How Does The Masque Of The Red Death Affect Poe's Life

Edgar Allan Poe was a brilliant poet who endured an incredibly harrowing life. It seemed as if everyone he became close to would decease before his eyes. His grim life served as inspiration for his work which take on eerie, nightmarish tones and themes, likely because those disturbing subjects are what he knew best. One of his poems greatly influenced by his life was “The Masque of the Red Death”. Some parts of the poem influenced by his life are Prince Prospero, the red death, and the theme of the inevitability of death.

A popular question to ask is “where did Poe get all of his darkness from”? Poe, had a forgettable childhood. According to ‘biography.com’, Poe’s family was dirt poor, and his mother passed away when he was two years old. Shortly after his mother’s death, Poe found himself in a foster home. He was under the care of as wealthy businessman, although he grew close to his foster mom, something didn’t feel right. Edgar’s foster father continually thought of him as a punk, and always believed that Edgar was ungrateful for everything that he had done for him. Poe’s dark childhood, helped him use gothic language in his writing. He took the pain and darkness that had developed in his early life and used it to create suspense in his stories.

Poe was a very interesting man as he wrote many poems in his day and age and he always seemed to have a somewhat grim look on life. I found a tidbit online that backed up my statement and it said “Edgar Allan Poe has a unique and dark way

Edgar Allan Poe is one of the most famous authors using literary tools. Poe had a lot of issues and internal conflicts, but put many of them into his stories. There are so many parts of his life he put into his writing to express it. One literary tool Poe use was life influences, like in the Masque of the Red Death when there was a mysterious masked man in a room with a lot of people and he was a disease that killed like Poe’s mom and wife. To sum up the three stories is in the Masque of the Red Death was a man that brought a lot of people in his castle to block from the disease but the disease come in and kills everyone.

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. Poe’s mother, Elizabeth died when he was two years old, after she left his father. Mr. and Mrs. Allan then adopted Poe while his siblings went to other families. John Allan was a successful merchant, so Poe had gone to worthy schools and grew up in virtuous surroundings. Poe later went to the University of Virginia to study Latin and French.

Upon examining Edgar Allan Poe’s life, one is not surprised that he chooses to write such gloomy and sinister stories. Poe’s life is far from happy and nurturing. According

Edgar Allen Poe left a writing legacy behind that most writers dream of living up to, his ideas of factional exclusion, human lunacy, and short story writing are all concepts still relevant in today's society. First, the idea of factional exclusion is an idea presented in the short story, “Masque of the Red Death.” In this story a Prince excludes himself from the outside world as a plague has overtaken the population, the Prince is not alone though, he enjoys the company of other nobles as they attempt to forget the people who are consumed by the plague outside. In a similar way, certain people in today's society who enjoy wealth and prosperity would rather forget those who are less fortunate and cannot enjoy the luxuries that those who are wealthy take for

Edgar Allan Poe is an extremely beloved author, constantly put on a pedestal as a dark, brooding, tragic writer. His name is practically synonymous with macabre at this point. But what led to this reputation? Many people read his more disturbing works and conclude he has had a horrible, painful life but was his life really as tragic as it has been perceived to be? Yes, he dealt with deaths in his family, mediocre parenting, and substance abuse (alcohol and opium) but that was not something that was particularly outlandish. People read his stories like “The Masque of the Red Death” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” and automatically classify Poe as a horror writer and cannot look past that. They are completely oblivious to how complex and multi-faceted

Many authors have their own type of style to go with their works. One author’s style of writing that remains debatable is Edgar Allen Poe’s. The idea of a writing style is so it can develop through time, which can help the author’s writing style to become individualistic and unique. Poe’s writings are based on different topics such as death, love, depression, loss, etc. though Poe thinks that his works are “romantic” pieces. Looking for an author’s writing style can be very difficult because every critic has a different view as to what it is, and Poe’s writing style is one of the most difficult because it can vary through different stories. One of the most difficult stories to understand is Masque of the Red Death- there is no background context

the Red Death shows the futile attempts by a prince and his guests of a party,

“To Suspect your own mortality is to know the beginning of terror”― Frank Herbert. Any self-conscience mortal has an ever present fear of the ultimate unknown; death. Many men and women will find riches and trinkets that they use to hide from it but in the end death is the one thing that we all know is inescapable. Throughout the Masque of the Red Death Poe writes the character Prospero into a character who wants to wield power over fear, time, and death.

Edgar Allan Poe is considered to be one of the greatest American writers of all time. His writing is dark and sinister. He wrote of death, murder, psychosis, and obsession. One could only imagine what would bring a person to write such morbid stories. Perhaps, it may be attributed to Poe’s childhood, a past that was sad and far from average. Both of his parents died when he was only three years of age (Shelley). The death of his parents caused a separation from his siblings and he moved to live with his relatives (Shelley). In later years, Poe endured poverty and the loss of his wife-to-be to another man (Clark). Possibly, without those troubling experiences, Poe couldn’t have imagined such eerie and enthralling tales. Some of his most

A story also written by Poe is “The Masque of the Red Death”. This story starts of by describing the sickness “the red death” which kills many people in a fictional country hastily. Many residents are distraught and scared of this sickness, other than the prince Prospero who does not seem to focus on this issue. Although Poe did not describe the exact symptoms of the sickness, I believe that he has portrayed tuberculosis as the red death, which would make sense as it is the illness that killed Poe’s loved ones quickly. Poe’s mother, wife and many more relatives suffered from this disease, but still just like prince Prospero he tried to ignore the significance of this illness. Moreover, I suppose that Prospero is Poe but when he was adopted

Poe’s writing style was much like that of Hawthorne’s, but drew from the darker side of romance creations. This gothic mood believed in the dark truths of the human heart, which are the ends and motivations for many of his stories. Human corruption and violence ends in murder in “The Black Cat”. Gothic writings move more into the supernatural side, which lets observer of the see a living person in the picture at his first, sleepy glance.

Poe, a traditional writer recognized for his ability to write in ways of extreme morbidity and darkness, may have been influenced to write in such ways because of his tragic childhood. Growing up, at the tender age of three years old, both of Poe’s parents died, orphaning him until his adoption by the Allan family. His parental connection and guidance was thus nonexistent and allowed him to fall into patterns of loneliness, and later, morbidity. Through the loss of his parents during an important stage of development, Poe was deprived of the upbringing other children had; for this reason, the direction of Poe’s life flew into a downward spiral. Later on in life, only further contributing to Poe’s darkness, was Poe’s discovery of his fiancee leaving him in favor of another man. The one person he chose to spend his life with, did not reciprocate the same feelings, and rather, abandoned him just as his birth parents did. Marriage, an event that represents unity, did not occur in his favored