The Devil And The Pendulum, By Edgar Allen Poe

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The Romantic period in America was a period that lasted from roughly 1820 to 1860; this time span included the Trail of Tears up until talks of the South seceding from the North. This was the first literary movement that happened on a large scale in America. Similar to the Romantic writers in Britain, their worked emphasized a love of nature, imagination, and emotion. Their main focuses were on how humans interacted with each other, as well as nature and its effect on people. Some Romantic writers focused on human’s and their actions and nature towards one another. One writer that used this was Washington Irving in his piece “The Devil and Tom Walker”, which speaks about how people tend to put money and power above personal relationships. In this piece, a wife takes the devil’s offer to leave her husband and become rich and famous, and the husband rejects the offer just in spite of his wife. This story showed the negative side of human nature, and two more examples in a negative side of human nature would be Nathaniel Hawthorne’s “Dr. Heidegger’s Experiment, and Edgar Allen Poe’s “The Pit and the Pendulum”. In Hawthorne’s piece, he speaks that if we could go back in time, we would still make the same mistakes …show more content…

One writer that employed this was Ralph Waldo Emerson, and he used this in a chapter 1 of his book titled “Nature”. In this chapter, Emerson states that “The sun illuminates only the eye of the man, but shines into the eye and the heart of the child.”, implying that we can be inspired by something as simple as the sun, but only while we are young. He then explains that the only adults that have “retained the spirit of infancy even into the era of manhood” still hold nature close to their heart. Further on in the chapter, he states “Nature always wears the colors of the spirit.”, saying that whatever emotion you are currently holding, nature will only further

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