Edgar Allan Poe Anti Transcendentalism

Anti-transcendentalism is a writing style like no other. The complexity of the genre is taken for granted in society today, where most literature is down to earth and to the point. With their cutting, dark language and incredibly pessimistic views on life, anti-transcendental writers were definitely not the most positive group of people. Their works tended to focus on the most adverse parts of human nature, with guilt, fear, and evil as some of the more common motifs. One particularly famous anti-transcendentalist was Edgar Allan Poe, who wrote nearly eighty poems, short stories, and other works in his short life, two of which being “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Like most of his writing, these two texts

They both follow the concepts of anti-transcendentalism, but one definitely does more so than the other. While both texts are undoubtedly anti-transcendental, more philosophies of the genre are found in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” making it a better representation of the movement. The first of these two texts, “The Pit and the Pendulum,” is a morbid story of a man captured, tried, and sentenced to death by the Spanish Inquisition. What the judges fail to mention in his sentence is the horribly gruesome death they have planned for him. Poe uses the details of that planned death to create an extremely dark atmosphere for his tale, providing the reader with the mood of an anti-transcendental work. This displays the concept of raw and morbid diction, which is significant in the writing style of this genre. There is also symbolism throughout the text, with a significant example being the candles at the beginning of the

Haunted by his incestral family line, he concludes that he is a doomed man. His thoughts affect him both mentally and physically. He develops the characteristics of a schizophrenic, and never manages to get over them. His actions display the destructiveness of the human spirit, as he was the one who truly destroyed himself. Driven mad by frustration and grief, he leaves sanity completely behind, and hallucinates so violently–convinces himself so thoroughly that his sister had come back to murder him–that it kills him. Even before his deteriorating mental state had reached this low, he had convinced himself that he could not escape the situation, stating, “‘I must perish in this deplorable folly. Thus, thus, and not otherwise shall I be lost” (Poe 6). By saying that, he destroyed his only chance of survival. This is where the anti-transcendentalist philosophies find their place in this story. In “The Pit and the Pendulum,” the main character was able to be saved, therefore able to transcend, whereas in “The Fall of the House of Usher,” Roderick could not be saved, showing his limitations in the universe, which is another key point in