1. Introduction
A brief introduction to Edgar Allan Poe’s life is as short as his writings: his father abandoned the family when Edgar was an infant, and his mother died when he was three years old. He was taken into the home of John Allan, a wealthy merchant who lived in Richmond, Virginia. He called him "Father," and Allan guided his early education, sending him to Jane Stith Stanard’s female academy and the English and Classical School. Stanard’s bones lie in Saint John's Churchyard, and the legend goes that Poe, in despair from his mother’s death, sneaked into the cemetery and conversed with the agony-filled phantoms. From eight to eleven years, Poe studied English, Latin, French, and mathematics. At eleven years, he sent pieces for publication in the Richmond newspapers. Poe, alone and disinterested, expanded his education on his own. He came to hate Allan and the city he now considered rural, so when his school-friend, Jane F. Thomas, died of brain fever, he suffered deeply and tried to leave Richmond. He was also tormented by financial hardships, and one night, so goes the legend, he ran away from home, walking 130 kilometers to get to his home in Boston. Once there, he believed he was going to get a warm welcome from his relatives and his brother, William Henry Leonard, but only worse poverty awaited him. He lived there for two years and spent his time cultivating his intelligence to deal with problems of elementary physics. He passed his time avoiding physical effort and sports, and he was considered a lazy and difficult young man.
2. Themes in Edgar Allan Poe's Works
All of Edgar Allan Poe's works delve into the darkness inherent in man and his surroundings. Poe seems to be more obviously preoccupied with a personal exploration of his own fears. Poe is suggesting, in the way he projects the human psyche, that our minds are composed of complex variables and subsidiary but subordinate faculties. In this kind of articulation, Poe presents the more distressing metaphysical insights: that man exists in a world for which he is, through inescapable experience and self-contemplation, astutely and abysmally incapable of understanding or explaining. Poe is responding to German idealism and French romanticism, which altered natural laws of the cosmos into psychological experiences. In other words, Poe is always conscious of the underlying fear of death, disintegration, and the extinction of the individual. Most of Poe's mature stories and poems exhibit a common characteristic whereby the narrator, typically hypochondriacal and superstitious, is able to explain a paradoxical and emotionally charged plot in a grotesquely romantic story. Poe is nowhere more intense in all his fiction than when he speaks of the world of the dead. He tries to formulate the human existence dealing with further darkness. The truth has been described in the form of logic or mathematical prose through such concepts as the 'geometrization of the spirit'. These disclosures take the form of fragmentary images which appear to emerge from the hydrographic world of dream and sleep, at which mankind quivered in his infancy. These reflections seduce the Poeian hero toward the life-enhancing potential of death.
2.1. The Dark Side of Human Nature
3. In many of his stories, Poe's principal aim was to arouse fear in the reader. Although the fear of shuddering horror was meant to be a temporary experience for the first readers and has long since faded, the more thoughtful readers are still aware that these stories were written as a result of deep psychological conflict which was Poe's constant companion. For the fear which Poe expected his tales to evoke was based on the most destructive premises of man's nature as he observed it within himself, such as hatred, jealousy, impotent rage and insatiable desire leading to acts of violence, perversion or obsessive passion. They were the symptoms of that contempt - that rejection of love which Poe had felt as a result of personal misfortunes. Although this fear may have taken disturbing and sometimes tragic proportions in his private life, it was also the wellspring from which his art took its life-giving force. 4. The expression of his deeply felt but carefully restrained passion gives power to many of his stories. In Poe "to create terror, the author does well, to intend it. To create the void, he must be in every respect a poet." A poet of the void, he certainly was and Poe specialists agree that his stories bore the marks of this duality in their plots and themes. Consequently, Poe was the first writer of fiction to attempt a description of the workings of the deep mind layers in his characters. His stories present a series of clues that invite subconscious participation by the reader through the subconscious act of reverie. In a real sense, his readers are encouraged to become active, rather than passive participants in the story. These stories require a state of imaginative identification with the protagonist's dark, violent feelings and Poe cleverly used this device to prompt his feelings and right-hand activities of the reader.
2.2. Madness and Insanity
The Fall of the House of Usher is associated with the ideal of madness. In the study guide, madness is identified with the tale's setting, its supernatural company, and its atmosphere of fear and dread. After meeting Lady Madeline, whom he believes is his patient, the narrator feels wicked and confined and longs for the serenity of "quiet," "sweet," and "holy" monastery. But because he is fake, the "simple" idea of the British added the word forced "I entered a labyrinth and wander" (room). As Usher causes the maze of its own decadence, the room is an artificial and mental maze that is connected to the confinement of the narrator who feels as strange and trapped. Roderick's little romance is complex and also has a moral struggle with his views, cultural demons, and internal thoughts. His feelings reflect his sense of general decay. At the beginning of the story, Usher asked the narrator "Can you actually green" (room). This geography is interrupted by the symbolism of circularity. The physical aspects of the round, including the lift of the underground that they use to transport fantasy bodies in castle rooms, including "windows to the outside world," bring the dungeons of the sky blue ceiling round windows around the castle, "weak and partially glass-white" instructions of the body of Lady Madeline to the Usher chamber. The round movement of the textbooks and the interactions of the reader must remember his rapid practice. The concept of circulation of the body represents the many alternatives that are not important or relevant to people in any way. This is the symbol of the continuous movement of the collapse of life and the Usher house. "Teacher" is also a symbol of hope, which is a symbol of the shielding of the great representatives of all participants and characters in the conversation, including the human body. For Usher, the limiting condition of the physical structure of the house prevents the actual flow of hidden desires and fantasies in the heart (heart). Usher's sense of beauty and moral values leads to the corruption of his ideas, thoughts, and feelings and leads to his fears in the arts of the walls. The sensation is thrown from the sky circle rather than from the sky just outside the circular window, in which violent emotional and physical pressure passes from side to side.
2.3. Death and Mortality
Edgar Allan Poe is considered the master of the horror tale. Since that category is an aspect of the short story, and that the short story was arguably established in a single work, Boccaccio's The Decameron, the right approach is to discover Poe's main features within the basic attributes of the short story and to see how he contributed to the genre. The dark preoccupations are brought to the ground of common man's existence, given understandable, if perverse, obsessions, with names and physical settings that are as mundane as possible. Ordinary is the highest form of realism, so these otherworldly constructs are made all the more terrifying and familiar. His major preoccupation is death. Victims of monster animals, victims of madmen; here men die both by their own ugliness and by the ugly anger they inspired in their victims. "The Imp of the Perverse" has those afterthoughts at all. The repetition of the word "dread," the key word, pins down in all its neutrality the metaphysics encased in story form. Ireton is not invaded by spirits, but he contemplates dreadful aspects of life. "Even with the breath that bound him, he would not be a man; I shuddered and, for a moment, I regretted my temerity." However, the entire story is equally an exercise of "temerity" in that what we don't want to see isn't confronted with its still vaster suggestions.
3. Literary Techniques Employed by Edgar Allan Poe
During his lifetime, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) forged a legacy of pioneering literary and poetical distinctions. In this essay, we will use examples from three of his poems and discuss the literary techniques of individualism, unity of effect, and literary criticism. Born the child of traveling actors who died while he was very young, Poe was raised by John Allan and his wife and sent to private school in England. These elements find their way into Poe’s works, primarily in poems about loss, despair, and death. Though he was a professional and respected critic, his animosity toward his contemporaries and infamy for ad hominem attacks garnered him animosity towards himself. Despite a difficult childhood and life, Poe wrote prolifically to later become a revered and influential figure in literature today. Poe consistently creates detailed, descriptive settings which correlate to his story’s individualistic effect. Poe’s unity of effect proves most evident in his poem, “Annabel Lee.” In the poem, the speaker’s adoration increases this purity. The love which binds the two, Annabel Lee and the speaker, has its roots in the young innocence reflected on the heavens being bright above and the moon resembling the rare brilliance of every eye. The individualistic effects of the moon and the stars and of the heaven and the sky unite the celestial sphere with the sea; the refrains relate Annabel Lee directly to these natural elements.
3.1. Symbolism
Symbolism is one of the earliest and most important literary devices Poe learned to master and greatly helped in the work of most of his tales. Poe’s masterpieces are much known for their symbols. The use of classical and biblical knowledge in most of his tales helped him to work on this. The use of this symbolism can be either the complex or simple aspect of the story folding. The use of symbolism in ‘The Raven’ has been very successful. The interest in riddles that he earlier learned from his grandfather is the key aspect of the story brought out in the form of dialogue of the poet with the raven. The immediate response of the bird to the poet’s questioning gives him the hope of what is the absurdity of his self-avarice. This simple dialogue follows a series of resigned soul-searching, emotional and intellectual struggle, and finally ends up in being with the irrational world of the moribund. Such symbolism in ‘The Raven’ is considered. But the universal acceptance of the poem, however, is not a mere symbolical weather. The Raven allegorized Poe’s own struggles and agonies with life. No individual in human history has as many followers in literature, movies, poems, research, folklore, memorabilia as Edgar Allan Poe. For a long time, Poe’s nightmares have influenced many generations according to the picturesque world he paints in his scary masterpiece tales, some of which are still vital and vigorous. However, Poe’s role in the sphere of horror is only that of a leader, for the work executed in the frightful genre. Today it has developed and has been enriched by the literary production taking which leads from his life trajectory of his venerable universe. Undoubtedly, Poe’s memory, as a poetic and fantastic horror novel best server, is surrounded by many symbols, who still pass between us in the literary stage. His narratives are a whole representation of the transitory eco symbolism without the beauty sense. They advance over the art concept.
3.2. Gothic Elements
The Fall of the House of Usher story has three clear Gothic elements that make it a representative Gothic work by Edgar Allan Poe. First of all, the Usher family is quite ancient, symbolizing the old American aristocracy. The gloomy and decadent atmosphere is consistent with the sadness of the Usher family. Then, the Gothic buildings and atmosphere are in line with this aristocratic family. The dark and decayed ancient house is like an old person awkwardly standing in the center of an obsolete world. Lastly, the story's dual character card makes it surreal and Gothic. The Usher family fears that they are caught between life and death, which is tragic. This particular status symbolizes the position of the main character and his wife. The grandeur of the door also adds to this point. The entire building, along with the surrounding hills, forms a real structure. The mist fills the lowland and the building, making the environment more horrific and horrible. The existence or non-existence of the freemasonry of the mind raises the question of whether the narrator can be completely trusted when describing events. Although the details of emotions and the subsequent election have been published, Roderick's repeated remarks about the proud family and the record related to the problem of golden judgment, mirroring, and prophecy show that it is central to both stories.
3.3. Psychological Exploration
The Tell-Tale Heart – A Story of Hate or Love? Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49) was an American writer and poet who wrote more than 70 short stories and poems. His work fits in with the Dark Romanticism literary movement, which resulted in part from a reaction against the Age of Enlightenment. Poe’s best-known fiction works are characterized by their strong importance of the macabre and include mystery, the grotesque, and the gruesome. As a truly talented connoisseur of gothic horror and dark tales, he uses these elements to explore his characters’ inner personas. It can be said that Poe’s tales have the ability to get deep under our skin and challenge our minds, as they often have complex, ambiguous, or double-quoted meanings. His use of narrative voice, his exploration of madness, or his very detailed description of the setting and the environment often leave important questions unanswered, thereby allowing his readers to participate in the detective work. The text "The Tell-Tale Heart" (2005), written by Edgar Allan Poe, is the perfect example of a short story that Poe was able to create as it becomes one of his most popular works. The story of a man who becomes so horrified by another man’s vulture-like eye that he plots and executes a gruesome action in order to get rid of it; the story takes its backbeat from the contemporariness, the existence, of the following Freudian psychological concepts: the relationship between hatred and love, the layered structure of ego. Taking a glance at the story, we see that the protagonist narrates the story. The similarity between characters and Poe himself, which have defined, shaped, and expressed the story, is clear. He dwells on the two aspects of the deed – crime and hatred – his everyday life and moral code. The poem can be seen as an expression of the protagonist’s two inseparable aspects, the contradictions regarding the act of hate and the compulsion to love at the same time, which Poe has faced in his real life.
3.4. Suspense and Tension
How are some of Poe's stories calculated to fill the reader with rising feelings of anticipation, dread, and special tension on the part of some of the characters? Poe credits both the calculated suspension of time during heightened suspense and the calculated evasion of interior thoughts on the part of some of the characters with the creation of such a desirable effect. I think Poe hints at the true reason for the desirable effect in those two statements and in other suggestive remarks in his talks and stories by the very inadequacy of his definition of suspense in terms of time and by repeatedly linking the concept of insider knowledge of character thoughts with the ability to produce tension. Most of Poe's stories involve no action. What happens is, for the most part, thinking. In the works, he depicts a series of low-level mental processes - from among his own fascinating reflections - of some of his simplified characters. Creating the illusion of a recognizable pattern. Of real people as the ordinary observer. Producing a feeling of chill, if not terror. A revitalizing effect Poe described as evoking "emotional perverseness." He has given clear, simple and detailed technical advice on how he created that effect. Many of you say his advice is autobiographical, but I take him mainly at his word. Details from his life are useful. But we need to look elsewhere than in Poe's biographies for a general concept of what Poe was about.
4. Analysis of Selected Edgar Allan Poe's Works
Variety of topics to discuss; they cover life details, learnings, achievements, works created, and more. Feel free to check those examples and use them to write your essay. Also, we can help you with the analysis of selected works or with other Poe essay writing tasks. Poe's influence is worldwide, and his mind's main focus was on horror stories with elements like revenge, death, and love. If labeled, his works are closer to horror and mystical tales than to modern creations. The writer used to express dark thoughts and was the creator of the whole detective fiction class. Starting as an author, Poe gave a detailed definition of the composition, didn't realize his idea, and decided to turn to short stories. After "The Pit and the Pendulum," there were "The Tell-Tale Heart," "The Black Cat," "The Premature Burial," and some others. After Poe's death, everyone agreed to name the father of the detective genre and mystical tales him. Today we can find Poe on the covers of the grim fantasy novels, hear the puppet in "The Simpson," and soon celebrate his 200th anniversary. There is no place for optimism and joy in his works: distant mountains are gloomy, storms and hurricanes are going on, above the murky swamps, over the ruins, the mournful towers reach out, the gloomy castle windows with black glass reflect the sign of Satan, the knight's armor is adorned with the threshold with his forefathers' skulls. Nothing foreshadows joy and happiness in his work. And no literary person will ever create such a myth in the distant years. Like, fascinating darkness of E. A. Poe's tales prompts everyone with excitement to tend to reject it at last, but the awesome power of the artistic genius recognized as fitting, not only for the character of the whole direction of the fantasy genre is recognized as accepted from gothic painting with respect to painting.
4.1. "The Tell-Tale Heart"
Poe's work is wide and diverse. It represents the best of his literary ability. However, above everything, the writer calls for a search for a guilty man on earth. Such impious enemies of the weak, aggressive buffoons, murderers, they fall on the guilty and on the divine debtors, insult them, reproach them for something. However, when they find one, they are sympathetic to him and try to get closer. Poe exalts a guilty person in his description, while showing his own humanity, compassion and unity. In the works of Poe, the theme of sin is central, and everything that is loved and beautiful was either in a state of sin, voluntarily or as a result of temptation. A drinking work refers the debt of sinning to life. Including the intelligence of being for unity through sin to the eucharistic cult, the strength of the redditor through tears. The humanity of the being is shown as complete and eternal. In the short story "The Tell-Tale Heart" the hero is a person with a broken psyche who attentively follows every word of his mocking, whom he killed, or rather knocked down on "the soul." The action of the protagonist is literally voiced. At first, it seems to him that he just hears the unbearable beating of the heart of his victim, who has crouched "down, down, down into the depths," and then the heart begins to scoff at him. It is characteristic that in order to drown out his sonavery, the murderer breaks into a speech about the invisible heart driving him crazy, and repeatedly exclaims "What do they know"! This is where the so-called Ananiev of a mentally sick person is revealed - an involuntary language of a person when, acting according to an impulse, his consciousness instinctively makes a "terrifying effect" on his listener, and Poe leads the subject of the impulse to an animal level.
4.2. "The Fall of the House of Usher"
1 Think about what keeps the narrator at "The Fall of the House of Usher" rather than precipitate his departure from his friend, Roderick Usher, who upset him. The mind of Roderick Vice was sick in... but there are moments when all agitations are fiercely new to the sense and exist in the intellect. Then the play of their images passes to the absent observer. Struggit way to bring them vigour of reason to that oblivion he has ensued and despair to the Master passion may infer a danger of its resounding triple vipers at the nerve. To throw the pendulum. To wither the sau of virtue to the victims. I must leave the decision. Roderick poet is this son. There are strangely pedestals. There is no education of a teacher or how to arise. At what point does an abandoned wing, which has been miraculously a skeleton, when washed away upon the ground and hidden with weeds, have an afterthought? And how does it discern how long would be skin serving off so that death comes in a horse? I think the biography should clarify the point, there have no sins that would visit themselves with more fully of common people than. Madame Rutter suffered to have been disturbed by the legend that created the former infirmities of her mother. Lord Usher designed this. His mother as an extreme youth, with the terrifying snake and tenderness that created the aunt and cousin, and no consideration was required to read in desire to prevent the lapse of the inheritance. Become to see that either the girl frowned at the death of white opal, burned with the blooming chamber, she also witnessed that any severe address must join the Ponce de Lioña House by Mohen. The next wish is to extend death. The reference to these is that has been satisfactorily convince any other man. To the skeptic of the appointment of chief Christian sudden emotion is markedly in need. 2 The narrative of "The Fall of the House of Usher" begins with the narrator explaining that he had received a letter from Roderick Usher, a boyhood friend, requesting that he come and visit. Usher was ill and appeared afraid that his malady might do him in. After some time, the narrator decided to comply with his friend’s request. When he arrived at the Usher domicile, he found a building that was massive, and it appeared to him as though the trepidations of his pal had taken on a physical likeness. When shown to the living portion of the house, the narrator was surprised to hear Usher’s voice. After exchanging a few insipid pleasantries with his friend, the best Usher could manage, the narrator asked about Usher’s ailment. Usher was unable to explain his complaint, and the narrator offered that he go ahead and retire if that was what he wished, but Usher declined. He asked the narrator to stay with him. A letter that the two of them were discussing came up as an amusing discussion over the small inconsistencies of somewhat (the materials used to make up a wicker basket in which to keep such and such). After a bit, the narrator began hearing his pal muttering madness in that of which he should have recollected: the family’s dire conditions. Miss Madeline Usher, Roderick’s sister, who was also suffering from malaise: the Ushers allegedly suffered from sickness previously have placed in the crypt underneath the dwelling; though that same dwelling would start to be shut up. Though the Usher wore, crumb jacket jacket came a great rapidity that even the lives of a lot of sides that entered as well, smeared wildly through the house, and, coinciding simultaneously with the narration, they were attacked by pages that began violently red over the entire structure. As Roderick hinted that in some respects, it might be better to stow them into a crypt.
4.3. "The Raven"
If we consider "The Raven" as a work in progress, with its writing as part of the Christmas season of 1843, with a continuation of its rewriting and correction in 1844, and if we also regard its completion as concluded with its publication in the New York Evening Mirror of January 29, 1845, then "The Raven" falls into that Peelian fifth category of abstruseness in general. For the indefinite conditional, with or without prompting of reason, although unfathomable, still propound individually or confound classification of terminological pastgale, whose fashioning through misuse concerns the dog-ears of the super-dead in utopian mad. Another way to put this point is to say that "The Raven" is probably Poe's closest approach to Romantic irony. In the way in which Schlegel, Tieck, and Novalis themselves, together with the Schlegelian radicals of the Jena period, made apparent the impossibility of a new Christian synthesis, gave ironical substance in their critical literature to the task of peering through the words of a work itself to insinuate the impossibility of faith in art and provide a counter aesthetic criticism. And since this density, the irrefutable ideality, of Romantic irony has for its center most public and exhibited examination in North American criticism, precisely those problems which present themselves to Poe himself as the poet-critic of Romanticism at the origin of the American artist, complaints, then an appropriate examination is seemingly elsewhere of itself to focus back upon a somewhat earlier time. "The Raven" obliges a critic to consider some things in peculiar ways. Certain sociological prerequisites, literary sources, antecedent textual facts, the poem's cinematic self-aspects, an almost strictly internal imaginative drama, the problems of its thematics, that reconstruction of its argument which may describe a specifically intended audience, and its tumbling verse which properly takes us, maybe beyond its illustrative quality, to and from some surprising conclusions which are not so far from the hubris of Poe's own prescience. First, the sociological. Poe's very relationship either with a complex middle class or with heuristically undifferentiated concerns of professions and mass posits a number of sharply phrased questions. For there have been both scholars in sympathetic parallel and opposed critical discourses, largely the work of professional literary historians, which have shifted their emphasis on the issue of Poe's purloined letter lettering only the professional or the professional period of the now recognized writer.
4.4. "The Masque of the Red Death"
"The Masque of the Red Death" is considered to be an allegorical tale since there are many keywords which refer to ideas that are important to the interpretation of the tale. The story takes place in the castellated abbey during the medieval ages. It narrates how to deal with the plague (Red Death) through words, actions, and the final interpretation of the story. The protagonist of the story is not Prince Prospero, nor the Red Death or God, and it does not have a moral. The story corresponds to existential reality and is, in this sense, existential. Prince Prospero is rich, multilacquered, and he and his friends, knights of his court, surrounded themselves with a fortification of the abbey and decide to lock themselves in for quite a while to protect themselves from the invasion and spread of the Red Death. During the masquerade ball Prince Prospero organizes, he plays with another prince with the conquistadors. At different times, they trim the clock, reminding the masquerades of the recent hour. It also symbolizes the sound of Prospero's final hour. The last hour is announced, and then the princes playing with the watchman faint and die. At that point, door four is opened and the appearance of a masked figure in the form of a victim of the Black Death is found, who sneaked and killed the unknowing masked figure. The figure was actually the real Red Death plague that penetrates the sealed walls of the abbey and spreads it. Poe chose the title "The Masque of Red Death". The Red Death can be partially interpreted as a desire for destruction which leads to renewal. A forceful extension of meaning recently introduced by Nellette Bradford, which instead of imposing the symbols on the text, tends to draw them from the story, viewing the linguistic mixtures as the mirror of the narrative.
