Edgar Allan Poe

EDGAR ALLAN POE
1809 – 1849

He was seen as the archetype of the neurotic genius. He was born Edgar Poe in Boston, the son of travelling actors. His parents died and he was taken into the home of the tobacco planter John Allan in Virginia. He was a southern writer though he didn’t deal with southern themes. He was an exception because southern writers treated the plantation tradition in arosy-coloured way, wrote about gentile, aristocratic life in the plantations.
He entered the university of Virginia, but he gained a reputation as a gambler and a heavy drinker, so he was kicked out of it. He went to Boston where he enlisted for the army. When he was 27 he married his 13 years-old cousin, Virginia Clemm.
He published his first book of poems entitled “Tamberlane and Other Poems”. In1827, working for a periodic, he won a prize for his first story “Message on a Bottle”. In 1838 he published his one full-length novel “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”, in 1839 “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and in 1840 his sonnet “Silence”. Late in 1839 his first collection of short stories appeared, “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque”. In 1841 “The Murders in the Rue Morgue” wereprinted, the ancestor of American detective stories. While living in New York in 1844, he wrote “The Raven”, his most famous work and immediate success. He is considered the father of the short story because he gave it its definite form: he stressed brevity and the elimination of all moralising that distracted the reader. He set the basis of what a thriller, what a suspense story should by like. Hewas the best short story writer in the world because of his unique narrative technique in handling plots.
In 1845 his wife fell ill and died, he was left in extreme poverty, penniless, broken hearted and with his own instability. He was his own enemy, he was a very sensitive individual with an introverted personality, he had a self-destructive personality, and failed to understand the world aroundhim. So he withdrew to his own world until he finally died. In this gloomy period he produced his best poetry. He wrote “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells” after his wife’s death.
Poe’s life had been a series of disasters: psychological crippling childhood depravations, overwhelming poverty, an unsuccessful attempt at suicide. He has been remembered as a drug addict – an opium-taker, the incarnation ofone of his mad narrators, or as a Byronic hero haunted by his own genius and destroyed by a cruel society and false friends.
Poe found his inspiration in a romanticism divorced from the actualities of American life, a world of disorder, perversity, and romantic emotions. He helped established the detective story as a genre with his short stories “The Murders of the Rue Morgue” and “The Mysteryof Mary Rogêt”. He wrote more than 60 stories and 48 poems. His prose is direct, energetic, clear, and calculated to focus readers’ attention to one idea at the time. His poetry is less versatile than his prose, his subject matters were not diverse but of a narrow range: he showed little concern for the American scene and the aristocratic tradition – though he was a master at musicality by the useof internal and external rhyme, and a lot of repetition. His poetry is melancholic, sad and beautiful. He was admired in France for his poetic musicality, and influenced the French Symbolist School of Poetry. His themes are characterised by gothic elements: horror, strangeness, melancholy, fear, suspense, and by aesthetic values such as beauty in horror. He developed the abnormal, the grotesque,the weird, the haunted world of sadness and terror.
He is considered the father of objective criticism. Before him, all criticism was based on excessive praise or condemnation, on personal opinions and prejudices. He was the first genuine American literary critic, who introduced the analytical approach to criticism.
His stories are often divided into:
➢ Arabesque Tales: horror, violent...