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Edgar Allan Poe And Romanticism Essay

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Edgar Allan Poe was an American poet, writer, editor, and one of the first literary critics. He is probably best known for his poems and his short stories, especially his tales of horror, mystery and suspense. He is broadly considered the originator of detective fiction. Poe was the literary critic of his time, born in Boston, Massachusetts he may have been the nation's first published horror, mystery and science fiction writer. Poe wrote eerie, grim and cryptic tales. His work as a poet, and a critic had a profound impact on literature everywhere. He is generally considered as the creator of the modern short story. To this day he is one of the most widely read Authors of the 19th century. He appeals to all kinds of different readers, the young …show more content…

Edgar Allan Poe came onto the scene early in his respective nation’s forays into Romanticism. Poe introduced his Gothic influences before the Renaissance of American Romanticism in the 1850s. In his work there was an emphasis on color as it pertains to race, especially aspects of whiteness. How Poe engaged and depicted whiteness in his literary works is what prompted this shared literary engagement with race. Poe fully embraced the tenets of the biologically based racism it produced. No early American writer was more important than Poe in shaping a concept of an image of racialized blackness destined to haunt the imagination. Poe's response to the meaning of blackness, is like his participation in the cultural construction of whiteness, was both problematic and revealing. Let's assume that, his stories and poems do not suggest directly otherwise, let's think of them more like metaphors. Then the word slavery appears only once in his work, the word slave five times, but in a metaphorical sense, like a poet who is a slave of the loved woman in To Helen or a narrator who is the slave of circumstances beyond human control in William Wilson. The word Negro never follows in direct connection with slavery. A Negro in Poe’s tales has been always a free man. The Negro Jupiter, who is a main character in The Gold Bug, is a freed slave who voluntarily remains with his former …show more content…

But was he racist? We once wrote, in Eureka, “The utter imposibility of any one’s soul feeling itself inferior to another; the intense, overwhelming dissatisfaction and rebellion at the thought.”(Edgar Allan Poe and the Fall of the House) His stories were often inspired by intriguing events, this shows that he had often been critical and cynical of the society in which he lived. He has even been accused of being ‘anti-democratic’, but it is more likely that he ridiculed a corrupt political system that used and abused democracy for its own ends and needs. However, some people saw metaphorical pointers toward slavery in his stories. One of these stories is The Masque of the Red Death, there a rich upper class person isolates itself from a society that is suffering from a rampant and deadly disease; a pandemic that is caused and spread by this upper class itself and to which it eventually succumbs. This, of course, could be seen a metaphor from the antebellum South, but there might be a better explanation for this story, particularly the catastrophic crisis in the United States monetary and financial system in 1837, and the ensuing years of economic depression and hardship. This serious crisis was caused by people who were more concerned with their own short profits than the welfare for

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