Poe Literary Criticism

Edgar Allan Poe is an American writer, poet, critic, and editor. He was born in 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. When Poe was two, his mother passed away, and his father left him. Poe had to join a foster family, and he had to live with them until his college years. When Poe was seventeen, he enrolled in the University of Virginia, and he had to drop out due to an enormous amount of debt. At the age of twenty-one, Poe attended the West Point Academy. After he attended West Point, Poe decided to focus his career solely on writing. This shift from a military background and an unfortunate upbringing has molded Poe’s writing style into a new genre of horror. The gothic horror tale genre was created from Poe’s upbringing, and his experiences and social status has had a major effect on “A Cask of Amontillado,” as well as the majority of his writings.
The underlying purpose of Poe’s “The Cask of Amontillado” is to describe how Montresor seeks to exact his revenge against Fortunato for an unnamed insult. This conflict stems from Poe’s experiences with social classes. Poe went to the University of Virginia, which was founded by Thomas Jefferson in 1819. It had been the theory of Jefferson that there should be no restrictions on the students, other than the expectation that they would conduct themselves as

Poe baffles his readers with stories that appeal to emotion and intrigue. Montresor opens the story with how he “must not only punish, but punish with impunity” (Poe 291). This opening is a brilliant way of taking a gothic tale to another level of horror. Tactics such as this draw in the reader to learn more about the characters, while also maintaining a certain standard of writing. However, a beautiful gothic horror story can not be complete with only dark writing and symbolism. This is where varying literary devices come into play in order to create a masterful