Why should Edgar Allan Poe be taught in the 11th grade curriculum? There are many opinions you could express. In this essay I will reflect on the dark and mysterious works of Poe, his personal perseverance, advanced vocabulary, the struggles he faced, and why he is such an inspiration.
Poe’s works have been in print since 1827 and are identified through many stories, such as “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Premature Burial,” “The Raven,” and many other dark works. He is an inspiration to writers and people who express themselves in dark and mysterious ways. Poe was an interesting man, he wrote very unusual pieces such as, “Annabel Lee” which is about his cousin Virginia whom he married and later and died from tuberculosis.
Although we may think this is strange now, back then it was relatively normal. “The Fall of the House of Usher” is about an incestuous family who had twins that were linked with the house, and when they died the house fell. “The Tell-Tale Heart” showed a distraught neighbor who was frightened by the eyes of an old man; he killed the man and put his heart underneath the floorboards. Many people may argue Poe might be inappropriate but doesn’t the Bible also have inappropriate things in it?
When you read his works, you think to yourself “He must have been in a really dark place in his life in to have written this”, well he was. Instead of turning all of these horrific moments into negatives, he turned them into positives with poems and short stories. With his use of advanced vocabulary and detail you have to be somewhat mature and dig deep to uncover the true meanings and understand it completely. It challenges you to push yourself into more in depth things. As you read the poems s...
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...orks, but the biography had the opposite effect and drove the sales of Poe’s books higher than they had ever been in during the author’s lifetime. The image of Poe that Griswold created that has made Poe the legend that lives to this day.
Even after all of these things occurred in Poe’s life he still persevered through it all! He still managed to be successful in everything he did. Why wouldn’t someone of his nature and character be an inspiration? Others may argue “He was an alcoholic and gambler, why in the world would you be inspired by him?” It isn’t about what he did in the past, we all have shady pasts. It is important to see how he changed his life around and turned his sorrows and weaknesses into monumental things. Most people would fall apart if this happened to them!
Edgar Allan Poe is and forever will be a muse to writers, artists, and men alike!
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential writers to date. His thrill filled tales of darkness and death helped people see a different side of romantic literature. Many believe that his isolated life and drinking problem helped influence his works. Poe showed his most prominent life accomplishment and disappointments through his life in his stories. He defined a lot of his life’s parallels through his works.
Poe became a huge role model in American romance literature. "Edgar Allan Poe helped to establish the image of the Romantic artist as a being who not only created art from the essence of his own personal suffering but also came to define him through this suffering." (Magistrale 1). Poe's life and all his heartbreaks and suffrage through it all are what made him such a good writer. He wrote about sad, depressing, dreary feelings because that is how his childhood and later life was.
Even though a good number of critics despise Edgar Allen Poe with a passion, almost all who read his creations gave him credit for being a genius. He was the first to write a detective story and tales that dealt with split personality or divided consciousness way before the matter was well known by the common people. He managed to capture the imagination of the public by exploring the mysterious psychological world of the individual -- madness, despair, pain, inner chaos, etc. His works, which lack a sense of right or wrong, had great influence upon some types of popular fiction, with a detective story on the lead. Ranging from French symbolists, like Rimbrad and Mallarme, to American writers, such as Bierce, Melville, and Faulkner, were influenced by Poe's writings. He even inspired well-known Philosophers like Frederick Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. Just to mention a few, gothic architecture, psychological abnormalities, hidden...
Poe was a very experienced author of unique tales. He was born on January 19, 1809 and died on October 7, 1849. He had a dark life growing up because his mother, foster mother, and his wife died from tuberculous. His father abandoned him and his foster father disliked him. This background may have greatly influenced his work. He wrote 70 poems and 66 short stories during his lifetime. Poe has written many Gothic horror stories. “The Tell Tale Heart,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” and “The Fall of the House of Usher” show these similarities.
Conclusion: Edgar Allen Poe suffered from what is now known as manic depression, and his gothic tales and dark poetry are direct examples of how life influences art. His works may not have been as controversial had he not lived a life of poverty, addiction, and tragedy. Some might say his work was way ahead of his time. But he wrote about things going on around him, like murder and grave robberies. He used imagery and setting to make his stories seem more realistic. His tales could easily be made into movies in today’s times.
Poe went through many hardships during his life that helped inspire his literary works. Many of his works seem pretty normal at first but then you realize there is an underlying tone of tragedy in his works, just like in his life. Many of his poems are inspired by his friends, family and real life experiences. This supports my thesis because it shows that the people and experiences in his life influenced his choices, his works and his outlook on things.
Edgar Allan Poe was a 19th century American poet, author, and critic. Poe is often described as a rebel against society and art-for-art's sake supporter who experimented in making his poems without didacticism and devoid of any meaning, but he is also respected as a genius in terms of his commitment to art and his ability to experiment with various forms of expressions (Fromm 304). In my opinion, Poe was not a rebel because he remained true to himself. Although he was influenced by traditional artists, he adapted this tradition to his personal being. Although he might have been perceived as a rebel against society because of his innovative views on the world, human beings, and poetry, I believe his work remains popular and influential today because he remained true to his style and personality. However, I agree that he was dedicated to art for art's sake because his main intention was to express himself through his work. Poe did not bother with popular styles and techniques, but he was a master poet when it comes to adapting to different styles to convey his emotions appropriately. Overall, Poe's poetry displays sentimentalism because he puts all emphasis on emotions and no emphasis on logic, but it is not limited to optimism because he displays both positive and negative emotions, and he displays them often together using both extremes in a single poem.
Edgar Allen Poe was one of the greatest writers of the nineteenth century. Perhaps he is best know for is ominous short stories. One of my personal favorites was called The Raven. Throughout his works Poe used coherent connections between symbols to encourage the reader to dig deep and find the real meaning of his writing. Poe's work is much like a puzzle, when u first see it its intact, but take apart and find there is much more to the story than you thought. The Raven, written in 1845, is a perfect example of Poe at his craziest. Poe's calculated use of symbolism is at his best in this story as each symbol coincides with the others. In The Raven, Poe explains a morbid fear of loneliness and the end of something through symbols. The symbols not only tell the story of the narrator in the poem, they also tell the true story of Poe's own loneliness in life and the hardships he faced. Connected together through imagery they tell a story of a dark world only Poe Knows exists.
Poe is a perfect example of how an author’s life affects their work. All of the troubles he went through his life from his parents to his wife and his money problems to alcohol problem, can be seen in his works. Not only did his life affect what what he wrote but his awarity affected what he wrote.
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.
Known for his mystery, macabre and detective fiction genre, Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most remembered poets of all time. Usually when people think of him, mind images of premature burials, murders, madmen, and mysterious women who are taken back from pure death like some zombie-like creatures comes to mind. In 1809, Edgar was born the second son out of three, two of which became actors. After the death of his mother and father at the age of three, John and Francis Allan raised him in Virginia. Edgar was sent to the best boarding schools and later on attended the University of Virginia where he was successfully academic. He was forced to leave due to refusement to pay his gambling debts. In 1827, he moved back to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army where his first poems titled Tamerlane, and Other Poems were published.
The life of Edgar Allan Poe, was stuffed with tragedies that all affected his art. From the very start of his writing career, he adored writing poems for the ladies in his life. When he reached adulthood and came to the realization of how harsh life could be, his writing grew to be darker and more disturbing, possibly as a result of his intense experimenting with opium and alcohol. His stories continue to be some of the most frightening stories ever composed, because of this, some have considered this to be the reason behind these themes. Many historians and literature enthusiasts have presumed his volatile love life as the source while others have credited it to his substance abuse. The influence of his one-of-a-kind writing is more than likely a combination of both theories; but the main factor is the death of many of his loved ones and the abuse which he endured. This, not surprisingly, darkened his perspective considerably.
...s hold on life but still maintained certain strength of character that held on to a hope that everything would work out well in the end. His stories may be dark, sinister, gloomy and cold, but always in the end there is still the feeling that "good overcomes the bad", which is what anyone believes or holds on to, as a matter of survival on earth.
Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most influential writers of the horror genre in American history. His horror stories have impacted numerous authors and their stories over the years. Various people have tried to copy his way of writing style, but they have failed to achieve the success he did. Even though Poe is no longer living, his impact on American literature can still be felt today.
Edgar Allan Poe opened up many new ways in literature for the following generations, without him we probably would not have detective stories and Gothic tales in the same form as we have today.