It is unfortunate that the man considered “the father of American Literature” has passed through history nearly unnoticed for his literary contributions. He still gets some recognition, but not like Hawthorne or Poe. Most studies say that “The House of Night” is his best poem, written at a time during the transition from the Enlightenment to the Romantic period. Its gothic themes and descriptions of the supernatural make some historians consider “The House of Night” to be the first romantic poem in America. However, “The House of Night” is not merely the personification of death, and a dark walk through his domain. Freneau was working a different angle when he wrote the poem. The enlightenment thinkers of his time were prone to using the idea of human reason and common sense in their rhetoric. Freneau did not want to write on the war like his colleagues and contemporaries, so instead he opted for a different route. In “The House of Night,” Freneau seized the opportunity to use the imagery and emotion present within the newly emerging Romantic genre to speak to the citizens of the thirteen colonies about his thoughts on the revolution. The poem became an emotional call-to-arms; propaganda bent on urging on the colonies in their resistance to the King of Great Britain.
The speaker’s dream opens in a desolate world, devoid of life. After walking through the barren land for a while, he comes upon an “awful dome” (line 69). Inside, there are men that are privately speaking about death. The speaker criticizes the men’s learned ways, and he believed that they were “pathetic” to be speaking of life and death in such a cavalier manner.
Further along in the building he comes upon Death, a creature that is ironically closing on its ow...
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...e poem to a mere twenty-one stanzas. The most important passages about the tyrant King George III taking over for Death are in the original publication of the poem. At the time they were in the midst of the war that was their country’s bid for freedom from an oppressive tyrant. The dark imagery offered through romanticism contextualized Death for Freneau and his readers. Death is given a face, the King of England, the man who would take their loved ones from them at no consequence to himself.
Works Cited
Freneau, Philip M, and Fred L. Pattee. The Poems of Philip Freneau, Poet of the American Revolution. Princeton, N.J: The University Library, 1902. University of Toronto-Robarts Library Archive. Web. 26 Sep. 2011.
Wallace, A. J., and R. D. Rusk. Moral Transformation: The Original Christian Paradigm of Salvation. New Zealand: Bridgehead Publishing, 2010. Print.
Ralph Waldo Emerson 1803-1882. The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Boston: Houghton, 1998. 1578-1690.
Edgar Allan Poe, an often misinterpreted literary mastermind, known predominantly by his extraordinary tales of horror, forbidden love, madness, and mystery, is more than meets the eye. Though his genres of expertise may indicate otherwise, Poe was a very social person, a gentleman by trade, and he possessed more hands-on military experience than any other major American author in history. As a writer, Poe gained a great deal of his inspiration from his surroundings. His enlistment in the army contributed significantly to his repertoire, and inspired some of his greatest works, including “’The Gold Bug;’ ’The Man Who Was Used Up,’ a satire of southern frontier politics; ‘The Balloon Hoax,’ set along the mid-Atlantic Carolinas coast; ‘The Oblong Box,’ involving a voyage out of Charleston harbor; [and] ‘The Cask of Amontillado,’ possibly based on a Fort Independence/Castle Island Legend”(Beidler, Soldier 342). The death of his mother and his unfortunate love life played another major role in his authoring, giving him the ability to write about “. . . the intense symbiosis between love and hatred . . . [illustrating that] love is seldom as simple or as happy as popularly hoped” (Hoffman 81). Poe’s chilling tales remain popular today, and have a long history of providing inspiration for major books and other cultural staples of entertainment.
Guretzki, David. “What Does It Mean For Evangelicals To Say They Are ‘Save’.” One In Christ 46.1(2012): 79-88. Academic Search Complete. Web. 30 April 2014.
...n American Literature. By Henry Louis. Gates and Nellie Y. McKay. 2nd ed. New York: W.W. Norton &, 2004. 387-452. Print.
Dark romantic literature has delved into the pits of man’s soul, through the use of psychology, to showcase a new take on the horror one can experience. It is this literature that touches all who reads it with a cold hand through exploiting a common fear shared by most. In Edgar Allen Poe’s “Fall of the House of Usher” Poe creates an ominous and eerie set of circumstances that incites pure fear into the narrator through his use of the Gothic Elements and Psychology to exploit the narrator’s fear of insanity to create the single effect of fear.
Goheen, Michael, and Craig Bartholomew. Living at the Crossroads: An Introduction to Christian Worldview. Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008. Print.
Norton Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Nina Baym. 8th ed. Vol A. New York: W.
Ferguson, Margaret W., Salter, Mary J., and Stallworthy, Jon. The Norton Anthology of Poetry. fifth ed. N.p.: W.W. Norton, 2005. 2120-2121. 2 Print.
Baym, Nina, and Robert S. Levine, eds. The Norton Anthology: American Literature. 8th ed. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2012. Print.
Walls, Andrew F. 1997. 'Christianity'. In A New Handbook Of Living Religions, 1st ed., 59-92. London: Penguin.
As a prelude to an inquiry into thematic elements of the poem, it is first necessary to draw out the importance of Fearing’s use of experimental form. Fearing “adheres” to the conventional use of strophic poetic construction, making use of epigrammatic style, where the seven stanzas separate the lament into isolated combinations and experiments on language and the content suggests each might stand alone as organic entities. Putting these highly-varied units into a single poem reflects on the incoherence of broader theme of death and the response to death, the dirge, as well as the notion that such a broad topic as death contains many sma...
Edgar Allen Poe, a famous novelist from the 18th century, is known for being a treasure trove for allusions, illusions, clues, and all sorts of literary fun. Born in 1809, this Bostonian never had it easy. Marriage to a 13 year old cousin, family problems, and deaths surrounded him. Over time, such tremendous struggle began to reflect in his writing, creating the dark and moody tone we now see today. One such piece, The Fall of the House of Usher, tells the tale of a man who goes to visit a dying friend on his last days. Roderick Usher is the name of this dying man, although he doesn’t seem dead in the beginning. However, the deathly state should be of no importance to the reader; death is the very essence of Poe’s writing. Rather, the reader’s attention should be deviated toward the unusual twin of the story,
Stackhouse, John G. What Does It Mean to Be Saved?: Broadening Evangelical Horizons of Salvation.
Wooding, Lucy. "Christian Humanism: from Renaissance to Reformation." N.p., Sept. 2009. MasterFile Premier. Web. 22 May 2014.
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