Edgar Allan Poe Suspense Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most famous American poets and short story writers during the early 19th century. Poe believed that the audience should be able to read stories in one sitting, which are tightly controlled and highly compressed narrative. These narratives should cover topics that every reader can relate to. Poe’s childhood events plays a drastic role in influencing him to write stories full of suspense. After we analyze some of Poe’s stories, we will come to know that Poe is a master of suspense because of the various techniques he uses in his writing, such as sound effects,ironies,figurative language, different sights, detailed description, unreliable narrator and repetition to create suspense.

Born to a family of actors, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in 1809. Within a year after his birth, his father abandoned their family. A year later, his mother passed away of tuberculosis. Edgar Poe changed his name to Edgar Allan Poe when the Allan family from Virginia took him in but he was never officially adopted. Poe started to accumulate debts when he was a student at the University of Virginia. He started gambling the money his father, Allan, gave him for college in efforts to make more money to pay off his expenses. Being humiliated by his poverty and Allan not providing enough funds, Poe returned to Richmond to visit the home of his fiance. Later he discovered that his fiance got engaged with someone else in his absence. After few months, the heartbroken Poe finally decided to leave the mansion of Allan on a journey to become a great poet. Ever since he could remember, that was always what he wanted to do. He accomplished his first objective when he published his first book “Tamerlane” when he wa...

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... famous poet as well as a short story writer in American history. We also came to know that he was a master of suspense because of the various techniques including irony, sound effects, figurative language, and repetition that he uses in his stories to create suspense. Poe’s childhood plays a vital role in influencing the type of work that he did during his lifetime. Because his childhood was filled with so much sadness and depression, he expressed his emotions through his writing. Poe was able to write some great stories based on suspense and tension because of his past experience. Every second in Poe’s life was filled with suspense which was shown in all of his works. As you can see, Poe was one of most influential poets and has taught all of the readers of his stories about how painful life can be and how we can express our emotions by writing.