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4. Edgar Allan Poe and the horror genre
Much of Poe's popularity is due to his tales of horror, but the horror genre has been very ignored and mocked by the critics, above everything in Poe'stime. The critics of Poe's time considered that his horror tales were an imitation of German Gothicism, Poe answered, “Terror is not of Germany, but of the soul" (preface of “Tales of the Grotesque andArabesque”). Poe believed that terror was a part of life and, in this way, a good topic to add in literature. However, Poe's terror is more present in his tales than in his poems. This is due to thefact that he considered that poetry has another objective, it has to represent the beauty and the pleasure.
The horror genre and the tales existed since many years before; we can see traits of them in“One thousand and one nights”, “The Odyssey” or “The Iliad”. In the Romanticism’s time, the Gothic horror appeared and it had strictly romantic roots, it used the scare as the main resource. Poe'scontributions of the first half of the nineteenth century as the psychological horror transformed completely the Gothic horror, and it was a literary dawn led by him. This dawn not only affected the horrorstory, it also affected the short story as a whole. Poe did what no one had or could have done in the field of the horror tale, and the modern horror story owes its foundation to this author. BeforePoe, most of horror and fantastic writers worked almost blindly, without the due understanding of the psychological basis of the horror and, they were based in popular values. On the contrary, Poethought that the real artist has to be impersonal, not an opinion seller and, literature's role is to express and interpret events and sensations as they are, regardless of if they represent the good orthe evil.
Due to the dark happenings of Poe's life, his spirit was more inclined towards the strange and spooky and he decided to be an interpreter of this topics. In this way, Poe's spectres...