Death as an Indisputable Ruler in The City in the Sea by Edgar Allan Poe

As a child, Poe would watch his mother perform on stage every night. He would be sitting front row watching the beautiful actress commit suicide every night due to her role as Juliet from Shakespeare's famous play. After the curtains closed, Poe’s mother would take young Edgar and go on with her evening (Edgar Allan Poe). Now, as an impressionable young child, Poe would see his mother die on stage and then see her “come back to life”. This led to Poe’s fascination with death. In “The Raven”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”, death is the main component. In “The Raven”, Poe talks about a man who was going mad while trying to forget his love who had just died. The fact that this woman is dead contributes to Poe’s theme of death. Now, this is not the only piece of literature that has to do with a man’s love dying, in the poem “Annabel Lee” Poe

Edgar Allan Poe, a poet in the 1800’s, achieved fame by writing poems with dark tones even when the theme itself was not dark. Most anyone who reads Poe’s poetry can identify the dark tone expressed in his poems, however not everyone can identify how he portrays the dark tone in them. Numerous poetry critics have concluded that Poe uses description, setting, imagery, and the topic of death in order to add dark tone to his poems. To provide evidence of Poe's use of these in his poems, poetry critics tend to cite the poems “Annabel Lee”, “Ulalume”, and “The Raven” due to the fact that each poem is riddled with examples. The majority of poetry critics use “Annabel Lee” for evidence of description and imagery, “Ulalume” for evidence of the theme death of a beautiful woman, and “The Raven” for evidence of description and setting. Edgar Allan Poe uses description, setting, imagery, and the topic of death to portray a dark tone in his poems.

Edgar Allan Poe is a famous well known writer known for his dark and gothic horror stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and many others. The well-known author had a rough life which dealt with a lot of death, so most of his stories revolve around this idea. In “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Masque of the Red Death” Poe uses similar themes or darkness to convey tone and conflict throughout the story. His writing style is dark and revolves around one main concept: death. Edgar Allan Poe uses diction and syntax, setting and conflict, and characterization in his writing style to develop his stories.

This verse lyric again investigates Edgar Allen Poe's topics of death and misfortune and may

Throughout life, there are many ups and downs, and everyone has to have the bad and good in life. Edgar Allen Poe is famous for his dark written Gothic stories such as The Masque of the Red Death. Edgar Allen Poe tends to get his readers excited while reading because of his choice of words and dark tones he uses to get his themes across, which is more than likely chilling or dark. He lures his readers in by being suspenseful, making the reader not want to quit reading because they want to know what happens next without putting the piece of literature down. Throughout the author’s stories, he typically has ups and downs, one of the downs most likely being death because of the anticipation he makes the readers feel. He

Edgar Allan Poe was a quite mysterious man who lived in the dark ages. What happened to be more mysterious about Poe was his death. Poe’s death is unknown, even though we have many theories and possible outcomes about his death we do not know exactly what happened. Some say Poe died from rabies and others say he died from alcohol. Despite the fact that there is a no final answer on Poe’s death, I think he may have died from alcohol.

“Mors ultima linea rerum est” (“Latin Quotes about Death”): this quote from Horace perfectly sums up the theme of the writings of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe suffered much loss throughout his life—first with the loss of his mother, then his adopted mother, his first love, and finally his wife—thus explaining why Poe commonly uses death as a theme in his works. Poe also commonly writes about women and youth, with the presence of death bringing a depressing and ominous undertone. Death exists in the happiest and saddest of subjects. “The Bells,” which judging by the first two sections the reader can assume will be a celebration of life, turns into a chaotic and then solemn story of death.

Almost every story and every poem of Poe’s had something to do with death. The reason being is he had dealt with so much death especially of loved ones in his life that it became a part of his life story. He lost most of his loved ones due to tuberculosis. Both of his mothers and his wife passed away due to this disease. Death kind of became a mystery to Poe because it happened so often to the ones he loved.

Edgar Allen Poe is a widely known writer from the 1800s. Poe aimed at creating a definite emotional effect and mood in both poetry and short stories. Poe’s goal was to make readers feel horror of premeditated death and, or profound sadness. Edgar Allen Poe’s style is characterized by his use of sound imagery, irony, repeated elements which he uses to create an emotional effect for his readers. Poe’s style is shown by his use of sound imagery in his short story The Tell-Tale Heart.

The main theme is fear, the terror a human goes through when being confined and sentenced to mental and physical torture. Poe is trying to show readers the mental torture that a person can put themself through when they think that they are going to die. Readers see the narrator becomes paranoid throughout the whole story because of what he thinks will happen to him. The narrator thinks that he is being drugged and watched because of his constant fainting and weird things happeneing to him. Readers never know if the things he was thinking were true or if he was just assuming because of his fear.

Picture this. The father of modern crime and detective stories, known as Edgar Allan Poe, is sitting down about to write a beautiful piece of writing and BAM! He whisks away into a story of love, death, and just plain out horror; either characters are losing someone near and dear to their hearts or they are plotting to kill. Edgar Allan Poe, at a very young age, lost both of his parents, and later on in life, lost his wife to tuberculosis, so in one way or another, these stories reflect off of his personal experiences. A major theme in Poe’s writings is death. The theme of death is seen throughout the works of Annabel Lee, the Cask of Amontillado, the Raven, and the Black Cat.

In life, as in death, Edgar Allan Poe evoked a feeling of sympathy from his

Thesis: Poe explores the paradox of a narrator who is faced with the inevitability of death and time, achieving the unity of effect that results from consciousness of existence. The chilling and alarming setting of the story enhances the feeling of torture and the inevitability of death in the tomb. Poe manipulates the setting by employing multiple types of imagery. Visual imagery conveys what the narrator sees in the setting he is in, such as the “blackness of eternal night encompassed me… the intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me” (45).

“The City in the Sea” Poe expresses his views about a city in the west that is ran by Death. For instance Poe states “While from a proud tower in the town, Death looks gigantically down.”(28, 29).This tells the reader that death is ruling the city. In this piece by Poe the poem depicts death and presents it in an unorthodox way. It is viewed as a god that watches over a magnificent, peaceful city in the far west. The city is massive and godly as Poe states “Domes and spires and kingly halls, and fanes and Babylon like walls.” (17, 18). Poe says the city is in the west because sun sets in the west, this has traditionally been associated with death. At the conclusion of the poem Poe suggest that something isn’t right as he speaks of

Respected as one of the greatest poets of all time, Edgar Allan Poe is a name widely known in all aspects of literature and poetry. He has made countless contributions to English literature and many contribute their success to his influential and complex style of writing. Poe has written fiction and poetry and are best known for that genre. Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed with the topic of death and Poe’s style is viewed more as dark and gloomy while exhibiting criticism which left his readers constantly guessing the true interpretation. This research paper will analyze the life and poetry fiction of Edgar Allan Poe. It will employ a literary analysis that focuses on theme to gain a more thorough understanding of the following three short poems: