Tani Mercado
Mr. Howes
English 11 ERWC
21 December 2014
Washington Irving: The Unknown Facts
About His Life
Many years ago people invented stories to help show readers what it was like in the past. The people that wrote those stories are called authors and or writers. Many writers express their feelings in various ways. Some writers have creative ideas about romance. There are others that write about dark romanticism which is trying to explore the mysteries of human existence. It also expresses madness, evil, and alienation in the writer’s dark romanticism’s stories of dark events. Writers have changed the way we think. Stories that writers make are beneficial to us all. There are many stories that are read just for fun. Those stories consist of Romanticism and Dark Romanticism. One of these powerful writers was Washington Irving, not only because he is a talented writer but because he also focuses on Dark Romanticism. Irving’s Stories are creepy bitter and tragic. Washington Irving was a very different man; he had a secretive side that he didn’t want anyone knowing about, he has an unraveling world. Irving’s past was harsh, but also a huge success for him, he became a writer, and wrote stories that had to do with Dark Romanticism: Irving has a very drastic mood for the characters in his stories, his stories reflect his life, and in this way Irving’s background was mysterious, and his stories were a very deep meaning.
Washington Irving was a very ingenious writer; he did not express his stories with Romanticism but with something more creative and dark. Washington Irving has a big role for mood; his stories are creepy, mysterious, and evil. Irving’s stories reflect on the mood, a lot of his work had deep and evil thoughts. “T...
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...rd his successful life as an author or writer. Irving was a very deft man and his work is known all over. The death of Washington Irving impacted New York greatly after they heard from his death. His hometown was also very devastated.
Stories are much more than just a hobby. Stories are what we read every day, they are everywhere. Our lives are based on stories; they are the entirety of the world. Everybody relies on these to know about our past, what goes on in the world and everything that is important to us all. Washington Irving was not only a writer and he had deep and mystical stories that might be about his life. Dark Romanticism is not about love, it has a very mystical meaning of the everyday life. There are many other great writers that use dark romanticism but Washington Irving is the most outstanding and sensational author, of every author out there.
Romanticism is an essential part of the early forms of American literature. Romantic’s, who value feelings and intuition as opposed to reason, seek to reveal higher truths through their writings. One way to reveal these truths is by the use imagination, as Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow do. Through the utilization of imagination, Washington Irving and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow reveal distinct truths about life.
During the American Renaissance, writers were put into one of two categories. The categories were the Dark Romantics and the Transcendentalists. Some Dark Romantics include Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving. The Dark Romantics stories included creepy symbols, horrific themes, and psychological effects of guilt and sin. The Devil and Tom Walker by Washington Irving gives a few examples as to why life is meaningless to some people.Humans are not all good, there are some cruel people in this world. The Pit and the Pendulum tells you exactly why.
Throughout Irving’s story, he used characterization, irony, the dreams, and other literacy devices to bring The Legend of Sleepy Hollow to life for Irving’s audience.
In Washington Irving’s work “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving demonstrates all characteristics of an American Mythology rather humorously. These characteristics affect the story attracting the attention of readers and impacting the reader’s experience of the story by relishing America’s unique attributes and values. In “Rip Van Winkle,” Irving incorporates attributes of American Mythology by setting the story in exciting pastimes, filling the story with strange and exaggerated characters, and featuring magical mysterious events.
Edgar Allen Poe is known for his dark yet comedic approach toward the his theme of his stories. Likewise, Poe’s themes have gathered many fans due to his impression of reasoning in his stories. The author uses thinking and reasoning to portray the theme. Poe’s unique diction comprehends with the theme of the story. Poe has a brilliant way of taking gothic tales of mystery, and terror, and mixing them with variations of a romantic tale by shifting emphasis from, surface suspense and plot pattern to his symbolic play in language and various meanings of words.
Each literary work portrays something different, leaving a unique impression on all who read that piece of writing. Some poems or stories make one feel happy, while others are more solemn. This has very much to do with what the author is talking about in his or her writing, leaving a bit of their heart and soul in the work. F. Scott Fitzgerald, when writing The Great Gatsby, wrote about the real world, yet he didn’t paint a rosy picture for the reader. The same can be said about T.S. Eliot, whose poem “The Lovesong of J. Alfred Prufrock,” presents his interpretation of hell. Both pieces of writing have many similarities, but the most similar of them all is the tone of each one.
Edgar Allan Poe is known for some of the most horrifying stories ever written through out time. He worked with the natural world, animals, and weather to create chilling literature. Two most notable thrillers are “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”. Poe was infatuated with death, disfigurement, and dark characteristics of the world. He could mix characters, setting, theme,and mood in a way that readers are automatically drawn into reading. Both of these short stories have the same major aspects in common.
The Romantic era writers, Washington Irving and Edgar Allan Poe, had many similarities but even more differences, in both writing theme and style. This is very evident in their works, “Rip Van Winkle”, by Irving, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”, by Poe.
When a writer starts his work, most often than not, they think of ways they can catch their reader’s attention, but more importantly, how to awake emotions within them. They want to stand out from the rest and to do so, they must swim against the social trend that marks a specific society. That will make them significant; the way they write, how they make a reader feel, the specific way they write, and the devotion they have for their work. Washington Irving, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Edgard Allan Poe influenced significantly the American literary canon with their styles, themes, and forms, making them three important writers in America.
Although at times it is easy to get carried away with the adventure of a story, noticing the elements a writer has put into his work is very important. In reading “Young Goodman Brown” and “The Legend of Sleepy Hollow” you can see both similarities as well as differences of how both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving chose to illuminate their romantic writing styles. The writers both use a mystical woodsy setting with supernatural twists to draw in readers. Underlying you will find the differing romantic themes each writer used, as well as how each writer chose to end their work.
In Washington Irving’s “Rip Van Winkle,” an allegorical reading can be seen. The genius of Irving shines through, in not only his representation in the story, but also in his ability to represent both sides of the hot political issues of the day. Because it was written during the revolutionary times, Irving had to cater to a mixed audience of Colonists and Tories. The reader’s political interest, whether British or Colonial, is mutually represented allegorically in “Rip Van Winkle,” depending on who is reading it. Irving uses Rip, Dame, and his setting to relate these allegorical images on both sides. Irving would achieve success in both England and America, in large part because his political satires had individual allegorical meanings.
Edgar Allan Poe is known for his many works that are dark and mysterious. He became known as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. Poe had a dark, troubled life growing up. Both his biological parents died when he was a young boy and was separated from his siblings when another family adopted him. His foster father was in the tobacco industry, but Poe did not want to be involved in that business. He wanted to write. He went to college with very little money. He was so embarrassed by his poverty that he came back home, only to find that his fiancée got engaged to someone else in his absence. He left again, before finding out that the only mother he had ever known was dying of tuberculosis. By the time he returned she had already been buried. Allan, his foster father, helped Poe get into the United States Military Academy at West Point. Allan remarried and did not invite Poe. Poe was angry and wrote Allan detailing all the wrongs Allan had committed against him and threatened to get himself kicked out of the academy. Poe’s wife got tuberculosis, which had already taken the lives of his mother, brother, and foster mother.Because Poe had such a dark, difficult life, he used his poems to reflect his life.
Romanticism explores and emphasizes the theme of darkness found in human nature. The dark romantics traits are shown through the works of Washington Irving. He demonstrated the examples of darkness in human nature such as mankind posses no divinity or wisdom and that nature reveals evil truths of life through his works ”The Devil and Tom Walker”. Irving shows the trait of nature reveals evil truths of life by saying,“He now looked around, and found most of the tall trees marked with the names of some great man of the colony, and all more or less scored by the ax.
Edgar Allan Poe has a unique writing style that uses several different elements of literary structure. He uses intrigue vocabulary, repetition, and imagery to better capture the reader’s attention and place them in the story. Edgar Allan Poe’s style is dark, and his is mysterious style of writing appeals to emotion and drama. What might be Poe’s greatest fictitious stories are gothic tend to have the same recurring theme of either death, lost love, or both. His choice of word draws the reader in to engage them to understand the author’s message more clearly. Authors who have a vague short lexicon tend to not engage the reader as much.
The Romantic Period is characterized as an artistic and intellectually stimulating literary movement. Writers of this genre and time are considered to be those who fused the elements of romance in their writings to enhance the human experience. Edgar Allan Poe, known as the father of the modern short story, epitomizes this notion in his writings. In “Annabel Lee,” and “The Oval Portrait,” Edgar Allan Poe uses romance to illustrate the essence of death and misery and to illustrate elements in which the reader can actually feel that what is happening in the story is happening to them. In “The Oval Portrait”, Edgar Allan Poe creates a setting in an abandoned castle where the main character and his valet are forced to take shelter after an unknown accident wounds the main character.