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Basic research on Edgar Allan Poe to identify some of the poetic and literary elements he used
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Literary elements are used in stories to make it more fascinating. Edgar Allen Poe uses four of the literary elements in his stories and poems to create the feeling of suspense. These elements are mood, tone, style, and characterization. Poe uses literary elements to express suspense in his stories to keep readers on the edge of their seat.
Poe uses mood to create suspense in the story “The Tell Tale Heart”. Poe creates a strange and creepy mood by telling the reader about the eye of the man that he murdered to get rid of his eye. “His eye was like the eye of a vulture, the eye of one of those terrible birds that watch and wait for while an animal dies, then fall upon the dead body and pull it to pieces to eat it” (Poe 64). Poe wanted to get rid of the man’s eye forever. The narrator felt the only way to do that was to kill the man. The narrator ends up confessing what he has done to the police because he claims he can hear the heartbeat of the man that he killed. The way that Poe writes about about the man’s eye and the detail that he uses creates the mood of the story “The Tell Tale Heart” helps create suspense.
Poe uses Tone to create suspense in the poem “Alone”. The poem “Alone” gives the reader a tone or
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This story is about an anonymous narrator that does not give any thought to animals. Then he gets a cat that he just gets annoyed with the cat's presence so he ends up hanging the cat. Another cat comes along that gets scared of him so he goes to kill it but his wife stops him, so he kills his wife. When he hides the body the cat gets stuck with it in the wall and the narrator gets caught. Poe uses long words to create style in his story. An example of this is when he says “The image of a hideous - of a ghastly thing - of the Gallows!” (10). By using these words he uses the style that creates the suspense that keeps the reader's reading. Suspense is created by style in the story “The Black
His mix of sound devices such rhyme and alliteration, makes his story more horrific and on the corner of your seat good. Likewise, he has a idiosyncratic style of writing which applies to ethos and also logos. He uses hyphens to indicate agitation or fear in his narrator.Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery and terror and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words. Devices of description, from demographia to triplets adjectival and adverbial, and conclude that Poe is a highly descriptive writer. Poe employs all of the types classified by Lanham. Lanham calls techniques of argument also abound; Poe is, after all, an eminently rhetorical writer not only in his literary criticism, where we would expect attempts at persuasion, but in his fiction as well.” (Zimmerman 8) Poe uses many of these deliberately as devices of comedy often verbal comedy: antisthecon, barbarism, bomphiologia, epenthesis, metathesis, prosonomasia, and puns.Poe uses comedy as a distraction from the petrifying atmosphere.The narrator also uses repetition, emphasizing his actions and building suspense. Using this creates the suspense and the theme of the
In the writings of great authors it is easy to pick out the literary elements used by them. Edgar Allan Poe is one of these authors. He makes use of the same literary elements in many of his stories. Three of the most used literary elements are irony, antagonists and foreshadowing.
In Poe has a lot of “psychological drama” in the work “The Tell-Tale Heart” (179). Poe’s work make the readers feel if the readers are there. He uses “irony” and “dramatic actions.” Poe intends to keep his readers one edge. Poe’s style has a genius about it. In Poe’s short story “The Tell-Tale Heart” it states, “Oh, you would have laughed to see how cunningly I thrust it in! I moved it slowly --very, very slowly, so that I might not disturb the old man 's sleep” (qtd. Poe). In this work Poe is Dramatic in telling the readers that he is creeping into this old man’s room to kill him. Poe’s work make an impression on his reader especially in “The Tell-Tale Heart.” In the entire short story Poe tries to under mind his
In this particular story, Poe decided to write it in the first person narrative. This technique is used to get inside the main character's head and view his thoughts and are often exciting. The narrator in the Tell-Tale Heart is telling the story on how he killed the old man while pleading his sanity. To quote a phrase from the first paragraph, "The disease had sharpened my senses, not destroyed, not dulled them. Above all was the sense of hearing acute. I heard all things in the heaven and in the earth. I heard many things in hell. How then am I mad? Hearken! and observe how healthily, how calmly, I can tell you the whole story." This shows that we are in his thou...
Edgar Allen Poe was an American Writer who wrote within the genre of horror and science fiction. He was famous for writing psychologically thrilling tales examining the depths of the human psyche. This is true of the Tell-Tale Heart, where Poe presents a character that appears to be mad because of his obsession to an old mans, ‘vulture eye’. Poe had a tragic life from a young age when his parents died. This is often reflected in his stories, showing characters with a mad state of mind, and in the Tell Tale Heart where the narrator plans and executes a murder.
Poe's story demonstrates an inner conflict; the state of madness and emotional break-down that the subconscious can inflict upon one's self. In "The Tell-Tale Heart", the storyteller tells of his torment. He is tormented by an old man's Evil Eye. The storyteller had no ill will against the old man himself, even saying that he loved him, but the old man's pale blue, filmy eye made his blood run cold.
Poe writes “The Tell Tale Heart” from the perspective of the murderer of the old man. When an author creates a situation where the central character tells his own account, the overall impact of the story is heightened. The narrator, in this story, adds to the overall effect of horror by continually stressing to the reader that he or she is not mad, and tries to convince us of that fact by how carefully this brutal crime was planned and executed. The point of view helps communicate that the theme is madness to the audience because from the beginning the narrator uses repetition, onomatopoeias, similes, hyperboles, metaphors and irony.
The short story is generally a study in human terror. Furthermore, the author explains Poe use of a particular style and technique, to not only create the mood of mystery, but to cause the reader to feel sympathy for the narrator. Poe makes a connection between the storyteller and reader with knowledge and literary craftsmanship.
One of the other literary devices that Poe focuses on is personification. Personification is used to give a life like description of an object. Personification is one of the literary devices that bring his writings to life. For instance, “…weighty rod of brass, and the whole hissed as it swung through the air.” (The Pit and the Pendulum) is a great example. Anadiplosis, bomphiologia, chronographia and enargia greatly influence Poe’s writing style. Poe uses these and many other types of literary devices to bring his writing to life. Using the imagination he was able to create theses works of true art. Poe made his stories so eloquent that you had to use your mind to read them, which made them popular in America. Even today, scholars still read his work and try to understand the mind of Poe. (Poe)
His writing pushed the known envelope of gothic literature and expanded its boundaries. He added to the basic foundation for what is known as dark literature today and has become a classic in our time. While remaining a classic, Poe also managed to create a technique that elicits strong emotion in readers of his work: the unity of effect. This technique is original to Poe and is the base and drive of his stories and poems. His short stories Metzengerstein and The Oval Portrait effectively illustrate the idea of the Unity of Effect and how it impacts the reader’s emotion at the end of the text; an analysis of language style, symbolism, and
To begin, Poe’s poem “The Raven” mentions a dark and empty hallway that exemplifies the loneliness of the narrator. In the text,
The mood of a story is incredibly important, and Poe was no stranger to this fact. He often created sinister or even cryptic moods through the use of his language and descriptions. But perhaps most influential in the development of the mood of his stories was the point of view from which the story was told.
In The Black Cat, Poe creates a tale of strange confusion and morbid mystery. The tone is serious, as the narrator is writing his account of the events the day before he is going die, presumably for his crimes. The narrator, and the villain of the story, begins by saying he is "noted for the docility and humanity of my disposition." This statement is ironic, because as the story continues, we see he is anything but docile and humane. He becomes a driven man, passionate about getting rid of the cat that haunts him.
One of the staples of Poe's writing is the dramatic effect it has on the reader. Poe is known for his masterful use of grotesque, and often morbid, story lines and for his self-destructive characters and their ill-fated intentions. "The Black Cat" is no different from any of his other stories, and thus a Pragmatic/Rhetorial interpretation is obviously very fitting. If Pragmatic/Rhetorical criticism focuses on the effect of a work on its audience, then "The Black Cat" serves as a model for all other horror stories. One of the most intriguing aspects Poe introduces into the story is the black cat itself. The main character initially confesses a partiality toward domestic pets, especially his cat. Most readers can identify with an animal lover, even if they themselves are not. It is not long though before the reader learns of the disease that plagues the main character - alcoholism. Again, the reader can identify with this ailment, but it is hard to imagine that alcoholism could be responsible for the heinous actions made by the main character. In a drunken rage the main character cuts out one of the cat's eyes with a pen knife, and act at which he even shudders. Then, only after the cat's slow recovery from that attack, does the man hang the cat from the limb of a tree. ...
Three elements of literary work that truly sum up the theme of The Tell Tale Heart are setting, character, and language. Through these elements we can easily see how guilt, an emotion, can be more powerful than insanity. Even the most demented criminal has feelings of guilt, if not remorse, for what he has done. This is shown exquisitely in Poe's writing. All three elements were used to their extreme to convey the theme. The balance of the elements is such that some flow into others. It is sometimes hard to distinguish one from another. Poe's usage of these elements shows his mastery not only over the pen, but over the mind as well.