. A year later, his mother passed away of tuberculosis. Edgar Poe changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe when the Allan family from Virginia took him in but he was never officially adopted. Poe started to accumulate debts when he was a student at the University of Virginia. He started gambling the money his father, Allan, gave him for college in efforts to make more money to pay off his expenses. Being humiliated by his poverty and Allan not providing enough funds, Poe returned to Richmond to visit the home of his fiance. Later he discovered that his fiance got engaged with someone else in his absence. After few months, the heartbroken Poe finally decided to leave the mansion of Allan on a journey to become a great poet. Ever since he could remember, that was always what he wanted to do. He accomplished his first objective when he published his first book “Tamerlane” when he wa...
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... famous poet as well as a short story writer in American history. We also came to know that he was a master of suspense because of the various techniques including irony, sound effects, figurative language, and repetition that he uses in his stories to create suspense. Poe’s childhood plays a vital role in influencing the type of work that he did during his lifetime. Because his childhood was filled with so much sadness and depression, he expressed his emotions through his writing. Poe was able to write some great stories based on suspense and tension because of his past experience. Every second in Poe’s life was filled with suspense which was shown in all of his works. As you can see, Poe was one of most influential poets and has taught all of the readers of his stories about how painful life can be and how we can express our emotions by writing.
Edgar Allen Poe used his literary works, to deal with stresses of reality. In his works he vented his frustrations and own negativity, and often used his own life experiences in his characters. Poe made it through much of his life by disguising his feelings in his work. To begin with Poe was considered to be a gothic fiction writer. Specifically his most used themes were questioning of death, reanimation of the dead, and mourning. However Poe also wrote humor tales and hoaxes. He was a very confused individual but he used his life and pain to become a very famous author. (Gale.Web, 2013)
Edgar Allen Poe was born in 1809 to two actors. His father and older brother were both alcoholics. When he was two years old, his father abandoned he and his mother. His mother, being unable to support them both, sent him to live with John and Frances Allen. She died not long after that. The Allen’s gave Poe a good life, but never legally adopted him, which led to him feeling like an outcast. Poe was bullied in school for being the child of actors, which fed into his feeling of not belonging. Poe was later sent to college, and planned to marry Sarah Elmira Royster as soon as he graduated. He eventually had to leave college due to debt, and returned home where he discovered that Sarah was engaged to another man. He then joined West Point Academy for a short time, but did not like it and soon dropped out. After that, Poe moved from job to job until he eventually married his 13 year old cousin, Virginia. Six years later, Virginia fell ill with tuberculosis and died. Poe’s depression deepened, and he later tried to kill ...
Poe’s life was never an easy one which could have gave him the inspiration he need to create such dark tales. From the “The Raven” which makes the reader feel along with narrator over the loss of someone dear and spiraling into a state of depression. To the tale of “The Tell-Tale Heart” which makes a person think why the narrator believe he is sane and in the right for killing the man. Edgar Allan Poe writes dark tales but his stories draw a person in and leaves the reader
Known for his mystery, macabre and detective fiction genre, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most remembered poets of all time. Usually when people think of him, mind images of premature burials, murders, madmen, and mysterious women who are taken back from pure death like some zombie-like creatures comes to mind. In 1809, Edgar was born the second son out of three, two of which became actors. After the death of his mother and father at the age of three, John and Francis Allan raised him in Virginia. Edgar was sent to the best boarding schools and later on attended the University of Virginia where he was successfully academic. He was forced to leave due to refusement to pay his gambling debts. In 1827, he moved back to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army where his first poems titled Tamerlane, and Other Poems were published.
Poe is most famous for creating an aura of suspense and terror in his stories including horrible crimes scenes. Montressor, one of Poe's characters, is a descend...
In conclusion, I believe that Edgar Allan Poe’s life was full of sorrow and loneliness. Though his life was one problem after another, this pushed him and inspired him to be the writer was. His past inspired his dark and demented them of his short stories, poems, etc. Many look up to Edgar as a phenomenal writer.
Edgar Allan Poe was an excellent horror, suspense, and mystery writer of the eighteenth century. His use of literary devices and different literary techniques makes this writer important to American literature. This paper will show how Edgar Allan Poe has made an impact on Society and American literature as well as how Edgar Allan Poe developed the short story. I will also discuss and analyze some of his works and techniques he uses in his short stories and poems.
His legacy influenced a whole new genre of literacy. It influenced not just American but international literature. He was one of the first writers whom developed the genre of detective, fiction, and horror. He is known as the “Architect” of the modern short story. Poe was one of the first critics to focus on style in literary work. Steven King, Clive Barker, and others followed Poe’s footsteps. The genre of horror is bigger than ever today and Edgar Allan Poe was the forefront of this style of writing. French, Italians, and writers in Spanish and Portuguese acknowledge their debts to Poe. If not for Poe, we wouldn’t have all of the great horror and detective films and stories we still read to this day.
Edgar Allan Poe is forever identified with his eerie poem “The Raven” with his many gothic horror stories, and as the father of the detective story (Werlock1). Poe’s stories are known in America and Europe. Most of Poe’s stories are Gothic, which he describes them as “arabesque” a term that he felt best described as flowery (Wilson52). Poe proclaimed his writing a reaction to typical literature of the day, which he called “the heresy of the Didactic” for its tendency to preach (Wilson52). Some of Poe’s stories are also comedies. “The Fall of the House of Usher” was a nevertheless typical of Poe’s short stories in that it presents narrator thrust into a psychologically intense situation in which otherworldly forces conspire to drive at least one of the characters insane (Wilson53).Edgar Allan Poe had a difficult life after dropping out of college. He became a short story writer, one of his stories being “The Fall of the House of Usher”. “The Fall of the House of Usher” uses literary elements of symbols and settings to further the theme of evil.
First one needs to know some background information on Edgar Allan Poe. Poe was born in Boston, Massachutes, to David Poe and Elizabeth Arnold. He lost both his father, who abandoned the family, and his mother, who died of tuberculosis, at a very young age. He was taken in by John Allan, a wealthy business man. As Poe aged, he and his father relationship became very strained. In 1826, while attending the University of Virginia, Poe and his father had a falling out over his supposed drinking and his gambling debts. In 1827, Poe enlisted in the U.S. Army. After two years of service, his father helped him get accepted into West Point Military Academy. It was only a few months before Poe was expelled from school and disowned by his father. In 1832 he moved to Baltimore to live with his aunt, Mrs. Clemm, and Cousin Virginia. Four years later Poe and his young cousin were married. She soon became very sick and suffered from repeated illness until she died in 1847.
Edgar Allan Poe born on January 19, 1809, was known as the creator of the modern detective story and innovator of the science fiction genre. Although, people identify him because of his horror stories as well as his haunting lyric poetry, there was a different side of him other than a gruesome, mysterious individual prowling in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries. Poe’s childhood was very tragic and affected his adult life when growing up. Poe was the second son of actors David and Elizabeth Poe. Shortly after Poe was born, his father abandoned the family in 1810 and the following death of his twenty-four year old mother in 1811, left Poe an orphan at the young age of three. Poe was adopted by a guy named john, who was a strict unemotional tobacco merchant and his wife Frances Allan, a week women with health issues. His original grandparents only took in his brother William Henry instead of Poe. He was educated with his father’s aid, in private schools, excelling in latin, writing verse, and declamation. Regardless of his education Poe was looed down upon and was considered an outsider by the upper class of Richmond society. It maybe because his foster parents never legally adopted Poe and also regarding his family background. In Poe’s time adulthood did not support actors in high manners, which this could have been attributed to his reputation. Poe childhood shaped him to be one of the most Famous creative poet there is.
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.
An eerie feeling comes to mind when you hear the name Poe. The detail that he puts in his works are so realistic that you think he would be serving multiple life sentences in a maximum security prison. Some of his works include, the Raven and the Tell Tale Heart. The football team named the Baltimore Ravens adopted the name to instill a sense of fear into their opponents as he instilled in his readers. Edgar Allan Poe’s writing style has been attempted by many, but no one has ever paralleled him due to the fact that he had serious issues like being a major drug addict and his family was very nonexistent and abusive.
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
Poe is able to convey fear on two different levels in his most popular short story. By using dark diction and eerie imagery, he creates an overly dramatic horror story, but by adding deeper psychological themes, he creates a timeless work that is relevant to any reader.