Duality In Edgar Allan Poe's Poetry

    Edgar Allan Poe once said, “With me, poetry has not been a purpose, but a passion.” When stressed, writing was his coping mechanism, and through observation, many grasp how much death encompassed Poe. Although not appreciated during his era, he revolutionized mystery with mesmerizing story plots that yield suspense, but also makes readers question his stability. Most importantly, unlike those famous during his lifetime who are now forgotten, Poe’s legacy will live on forever. Moreover, throughout life, Poe experienced catastrophe, and because of this, writing became his creative outlet.

In Avi’s novel, The Man Who Was Poe, the reader learns all about the story’s focal antagonist, Edgar Allan Poe, under the alias of Dupin. Poe was a real man, who is one of the best-known American authors, with one of the most distinctive styles of writing. He is mostly recognized for is short stories that possess a gruesome plot and a hair-raising theme. In the novel, the style of Avi’s writing can easily be identified as an emulated version of the way Poe wrote. The way Avi used his writing to make the reader feel is also very similar to Poe. Both authors used descriptions and selective vocabulary in attempt to set the mood of the story and make the audience, who reads the story, feel a certain way. The elements of fiction play a big role in the style of the authors’ writing. The strategy, of usage, of setting, character, theme, plot, and mood, in Poe’s stories, and Avi’s novel, correspond to one another in many ways. Descriptions of Poe and the way he is depicted in the story also duplicated many of Poe’s real life characteristics. Poe’s style of writing is clearly a substantial influence on Avi, and is projected throughout the duration of his book with the usage of theme, setting and mood, along with the physical and mental characteristics of Poe himself.

Beauty is in the eye of the beholder: there can be many different perspectives seen in a poem. One individual could read a poem as depressing and another can perceive it as a new beginning. One’s views rests on individual perspectives. For example, Edgar Allen Poe’s writing is dark and controversial. In my essay I will argue that Poe was not in his right mind and he was driven mad with evidence throughout his short story “The Tell-Tale Heart”.

This essay will discuss the themes in Poe’s writing that mirror his personal life and, in addition, the fear and supernatural motivators for his characters. First, I will discuss Poe’s background and explore how he became best known as a poet for his tales of mystery and macabre.

When telling a story, authors use a variety of specific word choices, imagination, imagery, characters, themes and moods to outline the big idea or message of the story. Edgar Allen Poe is an American author who’s known for his tales of mystery. Poe uses a specific strategy to make the readers think and analyze every word he asserts. This catches the reader’s attention because it enables us to focus on the central point. In both stories, “The Pit and the Pendulum” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” Poe focuses on descriptive and sensory details to portray what he wants to say and to captivate the reader both mentally and physically.

Some like Kenneth Dauber, who studied Poe’s work at a later date, believe Poe mostly wrote “stories written around a vacancy”. While in reality, Poe may not be a modern Pluto or a “failure” of a writer, the majority of people, despite their personal opinions, cannot argue that Poe is a writer that has much influence over his readers, often making them feel like characters in his own stories. Poe’s writing style is quite distinctive; he writes exactly how he wants you to feel, which is usually petrified or bewildered. If the sentences are short, the mood is apprehensive; longer sentences usually mean a calmer point in the twisted plot. In “The Tell-Tale Heart”, the narrator describes how he “cautiously- oh, so cautiously, cautiously” went about killing an old man, a person he said he “loved”, because his eye was bothering him. (Poe, 303) As the narrator describes how he “kept quiet and still for a whole hour [and] did not move a muscle”, the details make the reader tense up like he is the one about to commit the crime. Likewise Poe’s images about the pendulum in “The Pit and the Pendulum” are lifelike; one can almost see the “razor, tapering from the edge…that [was] perceptively [descending]” (Poe, 252).

Poe’s psychological approach to the story makes the connection between the reader and the narrator stronger and shows the strategy that Poe adopted in conveying the feelings from the text into the reader’s mind. Thus, what the reader experiences in the process of reading the text reveals exactly what happens to the narrator. In return, what happens to the narrator suggests the process the reader undergoes in the reading of Poe’s story: “The reader becomes an active mediator containing the psychological effects of the story’s utterance, so the narrator’s imagination records a series of psychological effects that constitute the action of Poe’s text” (Bieganowski 178).

“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” Poe, Edgar Allan. The Philosophy of Composition. 1846. The name Poe often brings to mind tales of horror and mystery, but this Poe was also a writer of sophisticated poems, capable of extreme poetic beauty within a dark genre of writing. Poe never lived the happiest of lives, but his writing is extraordinary, both for its execution, and for the sheer elegance of the words which he found to write upon the page. Death is among one of the recurring themes which Poe explored. Dark and stormy compositions focussed around such ideas serve only to illustrate Poe’s writing style. One can see that such a horrid subject is clearly derived from the writer’s distraught life which would almost appear to create a trail of death in the writer’s footsteps. That being, Poe discovered the secret to writing. Edgar Allan Poe chose to write in an incredibly dark area of literature, but the mastery with which he explores such subjects is applicable to writing in the whole of literature.

Edgar Allan Poe has a distinctive and dark way of writing (Poe & Kennedy, pp.22). His mysterious style of writing appeals to passion and sentimentality. Poe’s most prominent works of fiction are gothic. His stories tend to have similar recurring theme of either death, lost love or both. Poe’s psychologically thrilling stories examining the depths of the humanoid psyche earned him much fame throughout his lifetime and after his death. And this distinctive style of writing made him possess his own style of wiring (Arbor, pp.71). There is a psychological concentration which is an important characteristic of Poe’s literatures, particularly the tales of horror that encompass his best and well-known works, such as The Black Cat and The Raven which

Poe's economic style of writing is a key instrument in making this story amazing. In this story, he uses his style to truly bring out what he intended for the story - a study of paranoia. In example, "I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. He had never given me insult. For his gold I had no desire. I think it was his eye! Yes, it was this! One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture -- a pale blue eye with a film over it. Whenever it fell upon me my blood ran cold, and so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man, and thus rid myself of the eye for ever. " it is easy to see that Poe used short sentences, to capture the rapid thoughts of a twisted mind.

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous writers in the American literary world. His stories and poems are known for their gothic style and having the common theme of death. This is certainly seen in his short story “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is speculated by many that Poe suffered from the mental illness known as bipolar disorder. In a letter to James Russell Lowell, Poe said, “I am excessively slothful, and wonderfully industrious — by fits. There are epochs when any kind of mental exercise is torture, and when nothing yields me pleasure but solitary communion with the “mountains & the woods” — the “altars” of Byron. I have thus rambled and dreamed away whole months, and awake, at last, to a

As a master of short stories of horror, Edgar Allan Poe is knowledgeable, learned and imaginative. He could skillfully manipulate the words in his literary works to create everything people can think of. The masterful use of the symbols, objects intensify the readers’ nerve as the typical elements of horror in Poe’s short stories, and therefore it is also a feature which makes Poe 's stories different from other writers.

Throughout Poe’s stories, he shows a development of characters through his development of imagery and syntax. As the antagonists’ characters develop, they become more malicious. This development advances the story and allows it to successfully showcase Poe’s idiosyncratic writing style, a suspenseful mood. Overall, his one-of-a-kind style has inspired many authors to write similar types of sober stories and poems. His influence has made a huge impact on schools around the country. Poe’s stories are taught to students to show off his specific type of style. Poe’s use of imagery and syntax influenced the massive industry of dramatic, thrilling, and suspenseful

about conveying these feelings to his readers and why it is so effective. Poe uses an

A virtuoso of suspense and horror, Edgar Allan Poe is known for his Gothic writing style. His style is created through his use of punctuation, sentence structure, word choice, tone, and figurative language. Punctuation-wise; dashes, exclamation marks, semicolons, and commas are a favorite of Poe. His sentences vary greatly; their structures are influenced by punctuation. Much of his word choice set the tone of his works. Figurative language colors his writings with description. Such is observed in the similarities between two of his most well-known short stories, “The Cask of Amontillado” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”