Edgar Allan Poe Dark Romanticism

Dark romanticism was a sub-movement that emerged from Romanticism popular around Europe and America. Romanticism as a whole was broad movement that revolutionized the conventional form of art, literature, philosophy and music during the late 18th century. Poe, Irvin and Hawthorne’s work reveal the dark and evil side of mankind and supernatural phenomenon. Poe’s work reflects the morbid and non-corporeal attributes of human nature. Even though they all have their own unique artistic expressions, their ideas are aligned at the seams of the dark romantic period. The purpose of this paper is not to prove that these literary figures were the same but to show the intersecting themes and motifs and the eccentric approach of these Romantic literary

In his poem “Israfel” he talks about the esoteric Islamic trumpet-blower archangel and hi transformation into an entity who mesmerizes the heavens and the Earth with its tunes on judgment day. This dichotomy of destruction and serenity is what makes Poe unique, he finds beauty in chaos. Poe’s “William Wilson” is an interactive play of alter-egos and the subconscious and perhaps the epitome of Jung’s active imagination theorem, a method of communicating with the unconscious to enhance and facilitate the creative process. In that story, Poe depicts a young man named William Wilson, who does not believe in morality and commits evil acts is being followed by another boy with the same name and appearance who acts as his moral compass and is murdered in the end only to show the reader that there is only one Wilson and the other one was a mere reflection. He showed the corrupt aspect of human

Poe’s most famous poem to date is The Raven, first published in 1845. It describes a visit of a supernatural nature by a Raven to a grieving man who’d lost his lover. The bird utters only one word to his questions, ‘nevermore!’ and the exchange becomes painful as it leads the protagonist to the brink of madness. Interestingly, The Raven was published two years before his wife, Virginia died of Tuberculosis. The ‘mad-man’ depicted in The Raven was perhaps a manifestation of Poe