Often times, authors use specific instances from their lives to produce ideas for stories and incorporate them into his or her works. In the gothic times, dark, threatening, horrific, morbid, depressing, bizarre, bewildering, death and insane are just some words that best describe the popular type of literature at that time. One man’s name can summarize these words, Edgar Allan Poe. He is considered to be one of the greatest obscure American authors/poets whom many literary scholars still try to make heads or tails of. People throughout the history often wondered why Poe’s writings are so fantastically diverse and unusual, why his literary style is dark, and why he has so many supernatural connotations in each of his writings. He displays his tragic life, achievements, and mostly his disappointments which occurred over the course of his life in a series of stories and poems. Edgar Allan Poe's works are not only a product of creative genius, but also a reflection of his countless struggles and devastating personal experiences. These occurrences spawn the themes of untimely death, insanity, and revenge that become the focus of his macabre style of writing.
Poe's life experiences have a major influence in his writings, including the use of the nature of death and provocative questions about the afterlife. The favorable reason to his macabre works has been thought to be the result of experiencing the many deaths of his loved ones early in his life. Based on Poe’s works, he believes that the death of a beautiful woman is unquestionably the most poetic topic in the world. For example, in his later poems, most notably, and represents the imaginative repetition of his painful experiences. Jeffrey Scraba, one of the literature critics ...
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Scraba, Jeffrey. "Repetition and Remembrance in Poe's Poerty." Critical Insights The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Steven Frye. Pasadena California: Salem Press, 2011. 34-46. Print.
Stauffer, Donald B. "Style and Meaning in "Ligeia" and "William Wilson"." Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston, Massachusetts: G.K Hall&Co, 1987. 115-25. Print.
Zlotnick-Woldenberg, Carrie. "Edgar Allan Poe's `Ligeia': An Object-Relational Interpretation." American Journal Of Psychotherapy 53.3 (1999): 403. MasterFILE Premier. Web. 29 Apr. 2012.
Poe’s story describes the harmful effects of the narrator’s obsession with the perfection of his deceased wife. The narrator is convinced that his first wife, Ligeia, was perfect. He worshiped her, seeing her as a source of true wisdom. Her eventual de...
For poets, it is essential that they write about what they know and what they feel, as the substance of what they are revealing will enhance their work and ultimately attract audiences. Edgar Allan Poe is one poet whose personal endeavours can be extracted from his poems. His works such as The Raven, Annabel-Lee and Ulalume are just a few of his most celebrated poems that reflect diverse aspects of Poe’s own life. Poe’s reoccurring themes of death in conjunction with love, the subconsciousness of self and ambiguity attracted audiences to become entranced in his work (Spark Notes, 2014). Adjacent to these intriguing themes is how Poe’s personal life was inexplicitly perceived in his poems, in particular The Raven.
Redfield, J. S. "The Genius of Poe." Foreword. The Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. A.C. Armstrong & Son.
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.
Howarth, W. L. (1971). Twentieth century interpretations of Poe's tales; a collection of critical essays.. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.
" Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe's Tales. ED. William L. Howarth, b. 1875. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971. 94. - 102. - 102.
Century Interpretations of Poe’s Tales. Ed. William L. Howarth. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, Inc., 1971.
Edgar Allan Poe has a unique writing style that uses several different elements of literary structure. He uses intrigue vocabulary, repetition, and imagery to better capture the reader’s attention and place them in the story. Edgar Allan Poe’s style is dark, and his is mysterious style of writing appeals to emotion and drama. What might be Poe’s greatest fictitious stories are gothic tend to have the same recurring theme of either death, lost love, or both. His choice of word draws the reader in to engage them to understand the author’s message more clearly. Authors who have a vague short lexicon tend to not engage the reader as much.
Edgar Allan Poe is a name that is prominent in literature as a slightly obnoxious, gruesome writer. His short stories and poems are sure to send a shiver down any reader’s spine with his vivid imagery. But if one takes the time to read all sixty-nine of his short stories, he or she would find many common elements that become slightly monotonous. Even though he uses some similar ideas, it is what separates his work as distinctly “Poe”. After dissecting each of his stories, it is intriguing to find what components he tends to repeat.
Edgar Allen Poe was a deeply troubled man. From a young age he struggled with a love life that would slowly tarnish his mind. Poe frequently turned to controlled substances and alcohol to help sooth his pain. Poe’s only true solace from the harsh reality to which he was doomed to live was through his writings. Poe helped developed several major literary genres including American gothic style and the American Detective Story. Both his short stories and poems are littered with themes expressing deeply macabre scenes such as mutilation, gore, and criminal insanity. However, one of his most prominent and well known topics in Poe’s writing deals with the death of beautiful women. This is directly
Lawrence confers about Poe’s style in “Ligeia” and how he wants to analyze her until he knows all of her parts and what they do. He sees her as a chemical salt, which he needs to analyze out in the test tube of his own brain. Overall Lawrence finds Edgar Allen Poe’s works to be mechanical and scientific.
Edgar Allan Poe is known as one of the greatest American- gothic poets of the 19th century (Buranelli,1977). His poems are very dark, melancholy and make the reader feel strange when something so morbid becomes so beautiful. Burnelli does an impeccable job explaining the grotesque qualities of Poe’s work by saying that Poe’s imagination was both normal and abnormal. The mixture of these two elements heightened the reader’s sensitivity and the way they perceived the poems and short stories Poe produced (Buranelli,1977).
Poe, Edgar Allan, Andrew Barger, Harry Clarke and Gustave Dore´. Edgar Allan Poe. [Memphis, Tenn.]: BottleTree Books, 2008. Print.
Silverman, Kenneth. Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance. New York: Harper Collins Publishers, 1991. book.
For a Romantic writer, the subject matter of art should deal with the emotions of the character and the reader, and the greatest art was that which had a direct effect on the emotions. Throughout Poe’s works, his characters are usually dominated by their emotions. This characterization explains much of the erratic behavior of the characters in his stories. For example, in the “Fall of the House of Usher” Roderick Usher’s emotions are overwrought. He is hypersensitive to his surroundings and because of this, his behavior became erratic. Daniel Hoffman’s “Edgar Allan Poe: The Artist of the Beautiful”, provides insight into the life of the troubled writer and how he took inspiration from his own tormented life and embedded that in his own literary work. He discusses how Poe’s work explores darker periods in one life and transcends ideals that are widely shared. His own suffering speaks through his characters who are often characterized by: toxic affliction, terror, and mental instability. This article focuses on Poe’s history and how that shaped his writing. It is made apparent that Poe suffered from a troubled past and that greatly affected