Edgar Allan Poe And Dark Romanticism

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Edgar Allan Poe was a poet, short-story writer and editor; some of his best known poems include: “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Fall of the House of Usher” and “The Raven”. Edgar Allen Poe is among the most important authors of Dark Romanticism; his work as an editor and poet had a powerful impact on American and International Literature. He is known as the “architect” of the modern short stories and among the first analyst to focus principally on the effect of the style and structure in a literary work.
Edgar Allan Poe’s literary style and themes are best known as “Gothic”. His most recurring themes deal with the questions of death and lost love. In his short story, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, Poe writes about murder, insanity, obsession and guilt. Poe makes death intriguing and horrifying with his brilliant dark mind. His work is primarily characterized in the dark romanticism genre and his tone can be described as a feeling of “melancholy” or “gloominess”.
Edgar Allan Poe has the talent to uncover the development of madness in people; a condition not debated or analyzed among society during his time. Poe uses the following figures of speech: figurative language, symbolism, repetition and imagery throughout his short-stories and poems to better captivate his audience with his brilliant dark tactics. Poe also uses hyphens to demonstrate agitation or terror in the narrator. Commonly, when repeated hyphens appear in his works, the narrator is in an altered mental state. With the above discussed techniques, Poe maintains the state of confusion, horror and disorder throughout the periods of grief and suspense in his works.
In his poem, “The Raven”, Poe uses many different elements of literature, most noticeably, symbols; the raven sy...

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...on with setting and tone. Poe often forms a spine-chilling atmosphere through the setting of stories in specific isolated locations with a combination of bad weather and illness. All together, these elements are essential to many of his stories and make the stories systematically dark and abstruse. "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "The Raven" are two of Poe’s stories where atmosphere is an influential literary element.
Conclusively, one of Edgar Allan Poe's considerable masterpieces was the ability to create awry characters. Besides the unreliable narrators in many of Poe’s stories, Poe had an inclination for adding psychological or physical conditions and disorders to many of his stories. A mental disorder in characters is so typical in Poe’s work that readers familiar with enough of his stories tend to question the sanity of the characters automatically.

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