Edgar Allan Poe's Impact On American Literature

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Like the other periods leading up to and after it, the Romantic period changed literature and brought newer and darker authors to newspapers and books. These newer authors wrote intellectually deep stories with hidden morals that would forever change history and writing. Artists like Edgar Allen Poe, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, William Cullen Bryant, and Nathaniel Hawthorne brought us pieces that would change American history. In this unit of my American Literature class, I learned about these artists. I’m going to summarize the works they did and explain their dark meaning to show you just how deep and dark this time period was. Edgar Allen Poe wrote a story called The Pit and the Pendulum about a man who was given the death penalty and Unlike other authors from his time, his story was less deep, was more about heroism, and was actually fictitious. This story’s power isn’t its darkness, but instead how it changed history forever. Several generations have grown up thinking that Paul Revere was a hero who informed the people of the British’s arrival, but this in fact isn’t so. Maybe this is the most important story of all from this time. This story is proof that stories even hundreds of years old that people tell today can be untrue. You would’ve thought that somebody would’ve looked this up by now and had it taken out of history textbooks for Heidegger’s Experiment is another dark story with a moral about people and youth. The story is about an Elixir that temporarily makes people young again. The people using it don’t know this, though, and their youth goes to their heads and causes them to become selfish and act like they did when they were young, because they thought that they had more time now. The effects wore off, and it showed that even responsible and wise adults are immature and stupid if they’re convinced that they can live forever. The moral is about the perspective of these people and how the feeling of youth changed it and made them think poorly and make unwise

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