edgar allan poe critique essay

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s Stories

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on October 19, 2019 • ( 1 )

During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 – 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug . The Raven , his most famous poem, created a sensation when it was published and became something of a best-seller. After his death, Poe’s reputation grew steadily—though in the United States opinion remained divided—until by the middle of the twentieth century he had clear status as an author of worldwide importance. Poe’s achievements may be measured in terms of what he has contributed to literature and of how his work influenced later culture.

Poe was accomplished in fiction, poetry, and criticism, setting standards in all three that distinguish him from most of his American contemporaries. In fiction, he is credited with inventing the conventions of the classical detective story, beginning the modern genre of science fiction, and turning the conventions of gothic fiction to the uses of high art in stories such as The Fall of the House of Usher . He was also an accomplished humorist and satirist. In poetry, he produced a body of work that is respected throughout the world and a few poems that have endured as classics, notably The Raven, as well as several poems that, in part because of their sheer verbal beauty, have persistently appealed to the popular imagination, such as The Bells and Annabel Lee . In criticism, Poe is among the first to advocate and demonstrate methods of textual criticism that came into their own in the twentieth century, notably in his essay The Philosophy of Composition , in which he analyzed with remarkable objectivity the process by which The Raven was built in order to produce a specified effect in its readers.

Poe’s influence on later culture was pervasive. Nearly every important American writer after Poe shows signs of his influence, especially when working in the gothic mode or with grotesque humor. The French, Italians, and writers in Spanish and Portuguese in the Americas acknowledge and demonstrate their debts to Poe in technique and vision. Only to begin to explore Poe’s influence on twentieth century music and film would be a major undertaking. In terms of his world reputation, Poe stands with William Faulkner and perhaps T. S. Eliot as one of the most influential authors of the United States.

The variety of Edgar Allan Poe’s short fiction cannot be conveyed fully in a short introduction. Though he is best known for his classics of gothic horror such as The Fall of the House of Usher and his portraits of madmen and grotesques such as The Tell-Tale Heart and The Cask of Amontillado , he is also the author of detective stories, The Purloined Letter ; science fiction, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym ; parodies, The Premature Burial ; satires, The Man That Was Used Up ; social and political fiction, The System of Dr. Tarr and Prof. Fether ; and a variety of kinds of humor, Diddling Considered as One of the Exact Sciences and Hop-Frog .

Three stories that illustrate some of this variety while offering insight into Poe’s characteristic themes are A Descent into the Maelström , The Purloined Letter, and The Fall of the House of Usher. Among Poe’s central themes is an emphasis on the mysteries of the self, of others, of nature, and of the universe. His stories usually function in part to undercut the kinds of easy optimism and certainty that were characteristic of popular thought in his time.

A Descent into the Maelström

A Descent into the Maelström, which first appeared in Graham’s Magazine in May, 1841, and was collected in Tales , opens with a declaration of mystery: “The ways of God in Nature, as in Providence, are not as our ways; nor are the models that we frame any way commensurate to the vastness, profundity, and unsearchableness of His works, which have a depth in them greater than the well of Democritus.” In using this epigraph, slightly altered from the seventeenth century English essayist Joseph Glanvill, Poe announces several motifs for the story that follows. One of these is the mystery of how God acts and, therefore, may be revealed in nature. Another is inadequacy of humanly devised models for explaining nature or God’s presence in nature. Yet another is the idea of the multiple senses of depth, not merely the physical depth of a well or a maelstrom, but also the metaphorical depths of a mystery, of God, of nature, of God’s manifestation in nature.

The story is relatively simple in its outline, though interestingly complicated by its frame. In the frame, the narrator visits a remote region of Norway to look upon the famous maelstrom, an actual phenomenon described in contemporary reference books that were Poe’s sources. There, he encounters an apparently retired fisherman, who guides him to a view of the whirlpool and who then tells the story of how he survived being caught in it. In the main body of the story, the guide explains how a sudden hurricane and a stopped watch caused him and his two brothers to be caught by the maelstrom as they attempted to return from a routine, if risky, fishing trip. He explains what the experience was like and how he managed to survive even though his boat and his brothers were lost. Poe carefully arranges the frame and the fisherman’s narration to emphasize his themes.

The frame narrator is a somewhat comic character. The guide leads him to what he calls a little cliff and calmly leans over its edge to point out the sights, but the narrator is terrified by the cliff itself: “In truth so deeply was I excited by the perilous position of my companion, that I fell at full length upon the ground, clung to the shrubs around me, and dared not even glance upward at the sky—while I struggled in vain to divest myself of the idea that the very foundations of the mountain were in danger from the fury of the winds.” On one level this is high comedy. The narrator professes to be worried about his companion’s safety but cannot help revealing that he is personally terrified, and his resulting posture contrasts humorously with the equanimity of his guide. On another level, however, Poe is also suggesting at least two serious ideas. The narrator’s description of the cliff, with its sheer drop of sixteen hundred feet, should remind most readers that in a strong wind, they would feel and behave much the same as the narrator. This realization makes the next idea even more significant: The pose the narrator has adopted is pointedly a pose of worship drawn from the Old Testament of the Bible. The narrator abases himself full-length, not daring to look up while clinging to the earth. He behaves as if he is in the presence of God, and this is before the tide turns and the maelstrom forms. The tame scene evokes in the narrator the awe of a mortal in a god’s presence; when he sees the maelstrom, he feels he is looking into the heart of awesome, divine mystery.

When the maelstrom forms, when the earth really trembles and the sea boils and the heavens shout and the guide asks him what he sees and hears, he replies, “this can be nothing else than the great whirlpool of the Maelström.” The narrator continues to see it as a more than natural phenomenon. Unable to accept the naturalistic account of it offered by the Encyclopædia Britannica , he is drawn instead by the power that it exerts over his imagination to see it as a manifestation of occult powers, an eruption of supernatural power into the natural world. This view forms the context within which the guide tells his tale.

An important feature of the guide’s story is the contrast between his sense of chaotic threat and his repeated perceptions that suggest an ordered purpose within this chaos. It almost seems at times as if the episode were designed to teach the fisherman a lesson that he would then pass on through the narrator to the reader, though conveying a simple moral seems not to be the fisherman’s purpose. For the fisherman, it was good fortune, assisted perhaps by a kind Providence, that allowed him to find a means of escape once his fishing boat had been sucked into the gigantic whirlpool and had begun its gradual descent toward the rushing foam at the bottom of the funnel of water. The main sign of design in these events is that just as the boat is blown into the whirlpool by the sudden and violent hurricane, a circle opens in the black clouds, revealing a bright moon that illuminates the scene of terror. This event makes the weather into a symmetrical picture: An inverted funnel of clouds ascending to an opening where the moon appears, over a funnel of whirling seawater descending into an obscured opening where a rainbow appears, “like that narrow and tottering bridge which Musselmen say is the only pathway between Time and Eternity.” This view of a tremendous overarching cosmic order composing a scene of mortal chaos produces other kinds of order that help to save the fisherman.

Bewitched by the beauty that he sees in this scene, the fisherman, like the narrator on the cliff-top, gains control of himself, loses his fear, and begins to look around, merely for the sake of enjoying it: “I began to reflect how magnificent a thing it was to die in such a manner . . . in view of so wonderful a manifestation of God’s power.” Studying the beauty, he regains his self-possession, and in possession of his faculties, no longer terrified, he begins to understand how the whirlpool works, and he learns that different shapes and sizes of objects descend its sides at different rates. Attaching himself to a cylindrical barrel, he slows his descent enough that instead of going to the bottom and so across the mystical bridge he envisions there, he is borne up until the maelstrom stops and he finds himself again in comparatively calm water.

For the fisherman, his narrow escape is a tale of wonder, luck, and divine mercy. For the reader, however, carefully prepared by the narrator and supported by elements in the fisherman’s story upon which he does not comment, the story also illustrates the inscrutability of the God that may be visible in nature. This is not a God who operates nature solely for human benefit, though he has given humanity reason, aesthetic sense, and the power of faith that can allow people to survive in, and even enjoy, the terrors of nature. The fisherman’s brother, who survives the onslaught of the storm to experience the maelstrom with him, is never able to move by means of faith or the appreciation of beauty beyond his terror; this makes his despair at impending death insuperable, so he cannot discover a way of escape or even attempt the one offered by the fisherman.

Though not necessarily unique in this respect, the United States has throughout its history been a nation where large groups of people tended to assume that they had discovered the one truth that explained the universe and history and where it seemed easy to believe that a benevolent God had designed a manifest destiny for the nation and, perhaps, for humankind as a whole if led by American thought. Poe was among those who distrusted such thinking deeply. A Descent into the Maelström is one of many Poe stories in which part of the effect is to undercut such assumptions in his readers by emphasizing the mysteries of nature and the inadequacy of human ideas to encompass them, much less encompass the divinity of which nature might be a manifestation.

The Purloined Letter

Although A Descent into the Maelström emphasizes the inadequacy of human intelligence to comprehend God’s purposes in the universe, it also emphasizes the crucial importance of people using what intelligence they have to find truth and beauty in nature and experience. T he Purloined Letter, one of Poe’s best detective stories, places a greater emphasis on the nature and importance of intelligence, while still pointing at mysteries of human character. This story first appeared in two magazine versions in 1844: a shorter version in Chamber’s Edinburgh Journal and what has become the final version in The Gift . It was then collected in Tales.

The narrator and his friend C. Auguste Dupin are smoking and meditating in Dupin’s darkened library, when they are interrupted by the comical Monsieur G—, the prefect of the Paris police. The prefect tries to pretend that he is merely paying a friendly call, but he cannot help making it clear that he has come to Dupin with a troubling problem. He eventually explains that the MinisterD—has managed, in the presence of an important lady, presumably the queen, to steal from her a compromising letter with which he might damage her severely by showing it to her husband. He has since been using the threat of revealing the letter to coerce the queen’s cooperation in influencing policy. As the prefect repeats, to Dupin’s delight, getting the letter back without publicity ought to be simple for an expert policeman. One merely finds where it is hidden and takes it back. The letter must be within easy reach of the minister to be useful, and so by minute searching of his home and by having a pretended thief waylay him, the letter should surely be found. All these things have been done with great care, and the letter has not been found. The prefect is stumped. Dupin’s advice is to search again. A few weeks later, the prefect returns, still without success. Dupin then manipulates the prefect into declaring what he would pay to regain the letter, instructs him to write Dupin a check for that amount, and gives him the letter. The prefect is so astonished and gratified that he runs from the house, not even bothering to ask how Dupin has managed this feat.

The second half of the story consists of Dupin’s explanation to the narrator, with a joke or two at the prefect’s expense, of how he found and obtained the letter. As in Dupin’s other cases, notably the famous The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the solution involves a rigorous and seemingly miraculous application of rationality to the problem. Although in these stories Poe was establishing conventions for detection and stories about it that would flower richly in Arthur Conan Doyle’s tales of Sherlock Holmes, the principles upon which Dupin works are slightly but significantly different from Holmes’s principles.

One key difference is the importance of poetic imagination to the process. Most of Dupin’s explanation of his procedure has to do with how one goes about estimating the character and ability of one’s opponent, for understanding what the criminal may do is ultimately more important to a solution than successful deduction. It requires a kind of poet to penetrate the criminal’s mind; a “mere” mathematician can make competent deductions from given ideas, as the prefect has done. It takes a combination of poet and mathematician—in short, Dupin—to solve such a crime dependably. The prefect has greatly underestimated the minister because he is known to be a poet and the prefect believes poets are fools. Dupin says that the police often fail because they assume that the criminal’s intelligence mirrors their own, and therefore over- or underestimate the criminal’s ability. Having established that the minister is a very cunning opponent who will successfully imagine the police response to his theft, Dupin is able to deduce quite precisely how the minister will hide the letter, by placing it very conspicuously, so as not to appear hidden at all, and by disguising it. Dupin’s deduction proves exactly right, and by some careful plotting, he is able to locate and regain it.

The two main portions of the story, presenting the problem and the solution, illustrate the nature and powers of human reason. The end of the story emphasizes mystery by raising questions about morality. Although reason is a powerful instrument for solving problems and bringing about actions in the world, and solving problems is a satisfying kind of activity that makes Dupin feel proud and virtuous, his detecting occurs in a morally ambiguous world. The end of the story calls attention repeatedly to the relationship between Dupin and the Minister D—, a final quotation from a play even hinting that they could be brothers, though there is no other evidence that this is the case. Dupin claims intimate acquaintance and frequent association with the minister; indeed, these are the foundation of his inferences about the man’s character and ability. They disagree, however, politically. The nature of this disagreement is not explained, but the story takes place in nineteenth century Paris, and Dupin’s actions seem to support the royal family against a rebellious politician. Dupin, in leaving a disguised substitute for the regained letter, has arranged for the minister’s fall from power and may even have endangered his life.

By providing this kind of information at the end, Poe raises moral and political questions, encouraging the reader to wonder whether Dupin’s brilliant detection serves values of which the reader might approve. To those questions, the story offers no answers. In this way, Dupin’s demonstration of a magnificent human intellect is placed in the context of moral mystery, quite unlike the tales of Sherlock Holmes and related classical detectives. On a moral level, who are Dupin and the minister, and what are the meanings of their actions with regard to the well-being of French citizens? Although Poe invented what became major conventions in detective fiction— the rational detective, his less able associate, the somewhat ridiculous police force, the solution scene—his detective stories show greater moral complexity than those of his best-known followers.

The Fall of the House of Usher

The Fall of the House of Usher has everything a Poe story is supposed to have according to the popular view of him: a gothic house, a terrified narrator, live burial, madness, and horrific catastrophe. One of his most popular and most discussed stories, this one has been variously interpreted by critics, provoking controversy about how to read it that remains unsettled. This story was first published in 1839, and it appeared in both of Poe’s fiction collections.

The narrator journeys to the home of his boyhood chum, Roderick Usher, a man of artistic talent and generous reputation. Usher has been seriously ill and wishes the cheerful companionship of his old friend. The narrator arrives at the grimly oppressive house in its equally grim and oppressive setting, determined to be cheerful and helpful, but finds himself overmatched. The house and its environs radiate gloom, and though Usher alternates between a kind of creative mania and the blackest depression, he tends also on the whole to radiate gloom. Usher confides that he is upset in part because his twin sister, Madeline, is mortally ill. It develops, however, that the main reason Usher is depressed is that he has become in some way hypersensitive, and this sensitivity has revealed to him that his house is a living organism that is driving him toward madness. The narrator does not want to believe this, but the longer he stays in the house with Usher, the more powerfully Usher’s point of view dominates him. Madeline dies and, to discourage grave robbers, Usher and the narrator temporarily place her in a coffin in a vault beneath the house. Once Madeline is dead, Usher’s alternation of mood ceases, and he remains always deeply gloomy.

Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher

On his last evening at Usher, the narrator witnesses several events that seem to confirm Usher’s view that the house is driving him mad. Furthermore, these confirmations seem to suggest that the house is just one in a nest of Chinese boxes, in a series of closed, walled-in enclosures that make up the physical and spiritual universe. This oft-repeated image is represented most vividly in one of Usher’s paintings, what appears to be a burial vault unnaturally lit from within. This image conveys the idea of the flame of human consciousness imprisoned, as if buried alive in an imprisoning universe. The terrifying conviction of this view is one of the causes of Usher’s growing madness. On the last evening, a storm seems to enclose the house as if it were inside a box of wind and cloud, on which the house itself casts an unnatural light. The narrator tries to comfort both himself and Usher by reading a story, but the sound effects described in the story are echoed in reality in the house. Usher, as his reason crumbles, interprets these sounds as Madeline, not really dead, breaking through various walls behind which she has been placed—her coffin and the vault—until finally, Usher claims, she is standing outside the door of the room where they are reading. The door opens, perhaps supernaturally, and there she stands. The narrator watches the twins fall against each other and collapse; he rushes outside only to see the house itself collapse into its reflection in the pool that stands before it, this last event taking place under the unnatural light of a blood-red moon.

Such a summary helps to reveal one of the main sources of conflicting interpretation. How could such events really occur? Is not this a case of an unreliable narrator, driven toward a horrific vision by some internal conflicts that might be inferred from the content of the vision? This viewpoint has tended to dominate critical discussion of the story, provoking continuous opposition from more traditionally minded readers who argue that The Fall of the House of Usher is a supernatural tale involving occult forces of some kind. Both modes of interpretation have their problems, and so neither has been able to establish itself as superior to the other.

One of the main difficulties encountered by both sides is accounting for the way that the narrator tells his story. He seems involved in the same sort of problem that the community of literary critics experiences. He is represented as telling the story of this experience some time after the events took place. He insists that there are no supernatural elements in his story, that everything that happened at the House of Usher can be accounted for in a naturalistic way. In this respect, he is like the narrator of A Descent into the Maelström. He “knows” that the natural world operates according to regular “natural” laws, but when he actually sees the whirlpool, his imagination responds involuntarily with the conviction that this is something supernatural. Likewise, the narrator of The Fall of the House of Usher is convinced that the world can be understood in terms of natural law and, therefore, that what has happened to him at Usher either could not have happened or must have a natural explanation. Like the narrator of The Black Cat, another of Poe’s most famous stories, this narrator hopes that by telling the story, perhaps again, he will arrive at an acceptable explanation or that his listener will confirm his view of the events.

Perhaps The Fall of the House of Usher is a kind of trap, set to enmesh readers in the same sort of difficulty in which the narrator finds himself. If this is the case, then the story functions in a way consistent with Poe’s theme of the inadequacy of models constructed by human intelligence to map the great mysteries of life and the universe. The narrator says he has had an experience that he cannot explain and that points toward an inscrutable universe, one that might be conceived as designed to drive humans mad if they find themselves compelled to comprehend it. Likewise, in reading the story, the reader has an experience that finally cannot be explained, that seems designed to drive readers mad if they insist upon achieving a final view of its wholeness. The story itself may provide an experience that demonstrates the ultimate inadequacy of human reason to understand the mysteries of creation.

Although Poe wrote a variety of stories, he is best remembered for his tales of terror and madness. His popular literary reputation is probably a distorted view of Poe, both as person and as artist. Although he was tragically addicted to alcohol and while he did experience considerable difficulty in a milieu that was not particularly supportive, he was nevertheless an accomplished artist whose work, especially when viewed as a whole, is by no means the mere outpouring of a half-mad, anguished soul. To look closely at any of his best work is to see ample evidence of a writer in full artistic control of his materials, calculating his effects with a keen eye. Furthermore, to examine the range and quantity of his writing, to attend to the quantity of his humor— of which there are interesting examples even in The Fall of the House of Usher —to notice the beauty of his poetry, to study the learned intelligence of his best criticism—in short, to see Poe whole—must lead to the recognition that his accomplishments far exceed the narrow view implied by his popular reputation.

Principal short fiction • Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, 1840; The Prose Romances of Edgar Allan Poe, 1843; Tales, 1845; The Short Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe, 1976 (Stuart Levine and Susan Levine, editors).

Other Major Works Play: Politian, pb. 1835-1836. Novels: The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, 1838. Miscellaneous: The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1902 (17 volumes); Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe, 1969, 1978 (3 volumes). Nonfiction: The Letters of Edgar Allan Poe, 1948; Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe, 1965; Essays and Reviews, 1984. Poetry: Tamerlane, and Other Poems, 1827; Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, 1829; Poems, 1831; The Raven, and Other Poems, 1845; Eureka: A Prose Poem, 1848; Poe: Complete Poems, 1959; Poems, 1969 (volume 1 of Collected Works).

Bibliography Brown, Arthur A. “Literature and the Impossibility of Death: Poe’s ‘Berenice.’” Nineteenth- Century Literature 50 (March, 1996): 448-463. Burluck, Michael L. Grim Phantasms: Fear in Poe’s Short Fiction. New York: Garland, 1993. Carlson, Eric, ed. Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Boston: G. K. Hall, 1987. Crisman, William. “Poe’s Dupin as Professional, the Dupin Stories as Serial Text.” Studies in American Fiction 23 (Autumn, 1995): 215-229. Frank, Lawrence. “‘The Murders in the Rue Morgue’: Edgar Allan Poe’s Evolutionary Reverie.” Nineteenth-Century Literature 50 (September, 1995): 168-188. Kennedy, J. Gerald. A Historical Guide to Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction. Boston: Twayne, 1991. ____________, ed. Masterplots II: Short Story Series, Revised Edition. 8 vols. Pasadena, Calif.: Salem Press, 2004. Peeples, Scott. Edgar Allan Poe Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allen Poe, A to Z: The Essential Reference to His Life and Work. New York: Facts On File, 2001. Thoms, Peter. Detection and Its Designs: Narrative and Power in Nineteenth-Century Detective Fiction. Athens: Ohio University Press, 1998. Whalen, Terence. Edgar Allan Poe and the Masses: The Political Economy of Literature in Antebellum America. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999.

Article contents

Poe, edgar allan.

Thomas Wright
https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190201098.013.612
Published online: 26 September 2017

At the beginning of the twenty-first century , Edgar Allan Poe was more popular than ever. The Raven and a number of his Gothic and detective tales were among the most famous writings in the English language, and they were often some of the first works of literature that young adults read. They had also entered the popular imagination—football teams and beers were named after them, and they had inspired episodes of the animated television show The Simpsons and a number of rock songs. Poe also continued to exercise a profound influence over writers and artists. Two of the most popular authors of the second half of the twentieth century , Stephen King and Isaac Asimov , acknowledged Poe as an important precursor. Countless novels published at the end of the twentieth century , such as Peter Ackroyd 's The Plato Papers: A Prophesy ( 1999 ) and Mark Z. Danielewski 's House of Leaves ( 2000 ), also bear definite traces of his influence. The Argentinean author Jorge Luis Borges , whose own works are greatly indebted to Poe, once called him the unacknowledged father of twentieth-century literature, and Poe's influence shows no signs of diminishing. Despite his enormous popularity and influence, Poe's canonical status is still challenged by certain commentators. Harold Bloom , for instance, regards Poe's writings as vulgar and stylistically flawed. Bloom follows in a long line of Poe detractors, many of whom have been amazed by the fact that what T. S. Eliot called his “puerile” and “haphazard” productions could have influenced “great” writers such as the French poets Charles Baudelaire and Stéphane Mallarmé .

Poe criticism was, however, far more favorable (and far more plentiful) over the last half of the twentieth century than previously. Poe is indeed something of a boom industry in academia. New Critics, New Historicists, psychoanalysts, and poststructuralists all find his works suggestive. Few of these critics are interested in making aesthetic judgements, however, and those who concern themselves with such things continue to express doubts about Poe's achievement.

As a result, Poe remains something of an enigma. To many he is a formative influence, a genius, and an inspiration; to others he is a shoddy stylist and a charlatan. It would be more reasonable, perhaps, to regard Poe as all of these things and to accept James Russell Lowell 's famous judgment that he was “Three fifths…genius, and two fifths sheer fudge.” Few of Poe's readers are reasonable, however, as he is one of those writers who is either loved or hated.

Poe's Persona

One of the reasons Poe has been far more popular and influential than writers who, according to some, have produced works of greater literary value is that he created, with a little help from others, a fascinating literary persona. That persona was of an author at once bohemian and extremely intellectual. The bohemian aspect was largely the creation of his “friend” Rufus Wilmot Griswold , who in his obituary of Poe described him as a depraved and demonic writer. Poe himself was responsible for the intellectual element: he presented himself to the public in his writings as an erudite and bookish scholar.

Poe's persona captured the imagination of the world; like Byron before him, he became a kind of mythical or archetypal figure. Nineteenth-century poets such as Ernest Dowson and Baudelaire (who prayed to Poe and dressed up as him) regarded Poe as the original bohemian poète maudit (a tradition in which the poet explores extremes of experience and emotional depth) and as the first self-conscious literary artist. As such, he seemed to be a prefiguring type of themselves. This legendary persona may be at odds with Poe's real personality and the actual facts of his biography, but that is beside the point. What matters is that it fascinated and continues to fascinate people.

Poe's legendary personality and life have also provided people with a context in which his writings can be read (and it is worth noting here that an account of Poe's life has traditionally appeared as a preface to anthologies of his works). As is the case with the Irish writer Oscar Wilde , we tend to read Poe's works as expressions of his (real or mythical) character and as dramatizations of his personality. This confers a degree of homogeneity on his writings; although he experimented in a variety of forms and wrote on numberless topics, we think of all of his productions as “Poe performances.”

Early Poetry

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809 , the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold , both of whom died when he was still an infant. He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan , with whom he had a difficult relationship. Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in 1827 . It was always Poe's ambition to be recognized as a great poet, and in 1827 he published his first volume of verse, Tamerlane and Other Poems , under the name “a Bostonian.”

The title poem of the slim collection is a monologue by Tamerlane, the Renaissance Turkish warrior. The other poems are conventional romantic meditations on death, solitude, nature, dreams, and vanished youth in which Poe comes before us, as it were, in the theatrical garb of the romantic poet. The poems display Poe's considerable gift for imitation (which he later used to great effect in his prose parodies) and his habit of half quoting from his favorite authors. They contain countless echoes from romantic poets (especially Lord Byron). It is not, however, so much a question of plagiarism as it is of Poe serving a literary apprenticeship and placing himself within a poetic tradition.

In 1829 Poe published, under his own name, his second verse collection, Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems . It contained revised versions of some of the poems that had been published in Tamerlane (Poe was a zealous reviser) and seven new poems. Sonnet—To Science , Poe's famous poem on the antagonistic relationship between science and poetry, opens the book. It is followed by the title poem, Al Aaraaf , which has been variously interpreted as a lament for the demise of the creative imagination in a materialistic world and as an allegorical representation of Poe's aesthetic theories. The poem is characterized by its variety of meter, its heavy baroque effects, and its extreme obscurity. The volume has its lighter moments, however. Fairyland , with its “Dim vales,” “Huge moons,” and yellow albatrosses is one of Poe's first exercises in burlesque and self-parody. It was typical of Poe to include, within the same volume, serious poems and comic pieces that seem to parody those compositions.

In 1831 , wishing to leave the army, Poe got himself expelled from the West Point military academy. In that year he also brought out a third volume of poetry, Poems by Edgar A. Poe . This collection represents a considerable advance on his earlier efforts and contains famous poems such as To Helen and The Doomed City (later called The City in the Sea ). The former, which is perhaps the most beautiful of all Poe's lyrics, is a stately hymn to Helen of Troy, which in its later, revised form, contained the celebrated lines:

Thy Naiad airs have brought me home To the Glory that was Greece, And the grandeur that was Rome.

The Doomed City is a wonderful evocation of a silent city beneath the sea.

Both poems create a haunting atmosphere through the use of alliteration, assonance, measured rhythms, and gentle rhymes; they also contain words with long open vowel sounds such as “loom,” “gloom,” “yore,” and “bore” that were to become a Poe trademark. Because of Poe's fondness for such techniques, it is hardly surprising that his poems have been compared to music. Poe believed that music was the art that most effectively excited, elevated, and intoxicated the soul and thus gave human beings access to the ethereal realm of supernal beauty, a realm in which Poe passionately believed and for which he seems to have pined throughout his life. As Poe aimed to create similar effects with his verse, he attempted to marry poetry and music. This is why the rhythm of his verse is perfectly measured and often incantatory; it is also why he frequently chose words for their sounds rather than for their sense. In To Helen , for example, he writes of “those Nicéan barks of yore,” a rather confused classical allusion but a word that produces wonderfully musical vibrations.

Poe offers us what he called “a suggestive indefiniteness of meaning with a view of bringing about vague and therefore spiritual effects .” Decadent and symbolist poets of the nineteenth century , including Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine , were heavily influenced by Poe's method, and they consciously imitated his “word-music.” They also regarded Poe as their most important precursor because of his theoretical statements about poetry. Indeed, Poe was (and perhaps remains) as famous a critic and theoretician of verse as he was a poet. He is particularly remembered for his powerful denunciation of didactic poetry and for his emphasis on the self-consciousness and deliberateness of the poet's art.

Most of Poe's important theoretical pronouncements were made in the essays and lectures he wrote toward the end of his life. In Poems he wrote a prefatory “Letter to Mr —,” which represents his first theoretical statement about verse. Here he defined poetry as a pleasurable idea set to music. He also argued, with more than a slight nod to the English poet Samuel Taylor Coleridge , that poetry “is opposed to a work of science by having, for its immediate object, pleasure, not truth; to romance, by having for its object an indefinite instead of a definite pleasure.” At its best, Poe's poetry embodies such ideas by creating vague yet powerful atmospheric effects and by giving the reader intense aesthetic pleasure.

Poe's early poetry received mixed reviews and failed to establish him as either a popular or a critically acclaimed author. Later commentators, such as T. S. Eliot and Walt Whitman , criticized its limited range and extent; they also bemoaned its lack of intellectual and moral content. Others dismissed Poe as a mere verse technician; Emerson famously referred to him as “the jingle man.” Poe's verse was, however, revered by later nineteenth-century poets such as Mallarmé and Dowson, and considering his influence on such Decadent and symbolist writers, he can perhaps be regarded as the most influential American poet of that century after Whitman.

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

Numerous connections exist between Poe's early verse and the short stories he started to write for magazines and newspapers around 1830 . (Poe's decision to turn his hand to prose was partly because of the lack of commercial and critical success achieved by his poetry.) In some of his stories Poe included poems; he also returned to forms, such as the dramatic monologue and the dialogue between disembodied spirits, that he had used in poems such as Tamerlane and Al Aaraaf . And yet Poe's tales are clearly distinguished from his early verse, most obviously by their variety of mood, content, and theme. Poe seems to have been liberated as a writer when he turned from romantic verse to the more flexible, capacious, and traditionally heterogeneous genre of the short story. He now had at his disposal a multitude of tones and devices, and in the twenty-five stories that he wrote in the 1830s and that were collected in the anthology Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (2 vols., 1840 ), he exploited these to great effect.

In fact, such is the diversity of the style and mood of Poe's early stories that the division of the contents of Tales into the two categories of grotesque and arabesque seems simplistic and inadequate. Poe's grotesques are comic and burlesque stories that usually involve exaggeration and caricature. In this group we can include the tales Lionizing and The Scythe of Time (earlier called A Predicament ), which are satires of the contemporary literary scene. Another characteristic of Poe's grotesque stories is the introduction of elements of the ludicrous and the absurd. In the tale Loss of Breath , the protagonist literally loses his breath and goes out in search of it. It is a shame that Poe's early grotesques are generally neglected, because not only do they testify to his range and resourcefulness as a writer, but some of them are compelling and funny. The neglect results partly from the fact that, in order to be appreciated, they require extensive knowledge of the literary and political state of antebellum America and partly because they have been overshadowed by his arabesque tales.

Poe's arabesque tales are intricately and elaborately constructed prose poems. The word “arabesque” can also be applied to those stories in which Poe employed Gothic techniques. Gothic literature, which typically aimed to produce effects of mystery and horror, was established in the latter half of the eighteenth century by writers such as the English novelist Anne Radcliffe and the German story writer E. T. A. Hoffmann . By the beginning of the nineteenth century , the Gothic short story had become one of the most popular forms of magazine literature in England and America.

It is generally agreed that Poe's particular contribution to Gothic literature was his use of the genre to explore and describe the psychology of humans under extreme and abnormal conditions. Typically, his characters are at the mercy of powers over which they have no control and which their reason cannot fully comprehend. These powers may take the form of sudden, irrational impulses (“the imp of the perverse” that inspires the protagonist of Berenice to extract the teeth of his buried wife, for example), or as is the case with the eponymous hero of William Wilson , a hereditary disease. Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque contains some of Poe's most famous Gothic productions, including Morella , Ligeia , and Berenice (the stories of the so-called “marriage group,” which concern the deaths of beautiful young women), along with perhaps the most popular of all his tales, The Fall of the House of Usher .

“Usher” is a characteristic arabesque production. It exhibits many of the trappings of Gothic fiction: a decaying mansion located in a gloomy setting, a protagonist (Roderick Usher) who suffers from madness and a peculiar sensitivity of temperament inherited from his ancient family, and a woman (his sister) who is prematurely buried and who rises from her tomb. Yet from Gothic clichés such as these, Poe produced a tale of extraordinary power. Indeed, perhaps only Stephen King in The Shining ( 1977 ) has succeeded in investing a building with such horror and in conveying the impression that it is alive.

Apart from the grotesque and arabesque stories, Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque includes other varieties of writing. Hans Phaall has been classed as science fiction, and King Pest is a surreal historical adventure. Several stories contain elements of all of these genres; Metzengerstein , for example, is at once a work of historical fiction, a powerful Gothic tale, and a witty and grotesque parody of the latter genre. The diversity of the contents of the tales, and the variety of theme and style within individual stories, must be seen in the context of the original form in which they appeared. All of the tales were first published in popular newspapers and magazines from 1832 to 1839 . The audience for such publications was extremely heterogeneous, and Poe was clearly trying to appeal to as large a cross-section as possible. We should also remember that, unlike subscribers to weightier publications, the magazine- and newspaper-reading public had a very limited attention span. Readers craved novelty, sensation, and diversity.

Poe was profoundly influenced by the tastes of this public. In a letter to Thomas Willis White , a newspaper editor, he remarked that the public loves “the ludicrous heightened into the grotesque: the fearful colored into the horrible: the witty exaggerated into the burlesque: the singular wrought out into the strange and mystical.” In Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque this is precisely what he gave them. The most obvious characteristic of his stories is their sensationalism: they include accounts of balloon journeys to the moon, premature burials, encounters with the devil, and a number of gruesome deaths.

From the early 1830s Poe planned to gather together his short stories and publish them in book form. In the mid-1830s he unsuccessfully offered for publication a collection of stories under the title Tales of the Folio Club . Poe devised an elaborate plan for the “Folio Club” volume. The tales were to be read out, over the course of a single evening, by various members of a literary club, and each story was to be followed by the critical remarks of the rest of the company. The book was evidently intended as a satire of popular contemporary modes of fiction and criticism; as such it can be compared to the work of Poe's English contemporary, Thomas Love Peacock . The satirical intent is clearly indicated by the names and descriptions of the various club members, which include “Mr Snap, the President, who is a very lank man with a hawk nose.” Many of the figures were based on real people.

When considering Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque , it is important to remember the dramatic nature of its forerunner. Our knowledge of the Folio Club gathering encourages us to read Poe's stories as the compositions of various personae and to regard Poe as author of the authors of the tales. W. H. Auden described Poe's writing as operatic, and Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque does indeed resemble an opera in which Poe's narrators walk on and off the stage. Thus, the narrator of Morella mutters, melodramatically, “Years—years, may pass away, but the memory of that epoch—never!” as he leaves the stage to make way for the narrator of Lionizing . “I am,” the latter remarks to the reader-audience by way of introduction, “that is to say, I was —a great man.”

Poe's gift for impersonating his narrators is remarkable, and like a great dramatist, he seemed to contain multitudes of characters. The comparison with the playwright is appropriate because the world of Poe's writing is a thoroughly theatrical one. In it the laws of “real life” (of psychological accuracy and consistency, for instance) do not apply, and in this context we can recall Poe's famous distinction between “Hamlet the dramatis persona” and “Hamlet the man.” In the Poe universe, bizarre and absurd incidents occur on a regular basis, the dialogue and the settings are distinctly stagy, and everything is hyperbolic. As the above quotations from Morella and Lionizing suggest, it is also a world in which tragedy can be quickly followed by comedy.

And here we might recall that Poe was the son of two itinerant actors. It is particularly interesting to note that Poe's beloved mother, Eliza, was renowned for her ability to play an enormous range of tragic and comic roles, often in the same theatrical season. Her son seems to have inherited this gift as, in his writings, he effortlessly swaps a suit of sables for motley attire. At times, as in The Visionary (later called The Assignation ), which contains elements of tragedy, parody, and self-parody, Poe wore both costumes at the same time. And this in turn may help us understand the appeal of Gothic literature for Poe, because it is a form of writing in which comedy intensifies the horror by setting it in relief. Those who have adapted Poe's tales for the cinema have appreciated the humorous elements of the Gothic, as their films are at once terrifying and hilarious.

Drama and theatricality are in fact everywhere in Poe's writing. As a young poet, he effortlessly mimicked the styles of writers such as Byron; as a reviewer he convincingly adopted the tone of the authoritative critic. Throughout his works he seems to entertain and juggle ideas rather than to offer them as articles of faith, and the idea of literary performance is central to his authorship. Poe is a writer-performer whose productions can be compared to virtuoso literary displays. As readers we are like members of a theater audience who are by turns enthralled, horrified, and dazzled, and when the performance is over we applaud Poe's artistry.

An appreciation of the theatrical nature of Poe's work has important consequences for criticism. If we view Poe's writing as fundamentally dramatic, it becomes impossible to discover Poe's individual voice in the universe of voices that is his work or to analyze it from the point of view of his authorial intentions. It also becomes essential to judge the work's style and content in terms of its dramatic appropriateness: when Poe's writing is weak and verbose, for example, this may be the appropriate style for a particular narrator.

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

The only full-length novel that Poe would write, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket ( 1838 ), was begun on the suggestion of a publisher to whom he had unsuccessfully offered Tales of the Folio Club . Its first two installments appeared in the Southern Literary Messenger , and it came out in book form in 1838 . In choosing to write a sensational sea adventure—the plot includes, among other things, a mutiny, a shipwreck, a famine, and a massacre—Poe once again selected an extremely popular subject and form.

As a realistic chronicle of an utterly fantastic journey, the novel is similar to some of the stories Poe had written in the 1830s, such as MS. Found in a Bottle . Cast in the form of a first-person account of a real sea voyage and including journal entries, “factual” information, and scholarly footnotes, Pym is written with a sharp attention to significant detail that recalls the novels of the eighteenth-century author Daniel Defoe . This attention to detail, which can be found throughout Poe's fiction, confers a degree of verisimilitude on narrations that lack psychological realism. Poe's fictional works are not, in other words, realistic, but they have a reality of their own. Pym is also similar to a Defoe novel in that it is digressive and loosely structured. In contrast to Poe's short stories, it lacks a definite architecture and fails to create a unified impression or effect. Curiously enough, this is precisely what makes it such a hypnotic book. Pym's journey, like that of Karl Rossman in Franz Kafka 's Amerika ( 1927 ), is imbued with a vague sense of horror.

Pym also contains a preface, reminiscent of Defoe, in which the narrator claims that the book is a real account of a voyage although its first installments in the Southern Literary Messenger had appeared under the name of the short-story writer, “Mr Poe.” Few reviewers were taken in by this typical Poe hoax, and the novel was generally reviewed with varying degrees of enthusiasm, as a work of fiction. Until around the 1960s, critics tended to agree with Poe's own dismissive estimation of his “very silly” novel. Since then, however, it has received much better press and has inspired a variety of readings that range from the autobiographical to the allegorical. Like many of Poe's works, it is Pym 's ambiguity and indefiniteness that make it so suggestive. These qualities are perfectly embodied in the novel's famous last line. As the eponymous hero's boat heads toward a cataract, a shrouded human figure suddenly appears, “And the hue of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of the snow.” At about the same time Poe also wrote two other works, both unfinished, that can be briefly mentioned here. The Journal of Julius Rodman , a Pym -like account of an expedition across the Rocky Mountains, appeared in Gentleman's Magazine in 1840 . Five years previously the Southern Literary Messenger had published scenes from Politian , a blank verse tragedy set in Renaissance Italy that would later be included in The Raven and Other Poems ( 1845 ).

Poe's Criticism

Throughout his life Poe wrote a great deal of literary journalism and worked in an editorial capacity for a variety of newspapers. It was also one of his great ambitions to edit his own magazine. As a critic he was outspoken, vitriolic, and fearless. He highlighted the technical limitations of the books he reviewed, accused several authors (most famously Henry Wadsworth Longfellow ) of plagiarism, and took great delight in attacking the New England literary establishment.

Poe was not simply motivated by a disinterested concern for the health of letters; he was also desperately trying to carve his way to literary fame. That is why his criticism tended to be as sensational as his short-story writing: controversy was the equivalent of the Gothic and grotesque effects of his fiction. Without money or regular employment, Poe had to achieve celebrity status in order to survive in the literary marketplace, and if he could not be famous then he would be notorious. He did everything he could to keep his name before the public, even going to the extent of anonymously reviewing his own works.

Poe also used the pages of the popular press to fashion and present an image of himself as a man of immense erudition. In his articles, as in his short stories, he included countless quotations and phrases from various languages; he also made a great exhibition of his learning. Poe's “Marginalia,” published in newspapers during the 1840s, consists of comments and meditations that he claimed to have scribbled in the margins of the books in his library. “I sought relief,” he commented, like a latter-day Renaissance connoisseur of fine literature, “from ennui in dipping here and there at random among the volumes of my library.” The reality was quite different, however. Poe wrote the pieces as fillers for newspapers when they were short of copy, and the sad fact of the matter was that he could never afford to assemble an extensive library of his own.

Poe's most important contributions to literary criticism were his theories concerning the short story and poetry. It has been suggested that his comments on the short story, which were scattered throughout reviews of books such as Nathaniel Hawthorne 's Twice-Told Tales ( 1837 ), helped establish the genre in its modern form. Poe's theory can be briefly summarized. He was concerned above all with the effect of his tale on the reader. This effect should, he thought, be single and unified. When readers finished the story they ought be left with a totality of impression, and every element of the story—character, style, tone, plot, and so on—should contribute to that impression. Stories too long to be read at a single sitting could not, in Poe's view, achieve such powerful and unified effects—hence the brevity of his own productions. Poe also advocated the Aristotelian unities of place, time, and action and put special emphasis on the opening and conclusion of his tales. In addition, he encouraged authors to concentrate exclusively on powerful emotional and aesthetic effects—the aim of fiction, he suggested, was not a didactic one. Finally, instead of providing the reader with a transparent upper current of meaning, he thought that the meaning of a tale should be indefinite and ambiguous.

Obviously, such ideas help us understand Poe's own short stories. The Tell-Tale Heart and The Masque of the Red Death , for example, exhibit most of the above-mentioned characteristics. The theories of poetry that Poe adumbrated in book reviews and in lectures such as The Poetic Principle ( 1849 ) also help us understand his verse. In Poe's criticism there is a sense in which he was justifying his own practice as a creative writer and also attempting to create the kind of critical atmosphere in which his work would be favorably judged. Other writers, such as T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound , have also found this to be an effective strategy for achieving literary success. More broadly, it can be suggested that writing such as Poe's that lacks a definite content and an unambiguous message requires a theory in order to, as it were, support it and make it intelligible to the reader.

Poe's statements about poetry are similar to his pronouncements on the short story. Thus, in a review of Longfellow's Hyperion, A Romance ( 1839 ), he criticized its lack of a definite design and unified effect. Later, when commenting on the same author's Ballads and Other Poems ( 1841 ), he complained of Longfellow's didacticism and his failure to appreciate that the aim of poetry was not to instruct readers but to give them access to the world of supernal beauty. These ideas were expressed in a more theoretical form in The Poetic Principle , in which Poe criticized what he referred to as “the heresy of the didactic” and famously defined poetry as “the Rhythmical Creation of Beauty.” These ideas proved to be extremely influential and were later adapted by “art-for-art's-sake” aesthetes such as Oscar Wilde and by symbolists such as Paul Valéry . It has also been suggested that Poe's emphasis on the words on the page, rather than on external considerations such as the writer's biography, make him an important precursor of the New Critics.

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe's most influential theoretical essay was probably “The Philosophy of Composition,” published in Graham's Magazine in 1846 . Before we turn to it, however, it is necessary to consider The Raven , the inception and writing of which the essay describes. The Raven , first published in the New York Evening Mirror in January 1845 , was an instant hit with the reading public. This allusion to pop music is apt because the immediate and enormous success of the poem has been accurately compared to that of a present-day song. On its publication, Poe became an overnight sensation, and thereafter he would always be associated with the poem. In a sense this association is unfortunate, because it obscures the fact that the poem, like many of Poe's short stories, is a dramatic production. The narrator, a young man mourning the death of his love Lenore, sits in his study musing “over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore”—a character and a setting typical of Poe. As well as being a dramatic poem, it is also an intensely theatrical one: the gloomy weather, the speaking bird, and props such as the purple curtain and the bust of Pallas could have been filched from the set of a Gothic drama. The young man's language, too, is distinctly stagy; at one point he remarks to the Raven: “ ‘Sir…or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore.’ ” The effect of such distinctly camp lines is complicated; you are not sure whether to laugh or scream. In the theater, and in the theatrical world of the poem, it is of course possible to do both.

Given the theatricality of the poem, it is fitting that Poe performed it, just as Dickens performed his novels, in public and private readings. During his recitations Poe once again proved that the theater was in his blood: he would dress in black, turn the lamps down low, and chant the poem in a melodious voice. The content of the poem is of course unrealistic; like a great drama, however, it creates its own vivid and convincing reality through its solemn rhymes and its stately rhythm.

Poe's raven has become as famous as those other birds of romanticism, Keats 's nightingale, Shelley 's skylark, and Coleridge's albatross. This is ironic because, in The Philosophy of Composition , he insisted that the poem was not a romantic one. The essay was written to demonstrate that, far from being a work of inspiration, the composition of The Raven proceeded with what he called “the precision and rigid consequence of a mathematical problem.” Along with metaphors drawn from mathematics, Poe typically (and revealingly) used images of acting to convey his detachment and self-consciousness during the writing of the poem.

Desiring to create a powerful effect of melancholy beauty that would appeal to both “the popular and the critical taste,” Poe tells us that he hit upon the saddest of all subjects: the death of a beautiful woman. This had, of course, been the subject of several of his earlier writings, such as the “marriage group” of stories in Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque . In order to make the effect of the poem intense and unified, he decided that it should be limited to around one hundred lines and that it would include a refrain composed of the single, sonorous word, Nevermore . In the remainder of the essay Poe, who might be compared here to a magician who enjoys explaining away his tricks, goes on to make numerous comments of a similar nature.

It has been suggested that The Philosophy of Composition was a typical Poe hoax, and it is highly unlikely that it is a veracious account of the actual writing of The Raven . This, however, is largely irrelevant since the essay's importance lies in the fact that it offered a novel theory of composition and a new conception of the poet. Poe was attempting to replace the idea of the inspired poet that had been established by the ancients and by contemporaries such as Coleridge with his notion of the cold and calculating author. Once again, Poe's idea proved to be extremely influential in the history of literature. It informs Valéry's conception of the poet as an extremely self-conscious artist and T. S. Eliot's idea of the impersonal author.

It is doubtful that Poe's theories would have exercised such a powerful influence had he not also embodied and dramatized them in his writings. Perhaps even more important, he also offered himself as an archetype of the kind of author he was describing. Poe presented himself, in other words, as the exemplar of the self-conscious poet, an original that poets such as Baudelaire copied.

The Raven was republished in Poe's most substantial and famous collection of verse, The Raven and Other Poems , in 1845 . The book, which was prefaced by a statement that typically succeeded in being at once self-effacing and arrogant, contained revised versions of earlier compositions such as Israfel and poems that had never previously appeared in book form. Also included in the collection were several poems that had appeared, or would later appear, in Poe's short stories. (This is a striking demonstration of the homogeneous nature of Poe's oeuvre.) The most famous of these poems are The Haunted Palace , a powerful atmospheric poem improvised by Roderick Usher, and The Conqueror Worm , written by the eponymous hero of Ligeia . In the latter, angels are in a theater watching humankind play out its meaningless “motley drama” in which there is “much of Madness and more of Sin / And horror the soul of the plot.” Suddenly, “a blood-red thing” comes onto the stage. The lights go out, the curtain comes down, and death (for it is he) holds illimitable dominion over all. In its Gothic style, its dark vision of the world, and its theatricality, the poem is characteristic of its author and indeed reads like a microcosm of his oeuvre. One obvious point that can be made in connection with the poems that appeared in Poe's short stories is that they are dramatic works (a comparison here might be made with Robert Browning's monologues). Yet again, Poe displays his great gifts as a mimic or actor, and once more we are alerted to the difficulties of reading his work in an autobiographical light.

Many of Poe's finest poems were written after the publication of The Raven and were collected in volume form posthumously. These include the onomatopoeic The Bells , the beautiful ballad Annabel Lee , and the musical masterpiece Ulalume . This last poem is perhaps the most perfect example of Poe's ability to create a mysterious and unearthly atmosphere through repetition, assonance, and the use of languorous, usually trisyllabic, words. While discussing the poem, Poe is reported to have remarked that he deliberately wrote verse that would be unintelligible to the many. Ulalume is certainly hard to understand, but like the rest of Poe's verse, its ambiguity heightens rather than diminishes its power.

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Between the publication of Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque in 1840 and his death in 1849 , Poe wrote numerous short stories. Among them are some of the most famous of all his writings, such as The Black Cat , The Tell-Tale Heart , The Cask of Amontillado , The Pit and the Pendulum , Hop-Frog , and The Masque of the Red Death . These stories have achieved the status of myths in the Western world; even those who have not read them know their plots. Because of the exigencies of space, and also because some of Poe's arabesque and grotesque productions have already been discussed, the focus here is on the stories that appeared in Tales ( 1845 ) and, in particular, on Poe's detective tales and science fiction. Although reviewers of Tales were, as usual, divided between those who described Poe as a great original and those who dismissed him as a showy and stylistically incompetent writer, the volume sold better than any of Poe's other publications.

Four detective stories (or “Tales of ratiocination,” as Poe called them) appeared in Tales : the prize-winning The Gold-Bug and three tales that featured the detective C. Auguste Dupin: The Purloined Letter , The Mystery of Marie Roget , and The Murders in the Rue Morgue . Although writers such as Voltaire, William Godwin , and Tobias Smollet had produced examples of what might be loosely termed crime fiction in the eighteenth century , it was these tales that established the modern short detective story as a definite and distinct form.

In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the most famous and entertaining of Poe's detective stories, we immediately recognize the structure of the modern detective tale. A hideous and inexplicable crime is committed (the brutal murder of two women in a locked room in Paris), and all the evidence is placed before us. The police, who rely on cunning and instinct rather than rational method and imagination, are utterly baffled. Fortunately for them, an amateur genius, Dupin, is on hand to unravel the mystery. The tale (which in terms of its action is written backward) thus includes two stories: that of the crime and that of its solution and explanation by Dupin.

In creating Dupin, Poe invented the archetype of the modern detective. Among Dupin's descendents are Agatha Christie 's Hercule Poirot, G. K. Chesterton 's Father Brown, and of course Sir Arthur Conan Doyle 's Sherlock Holmes, who in one of Conan Doyle's stories actually discusses Dupin's merits. An eccentric and reclusive genius, Dupin is both a poetic visionary and a detached man of reason; he combines the attributes of the poet with those of the mathematician. In The Purloined Letter , where he unravels a mystery by identifying with the criminal, Dupin also displays an actor's power of empathy. He is, in other words, a glorified and aristocratic version of Poe. Poe also created the original of the detective's companion: a friend of average intelligence who narrates the tale and who acts, as it were, as the reader's representative within it. In The Murders in the Rue Morgue , the character is nameless; in later works by other authors he will be called Doctor Watson and Captain Hastings.

Poe is thus in large part responsible for one of the most popular and dominant forms of modern literature. After reading Poe, the French writers the Goncourt brothers believed that they had discovered “the literature of the twentieth century —love giving place to deductions…the interest of the story moved from the heart to the head…from the drama to the solution.” This prediction proved correct. Twentieth-century writers such as Jorge Luis Borges (who believed that Poe's ghost dictated detective stories to him) consciously imitated Poe, and the popularity and influence of the detective story has been, and still is, enormous. The broader point made by the Goncourt brothers concerning a literature of “the head” is also interesting. The detective story is essentially an intellectual exercise or game, and much of Poe's writing can be described in these terms. Perhaps it is this quality in his work that made it so popular and influential in the twentieth century .

The invention, or at the very least the foundation, of the modern detective story is surely Poe's greatest contribution to world literature. He has also been hailed as the father of modern science fiction. The extent to which Poe established the genre is, however, a matter of controversy. Those who have argued for his formative influence point to the futuristic, technological, and rationalistic elements of his work. It is perhaps better to approach the question through a consideration of Poe's influence, which was enormous. Poe's science fiction stories profoundly influenced later masters of the genre such as Jules Verne , H. G. Wells , and Isaac Asimov (who conflated the science fiction tale and the detective story). Among the Poe stories that have been classed as science fiction are Hans Phaall , the eponymous hero's account of his nineteen-day balloon journey to the moon, and the futuristic Mellonta Tauta . Two stories in Tales , The Colloquy of Monos and Una and The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion , have also been classified as science fiction tales.

Both are dialogues between disembodied spirits set sometime in the distant future. The dialogue form, which derives from ancients such as Lucian and Plato , was very popular in Poe's time among satirical writers such as Thomas Love Peacock, Giacomo Leopardi , and William Blake . Poe also used it for satirical purposes; in these dialogues he criticizes his age for, among other things, its exclusive belief in science. Poe's argument with science was in some respects a typically romantic one. Science and industrialization, it is suggested in The Colloquy , have given humans the false idea that they have dominion over nature and have devalued the poetic intellect.

Yet Poe went further than this conventional romantic position and challenged science's claims to objectivity and its emphasis on empiricism. So far as objectivity is concerned, reading hoax stories such as Hans Phaall leaves the impression that scientific explanations of the world are not unlike stories and that science itself may be a kind of fiction. Regarding the limitations of empiricism, Poe believed that the discovery of facts was not enough and that it is what is done with them that is important. It requires, Poe suggests, a visionary rather than a scientist to sort, connect, and shape them into theories. This visionary figure, who is both poet and mathematician, appears throughout Poe's writings. Sometimes he is Dupin, the great detective; at other times he is Poe, the theorist of poetic composition and the author of the scientific prose poem Eureka .

Poe evidently believed that Eureka , published in 1848 , was his greatest achievement: “I have no desire to live since I have done ‘Eureka,’ ” he wrote to his mother-in-law. “I could accomplish nothing more.” Indeed, he appears to have regarded it as nothing less than the solution to the secret of the universe. It is most unfortunate for humanity, therefore, that Eureka makes extremely dull reading and is very difficult to understand. One of the best attempts at a summary is contained in Kenneth Silverman 's ( 1991 ) excellent biography of Poe. Suffice it to say here that Eureka , subtitled as “Essay on the material and the spiritual universe” predicted, among other things, the annihilation and the rebirth of the universe.

Although Eureka has traditionally been regarded as a distinct work within the Poe canon, there are many connections between it and the rest of his oeuvre. Passages in short stories such as Mellonta Tauta prefigure some of its contents. In his preface to the book Poe described it as a poem rather than a “scientific” work. “I offer this Book of Truths,” he wrote, adapting Keats's famous line, “not in the character of a Truth-Teller, but for the Beauty that abounds in its Truth; constituting it True.”

The rather confused critical reception that Eureka received also made it a typical Poe production. Some reviewers read it as an elaborate hoax in the manner of Hans Phaall ; others considered it to be a prolix and labored satire of scientific discourse. Certain critics regarded it as a brilliant and sincere work of genius, yet it was also dismissed as arrant fudge. Such diverse and extreme reactions to Poe's work have already been noted; they testify to the fact that, whatever else his writing is, it is impossible to ignore.

Poe's Influence

When Poe died in Baltimore on 7 October 1849 from causes that are still the subject of debate, some commentators predicted that his works would be forgotten. They could not have been more wrong, as his books are currently read throughout the world and his influence on world literature has been extraordinary. With their consummate artistry, their self-consciousness, and their heavy atmosphere of decay, Poe's poems and tales (along with his literary persona and his theories) inspired Decadent and symbolist writers of the nineteenth century . Baudelaire, among whose earliest works were translations of Poe's stories, famously died with a copy of Poe's tales beside his bed. Mallarmé, Verlaine, Dowson, and Wilde also worshipped at the Poe shrine.

At the end of the nineteenth century , science fiction writers such as Verne and Wells and authors of detective stories such as Conan Doyle acknowledged their profound debt to Poe. It was Conan Doyle who remarked that Poe's tales “have been so pregnant with suggestion…that each is a root from which a whole literature has developed.” In the twentieth century Poe's influence was no less profound. His short stories were of immense importance to authors as diverse as Kafka, H. P. Lovecraft (who referred to his tales of horror as “Poe stories”), Vladimir Nabokov , and Stephen King. He has also had a powerful effect on every other branch of the arts. Painters such as René Magritte and Edmund Dulac were fascinated by him, and film directors such as Roger Corman and Alfred Hitchcock also took inspiration from his writings.

Poe continues to inspire and enchant people today. In the future he will no doubt attract as much hostile criticism as he has in the past, but he will survive because he will continue to be read. And despite all of the faults and all of the fudge in his writings, it is hard, in conclusion, to think of another American writer who has so drastically altered the landscape of the popular imagination or who has had such a powerful effect on his fellow artists.

Selected Works

Tamerlane and Other Poems (1827)
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems (1829)
Poems by Edgar A. Poe (1831)
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket (1838)
Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque (1840)
The Raven and Other Poems (1845)
Tales (1845)
Eureka (1848)
Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969–1978)
The Science Fiction of Edgar Allan Poe (1976)
The Fall of the House of Usher and Other Writings (1986)
Poetry, Tales, and Selected Essays (1996)

Edgar Allan Poe

Premature Burial
The Black Cat
The Complete Works
Adaptations

Daguerreotypes of Poe

Medical Articles Bibliography

Edgar A. Poe: Mournful and Never-Ending Remembrance Selected Daguerreotypes are from this book.
America : History & Life (ASU access only) Search for -- poe edgar allan Articles from American History journals. Many put his life in context of society at the time, a few discuss his writings.
The Big Read - Edgar Allan Poe A National Endowment of the Arts discussion of E. A. Poe
Edgar Allan Poe and neurology "Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most celebrated writers of all time. He published several masterpieces, some of which include references to neurological diseases. Poe suffered from recurrent depression, suggesting a bipolar disorder, as well as alcohol and drug abuse, which in fact led to his death from complications related to alcoholism. Various hypotheses were put forward, including Wernicke’s encephalopathy."
Mystery of Edgar Allan Poe - An A&E program (ASU access only) "Edgar Allan Poe, America’s master of the macabre, is famed for such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Raven.” But the story of his life was more bizarre than any of the tales he told. This episode of Biography sheds light on a man greatly blessed and supremely cursed: blessed with immortal genius and cursed by a life of lost loves and shattered hopes. Distributed by A&E Television Networks. (45 minutes)"
Edgar Allan Poe; a bibliography of criticism, 1827-1967 Book
Literature Criticism Online (ASU access only) Search for -- poe edgar allan primarily literary criticism
Literature Online (ASU access only) Search for -- poe edgar allan Literary criticism and some full text of his works
Literature Resource Center (ASU access only) Search for -- poe edgar allan Biography, literary criticism, bibliographies
MLA Bibliography (ASU access only) Search for -- poe edgar allan THE index to use for literature classes
The recognition of Edgar Allan Poe: selected criticism since 1829 Book
<< Previous: Adaptations
Next: Medical Articles Bibliography >>
Last updated: Jan 2, 2024 8:27 AM
URL: https://libguides.asu.edu/Poe

The ASU Library acknowledges the twenty-three Native Nations that have inhabited this land for centuries. Arizona State University's four campuses are located in the Salt River Valley on ancestral territories of Indigenous peoples, including the Akimel O’odham (Pima) and Pee Posh (Maricopa) Indian Communities, whose care and keeping of these lands allows us to be here today. ASU Library acknowledges the sovereignty of these nations and seeks to foster an environment of success and possibility for Native American students and patrons. We are advocates for the incorporation of Indigenous knowledge systems and research methodologies within contemporary library practice. ASU Library welcomes members of the Akimel O’odham and Pee Posh, and all Native nations to the Library.

Repeatedly ranked #1 in innovation (ASU ahead of MIT and Stanford), sustainability (ASU ahead of Stanford and UC Berkeley), and global impact (ASU ahead of MIT and Penn State)

A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’

By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University)

‘The Philosophy of Composition’ is an 1846 essay by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Although he wrote the essay in order to explain how he came to write his hugely successful poem ‘The Raven’, it has become a key non-fiction work – probably the key work – produced by Poe, and an important document in helping us to understand his approach to writing.

You can read Poe’s ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ here before proceeding to our summary and analysis of his argument below.

‘The Philosophy of Composition’: summary

Poe begins his essay by acknowledging the importance of having the end-point in sight when writing something: he refers to a letter he received from Charles Dickens, in which Dickens noted that William Godwin wrote his novel Caleb Williams backwards. Although Poe is not sure that Godwin did exactly this, he must, Poe maintains, have written his novel with some idea of what the denouement or end of the novel would be.

Poe tells us that he begins any new piece of writing by searching for an effect which he wishes to create in the reader’s mind and heart. He then searches for the right tone or sequence of events (in a story) to help him to create that effect.

He wishes that more focus was given to the methods by which writers compose their works. He thinks that most writers, through ‘autorial [sic] vanity’, prefer to hide their methods from their readers, concealing their processes and giving the impression that they create in a ‘fine frenzy’ of inspiration. Poe also acknowledges, though, that many writers may only be partially conscious of these processes as they take place, so wouldn’t be able to recall them afterwards.

Poe, by contrast, can readily recall the processes undertaken to write his works, and says he has chosen ‘The Raven’, his 1845 poem, as his example. He argues that a work of literature should not be too long if it is to create an effect: a poem or story should be capable of being read in one sitting, otherwise the real world interrupts the reader and the effect is lost. Long poems are really a series of brief poetical effects joined together. Novels are different in that they aren’t aiming for this unity of ‘effect’ in the same way.

He decided, when sitting down to write ‘The Raven’, that it should be about 100 lines.

Next, he chose the effect that he wished ‘The Raven’ to convey. He wanted the poem to convey ‘Beauty’ first and foremost: this is more important than ‘truth’ or ‘passion’, and, if they appear in a poem, should always be subordinate to the chief effect, which is Beauty.

The next question was what tone he wanted the poem to convey, and he decided that the tone would be one of sadness. With these three things – length, effect, and tone – all decided, Poe could sit down and compose his poem. He decided to use a refrain to structure his poem: a repeated line at the end of each stanza.

He chose a single word, which would remain the same throughout the poem, but with the thoughts expressed in the rest of the stanza varying throughout the poem, in contrast to the consistency of this repeated refrain.

Having come up with the idea of the single-word refrain ‘Nevermore’, Poe tells us that he decided it would be good to have a non-human speaker repeat this line. At first he considered a parrot, but realised a raven would be more in keeping with the desired tone of his poem. Poe wanted death to be a part of the poem and, in keeping with his intended focus on Beauty, realised that the death of a beautiful woman (that recurring trope in Poe’s writing) would be suitable.

This brings us to one of the most interesting parts of Poe’s argument in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’: he maintains that originality, in a writer, is less about ‘impulse or intuition’ than it is about rejection: it is ‘less of invention than negation’. An original writer reads deep and wide and then rejects whatever ideas do not fit his approach, and by such a process he arrives at a new way of approaching his work. In the case of ‘The Raven’, Poe acknowledges that the individual details of the poem’s rhythm and metre are not in themselves new, but he has put them together in a new way.

The rest of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ is devoted to showing how Poe then brings these elements together so that they appear natural but also possess a rich symbolism. The end-point is that the raven comes to signify or emblematise the young man’s remembrance of his deceased lover, Lenore.

‘The Philosophy of Composition’: analysis

One of the most important aspects of ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ is Poe’s rejection of the Romantic myth that the poet is an original genius who relies on ‘Eureka’ moments of inspiration to create his works.

Although he was a Romantic in many respects, Poe denies that such flashes of inspiration are the chief mode by which works of literature are produced. Instead, he emphasises the ‘painful erasures and interpolations’ which go into the creative process: the various drafts and redrafts, the deletions and rewritings.

Indeed, in some respects Poe’s argument about literary ‘originality’ and composition prefigures what twentieth-century poets and critics, such as T. S. Eliot, would say about this topic.

Eliot, in his famous 1919 essay ‘ Tradition and the Individual Talent ’, would argue that every poet forges his own ‘originality’ off the back of what poets have achieved before: in what almost strikes us as a paradox, there can be no originality without drawing on what other writers have done. It is by making small modifications to what past poets have achieved that the new poet shows his ‘originality’, in however slight a way.

Another aspect of Poe’s argument in ‘The Philosophy of Composition’ which foreshadows Eliot’s own later influential thesis is his view on the topic of ‘effect’. In another essay from 1919, ‘ Hamlet and his Problems ’, Eliot would put forward his theory of the ‘ objective correlative ’, which is the formula (i.e., a set of objects or, in a play or a narrative work, a chain of events) which enables the writer to create the desired effect he wants to achieve with his work.

As with Poe, the emphasis is on the end goal : the writer must create with a clear end in view (e.g., the death of the main character, the union of the two love interests, and so on). Once again, Poe’s ‘philosophy’ in his essay pre-empts some of what Eliot would later argue.

Some critics have suggested that Poe – who was elsewhere known for perpetrating hoaxes and for pulling his readers’ legs – may have had his tongue in his cheek when writing ‘The Philosophy of Composition’: that it is less a serious work of philosophical literary criticism than it is a bit of a joke.

Certainly, one wonders whether Poe ever seriously contemplating having a parrot appear in his poem about tragic lost love, when, as he acknowledges, such a bird would have been at odds with the poem’s tone. But Poe is clearly advancing some very sensible points about poetic composition in this essay, and every fan and student of his work should be familiar with his argument here and the light it can shed on his writing as a whole.

Discover more from Interesting Literature

Subscribe to get the latest posts to your email.

Type your email…

Subscribe now to keep reading and get access to the full archive.

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

Critical Insights: Edgar Allan Poe by Robert C. Evans (review)

Syeda Anila Rizvi
Penn State University Press
Volume 24, Number 2, 2023
pp. 274-277
View Citation

Additional Information

Buy Article for $19.00 (USD)

Buy Digital Article for $19.00 (USD)
Buy Complete Digital Issue for $35.00 (USD)

Project MUSE Mission

Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves.

2715 North Charles Street Baltimore, Maryland, USA 21218

+1 (410) 516-6989 [email protected]

Now and Always, The Trusted Content Your Research Requires

Built on the Johns Hopkins University Campus

This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless.

Last Update: August 19, 2022 Navigation: Main Menu Poe's Works Poe's Poems Poe's Tales Poe's Misc. Editorial Policies Searching

The Essays, Sketches and Lectures of Edgar Allan Poe

∞∞∞∞∞∞∞

Sections: The Collections and Books The Essays, etc. Related Material Bibliography

The Collections and Books:

Editions Authorized by Poe:

Poe published only one of his lectures during his life. This was “The Universe,” published as Eureka , the “Prose Poem” by which he hoped most ernestly to be remembered. Other items were first collected in the posthumous collection edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold, incorporating some additional manuscript changes and other material. These collections are listed chronologically.

Eureka: A Prose Poem (1848 — EUREKA — there are several copies with annotations by Poe)
The Works of the Late Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Rufus Wilmot Griswold (1850, volume II: Poems and Miscellanies ; and 1856, volume IV: Pym, &c . — WORKS )

Later Collected Editions:

After Griswold's death in 1857, there were several alternate attempts to collect Poe's works, including a number of the essays and Eureka . The most important of these were collections edited by John H. Ingram, also in four volumes (initially published in 1874-1875), the ten-volume set edited by Edmund C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry (initially published in 1894-1895), and the seventeen-volume set edited by James A. Harrison (published in 1902). (Although at least one of these editions bears the title of The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , none of them are, in fact, actually complete. In some instances, they also contain works that have since been identified as not being by Poe.)

The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by John H. Ingram (Edinburgh: Adam and Charles Black, 1874-1875 — The essays are collected in volume 3)
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Edmund C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894-1895 — The essays are collected in volume 7 and Eureka will be found in volume 9)
The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by James A. Harrison (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1902 — The essays are collected in volume 14 and Eureka will be found in volume 16)

Modern Scholarly Editions:

The most widely recognized scholarly edition of Poe's tales and sketches, also including some of the essays, are the volumes edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott, (published in 1978, nearly a decade after Mabbott's death), completed by his widow, Maureen Cobb Mabbott (and several assistants), with a few additional essays appearing in the volumes in the edition as continued by Burton R. Pollin. All of these volumes are thoroughly annotated, with introductory material, notes and variants. Two volumes originally prepared for this series, edited by Stuart and Susan Levine, were published separately by the University of Illinois Press.

The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Thomas Ollive Mabbott (Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978 — Volume 2: Tales and Sketches, 1831-1842 and Volume 3: Tales and Sketches, 1843-1849 )
The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , edited by Burton R. Pollin (New York: Gordian Press, 1986 and 1997 — Volume 3: Writings in the Broadway Journal, Text , Volume 4: Writings in the Broadway Journal, Annotations , and Volume 35 Writings in the Southern Literary Messenger, Text and Annotations
Eureka and Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , edited by Stuart and Susan F. Levine (Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004 and 2009)

The Essays, Sketches and Lectures:

These items are arranged alphabetically by name. Within each name, entries are listed chronologically. Some of these items were not published under any specific title and most are, therefore, given here under a title deemed appropriately descriptive. The authorship of some items is a topic long researched and debated. Most of the items included here were signed, but for some, the attribution to Poe is necessarily the result of conjecture. A few prominent items that have been rejected are also listed, including a number of poems that were erroneously ascribed to Poe by T. O. Mabbott.

Scroll down, or select letter:

A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W X Y Z

“ American Novel-Writing ”
“ American Poetry ”
“ American Poetry ” (a lecture)
“ Anastatic Printing ”
“ Byron and Miss Chaworth ”
“ The Capitol at Washington ” (rejected)
“ A Chapter in the History of Vivum-Ovo ” (rejected)
“ Cryptography ” (alternate title for “Secret Writing”)
“ The Elk ” (later title of “Morning on the Wissahiccon”)
“ English Notes for Extensive Circulation ” (rejected)
“ Eureka ”
“ Exordium [to Critical Notices] ”
“ A Few Words on Etiquette ” (rejected)
“ Harpers Ferry ” (rejected)
“ House Furniture ” (alternate title for “The Philosophy of Furniture”)
“ Instinct Versus Reason — A Black Cat ”
“ Letter to B—— ”
“ Maelzel's Chess-Player ”
“ Magazine Writing — Peter Snook ” (alternate title of a review of “Peter Snook,” by James Dalton
“ Morning on the Wissahiccon ” (original title of “The Elk”)
“ Notes Upon English Verse ” (original title for “The Rationale of Verse”)
“ An Opinion on Dreams ” (rejected)
“ Our Magazine Literature ” (Possibly by Poe, but disputed)
“ Old English Poetry ” (Actually a later title assigned to Poe's review of Book of Gems by Samuel Carter Hall)
“ Palaestine ”
“ The Pay for American Authors ”
The Philosophy of Animal Magnetism (rejected)
“ The Philosophy of Composition ”
“ The Philosophy of Furniture ”
“ The Poetic Principle ”
“ Poets and Poetry of America ” (a lecture, also called “American Poetry”)
“ The Rationale of Verse ”
“ Secret Writing ”
“ Some Secrets of the Magazine Prison-House ”
“ Some Account of Stonehenge ”
“ Street-Paving ”

Related Material:

A chronological index (in preparation)
“ The Canon of Poe's Essays, Sketches & Lectures

Exiting nps.gov

Edgar allan poe and literary criticism.

...his harsher reviews created enemies and earned him the nickname 'the man with the tomahawk'

Edgar Allan Poe first came to the attention of the literary world as a magazine editor and critic. He wrote nearly one thousand essays, reviews, articles, columns, and critical notices that appeared in magazines, newspapers, and annuals. Poe was among the first to propose setting standards by which to judge literary works, and created his own vision of what constituted good literature by studying writers that ranged from Plato and Aristotle to Milton and Coleridge. His influential theory of “unity of effect” states that the author of a short story should construct a tale to fit one overall purpose or effect. Poe believed his role as a critic included exposing poor writing and demanding that American writers meet higher standards. His critical reviews often included a detailed technical examination of the work at hand, and his observations ranged from pointing out grammatical errors to exposing illogical reasoning. The witty fashion in which Poe delivered his critiques helped increase the circulation of the magazines for which he worked, while his harsher reviews created enemies and earned him the nickname “the man with the tomahawk.” The following is a sample from the opening paragraph of Poe’s review of a book by George B. Cheever:

“He is much better known, however, as the editor of ‘The Commonplace Book of American Poetry,’ a work which has at least the merit of not belying its title, and is exceedingly commonplace.”

Among Poe's ideas of literary criticism was the belief that a work should be reviewed for its own worth, and that non-literary criteria like a writer's background or social status should be irrelevant. Over a century later, literary critics such as Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, and R.P. Blackmur adopted the same approach.

edgar allan poe national historic site
edgar allan poe
literary criticism
literary critic
literary innovator

Edgar Allan Poe National Historic Site

Last updated: October 12, 2017

The Edgar Allan Poe Review

Barbara cantalupo, editor.

Biannual Publication ISSN 2150-0428 E-ISSN 2166-2932 Recommend to Library Code of Ethics Project MUSE Scholarly Publishing Collective JSTOR Archive

Description
Submissions

Access current issues through Scholarly Publishing Collective , Project MUSE , or back content on JSTOR . The Edgar Allan Poe Review publishes peer-reviewed scholarly essays; book, film, theater, dance, and music reviews; and creative work related to Edgar Allan Poe, his work, and his influence. Also included are the following regular features: “Marginalia” (short, non–peer reviewed notes), interviews with Poe scholars, the Poe in Cyberspace column, and Poe Studies Association updates. EAPR is the official publication of the Poe Studies Association .

Established in 1972 as a nonprofit, educational organization, the Poe Studies Association (PSA) supports the scholarly and informal exchange of information on the life, works, times, and influence of Edgar Allan Poe.

Editor Barbara Cantalupo, The Pennsylvania State University, US

Book Review Editor John Martin, University of North Texas, US

Editorial Board David C. Cody, Hartwick College, US Dennis W. Eddings, Western Oregon University, US Alexander Hammond, Washington State University, US José R. Ibáñez, Universidad de Almeria, ES Sonya Isaak, Heidelberg University, DE Paul Jones, Ohio University Paul Jones, Ohio University J. Gerald Kennedy, Louisiana State University, US Richard Kopley, The Pennsylvania State University, US Kent Ljungquist, Worcester Polytechnic Institute, US Jonathan Murphy, Texas A&M International University, US Scott Peeples, College of Charleston, US Stephen Rachman, Michigan State University, US Jeffery Savoye, The Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, US Elizabeth Sweeney, College of the Holy Cross, US Brett Zimmerman, York University, CA

If you would like to submit an article to The Edgar Allan Poe Review please visit http://www.editorialmanager.com/poe/ and create an author profile. The online system will guide you through the steps to upload your article for submission to the editorial office.

Institutional Print & Online - $360.00

Web of Science Core Collection: Emerging Sources Citation Index European Reference Index for the Humanities and Social Sciences (ERIH PLUS) IBZ MLA International Bibliography Scopus

Mailing List

Subscribe to our mailing list and be notified about new titles, journals and catalogs.

The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique

Looking for The Tell-Tale Heart psychological analysis? This term paper focuses on the themes, symbolism, and point of view in the short story by Edgar Allan Poe. It also reviews the mental disorder that the narrator suffers from.

Introduction

Literary Analysis

Works Cited

The Tell-Tale Heart is one of the most famous works by Edgar Poe. The outstanding character in the tale, who is also the narrator, attracts a lot of attention from the readers. The character reveals much about human nature and other self qualities that people tend to overlook.

Themes of death, egoism, and evil are found in most of Poe’s works. The same case applies to The Tell-Tale Heart as evidenced by the analysis in this paper. The analysis focuses on the main character and narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. The analysis is conducted from a psychological approach.

There are various forms of literary psychological criticism. In this paper, the author uses the Freudian psychological approach to analyse Poe’s work. The narrator forms the basis of the tale. All the themes in the story revolve around them.

The literary critique explores the themes of death, ego, and evil as reflected in Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart . The themes of ego and evil are featured prominently in this critical review.

The two contribute immensely to the narrator’s actions. The literary criticism of the tale seeks to answer the question of human ego-evil relationship and associated psychological justifications. Freud’s psychological approach serves in analysing the narrator’s actions towards the old man.

The Tell-Tale Heart Summary

Edgar Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart tale adopts the first person perspective. The main character also assumes the role of the narrator. He begins the story by arguing that they are sane and not mad as people are saying.

The narrator says, “True!- nervous -very, very dreadfully nervous I had been and am; but why will you say that I am mad? The disease had sharpened my senses- not destroyed -not dulled them” (Poe par. 1). However, Poe does not tell the reader whether the narrator is a male or a female. The usage of the connotation ‘He’ does not describe definite gender of the narrator, but just as an assumption.

The narrator admits that they are sick. However, they insist that the disease has sharpened their senses. The disease has not made them mad. In a bid to prove their sanity to the audience, the narrator embarks on the story. The events told in the story take place in a house where the narrator lives with an old man as a companion. The narrator claims that they loved the old companion very much.

As such, they did not have any reason or desire to kill him, not even for his money. The narrator reveals that they loved the old man. They were in good terms with the old man, and the narrator was not interested in stealing from him (Poe par. 2).

However, it appears that the old man had a deformed eye that instigated the narrator to commit the murder. In fact, if it were not for the eye, the story would have been very different. It follows then that the narrator has a motive to kill the old man.

Consequently, they scheme on how to execute the heinous crime. For seven consecutive nights, they stalked the companion throughout. They went to the extent of intensifying their affection for him to keep him close. On the eighth night, an opportunity presented itself and the narrator killed the old man.

The act of murder execution proceeds with extreme caution and the body concealment. However, a last minute shriek by the old man, or probably the excited yell of the narrator, changed the events. The arrival of police officers to the scene immediately after the crime attests to this.

The police arrived to a warm welcome from the narrator. Their arrival, they attribute to a scream they had been alerted to having emanated from the house. The police search the entire building but find nothing. Eventually, the narrator invited the two police officers into the deceased old man’s bedroom for a chat.

While there, however, the narrator imagined hearing the old man’s heartbeat. The heartbeat got louder and louder as the narrator and the two police officers chatted away in the bedroom. Finally, the imaginary noise freaked the narrator out. Eventually admits to having killed the old man, and in proof of his crime shows the police officers where he hid the dismembered body.

The Tell-Tale Heart Literary Analysis

Plot: psychological journey.

Poe adopts a very interesting approach in writing the story. The main character, who also performs the heinous murderous act, tells the story. As a result, we assume the story is a confession. The confession is evident given that even the narrator insists they can prove their sanity to the audience.

The location of the story remains unclear. However, an analysis of the story creates the impression that the location is a courtroom. Such an assumption looks fair given that the court could have declared the narrator to be of unsound mind. The story ends with the narrator revealing to the police officers where he hid the body. As such, it is likely that they are making the confession while under arrest.

The Tell-Tale Heart Themes

Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart story is riddled with a number of themes. The numbers of themes vary depending on the analytical approach chosen to review the story. As already indicated, the current analysis relies on the psychological approach of literary critique. Hence, from the perspective of this approach, it appears that several themes are apparent in the story.

The main themes in the story include ego, murder, evil, obsession, insanity, and guilt. Others include reality viewpoints, justification, time, and cleverness. The themes of evil, ego, murder and insanity are very dominant in the story.

From the start of the story, the narrator insists on being sane. Consequently, the narrator details their heinous crime to prove their sanity. Even after the detailed narration, the narrator still insists on their sanity. They insist that they took a lot of precautions to cover their tracks, something that can only be done by a sane man (Poe par. 8).

In a number of instances, the narrator reminds the audience how cleverly they executed the murder. The assertion is evident when they claim, “You fancy me mad. Madmen know nothing. But you should have seen me. You should have seen how wisely I proceeded –with what caution –with what foresight –with what dissimulation I went to work!” (Poe par. 3).

Despite the frantic effort to convince his sanity, the narrator falls under Freud’s psychic zone of id. The id zone has a number of distinct characteristics. It is characterised by an excitement that is disorganized and lacks will. It is an impulsive drive that is aimed at satisfying the instincts and pleasures of the individual (Freud 103).

About the theme of murder, the narrator’s motive is amusing, if not ridiculous. The ‘admitted motive’ is evident when the narrator says that the old man had the eye of a vulture. They describe it as “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 forever” (Poe par. 2).

The execution of the heinous crime is almost perfect. The narrator leaves no trace behind. However, their confession raises doubts about their sanity. It is clear that the narrator is a ruthless murderer, considering how they killed and dismembered the old man’s body for concealment.

The theme of obsession, and in some part that of guilt, is apparent from the beginning of the story. The desire to murder the old man increases whenever the narrator sees his deformed eye. It appears the narrator is obsessed with the deformed eye. The obsession to murder the old man based on his bad eye intensifies when the narrator sees him in bed.

The narrator does not exhibit obvious psychological motives. However, killing the old man based on the feelings the eye stirs in them is an indication of a possible motive. Indeed, motives for individual actions arise from thoughts, feelings, and fantasies. The narrator fantasises killing the old man, revealing this aspect of human thinking in the process.

Such an obsession and the narrator’s erratic behaviour, together with how they narrate the story, leave no doubt that they are insane. In fact, the narrator believes that the heartbeat of the dead old man nearly drove them insane to the extent of confessing to the crime. They describe how they shrieked and showed the police where they had hidden the body (Poe par. 10).

The Tell-Tale Heart Character Analysis

The story has six major characters. They include narrator, the old man (who ends up as the victim), the neighbour, and the three police officers. However, the story revolves more around the narrator and the old man than it does around the other characters.

In fact, one can argue that the narrator and the old man are the main characters. The other four are just supporting characters. Poe is not clear on the identity of the narrator’s audience. It is not clear whom the narrator is trying to convince with the confession.

The Tell-Tale Heart Narrator

Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart revolves a lot around human nature. Human nature is made evident from the narrator’s viewpoint. The narrator is very confident in the execution of the heinous crime. They are confident enough to confess about the same. The desire to prove their sanity is even more intriguing. As a result, the narrator creates a picture of self-worthiness, self-conviction, and lack of remorse.

The narration turns out to be a perfect rhetoric in relation to the narrator. From the beginning to the end of the story, the narrator makes the reader view their deeds with contempt a number of times. Perhaps, as Zimmerman puts it, The Tell-Tale Heart is in real sense a form of courtroom rhetoric-judicial. It is a form of forensic oratory (Zimmerman Frantic Forensic Oratory 34).

The narrator appears determined to convince someone with his or her confession. The determination is evident when they insist that mad men know nothing (Poe par. 3). The narrator’s reference to “you” clearly shows that they are addressing someone else.

Perhaps the narrator is writing to or conversing with this ‘you’. The narrator tries to persuade and guide the audience to their point of view. Essentially, it is clear that the narrator has already confessed to the crime. They have already shown the police the body before their confession (Poe par. 10).

The narrator is defending themselves in the story. They do not regard the heinous act with any remorse or contempt. From this analysis, one can argue that the story reveals one major aspect of human nature that is inherent to many individuals. Generally, many people tend to overlook their individual flaws and faults. They may do everything in their power to cover up these flaws and faults (Bonaparte 32).

Ki points out the theme of “ego-evil”, which underlies the ‘main’ human nature highlighted in the narration (25). By definition, ego-evil refers to human behaviour that is, according to Zizek (70), driven by the desire for selfish gains and greed.

Such behaviour is very apparent concerning the conduct of the narrator. When one disregards the sanity of the narrator, which they seem to assert loudly, a sensible motive for their action is lost. In the words of the narrator, the old man had not done anything to anger them, “I loved the old man. He had never wronged me” (Poe par. 2).

From the discourse above, it is apparent that associating the narrator with ego-evil behaviour is logical. In essence, the narrator’s actions are motivated by some form of ideological ideal. The actions also emanate from their fanatical devotion (Ki 25).

The narrator’s egocentrism is apparent in their ‘over-identification’ with the views they hold. Such a trait on the part of the narrator ultimately leads to a form of “narcissistic ‘denigradation’ of others and violation of human laws” (Zizek 70).

The narrator claims killing the old man due to his bad eye. In essence, the narrator admits the old man’s vulture eye is what made them commit the offense (Poe par. 2). Such an explanation tells a lot about the narrator’s state of mind. Regarding the old man’s eye as identical to that of a vulture gives the narrator the motivation they need to commit the crime.

With such an attitude, they could easily kill the man without any remorse. As such, the narrator judged the old man based on personal affections, rather than on truth. Ki (25) explains this behaviour from a psychological perspective.

According to Ki (25), an intentional misjudgement of another person is an indication of the shortcomings of the self. It means that the self lacks insight (Ki 25). Killing the old man would rid the narrator the ‘torturing’ eye. Such an explanation appears valid from a psychological perspective.

The narrator is a true representation of ‘self-misrepresentation’. Their character also shows the narrator has ‘misdirected’ sense of self-worth and self-righteousness. Both of these aspects are blown out of proportion concerning the narrator. From the onset of the narrative, the persona appears determined to point out their strengths, which are in doubt.

In their narration, the persona says that the disease has only made their senses shaper. They claim to have heard things from heaven and from earth. According to them, this is proof enough that they are sane and not mad (Poe par. 1).

The narrator’s sense of self is terrible, especially with regards to their senses. Such a convoluted sense of self leads to another conclusion. The conclusion is that the narrator is psychotic. The psychotic nature of the narrator is the first impression created in the mind of the reader at the beginning of the narrative. However, the narrator endeavours to prove otherwise in the narrative.

Further analysis of the narration reveals that the persona is a ‘self-positing’ individual. They try to create the impression of an individual who is very right. They claim that they discovered their powers on that night. They were so happy when they discovered how intelligent they are (Poe par. 4). Such a ‘perception of self’ means that the narrator likes to exercise their powers on others.

Perceptions of own power, triumph, and sagacity also portray the narrator as a person who likes to dominate the helpless. The old man was asleep and half-blind due to the darkness and his bad eye, yet the narrator was triumphant of killing him. Pitcher (232) portrays the narrator in Poe’s tale as someone living in a universe where the self is the only god that exists.

Eventually, it is apparent that the narrator fails miserably to convince the audience of their sanity or self-importance. According to Melville (34), the narrator appears to fully understand the various techniques of argument. They are trying desperately to convince the audience.

Initially, the narrator indicates that they are aware of what the audience thinks of them. The narrator is aware that the audience considers them as a hostile, nervous, and lunatic person. Because of this awareness, the narrator attempts to win over the good will of whoever is listening to them.

The narrator lodges an appeal to the audience’s sense of reason to mitigate the hostility directed towards them. Such an appeal is also aimed at making the audience more receptive. The narrator tells the audience that they wish they were there when they were committing the offense. The audience, according to the narrator, would have seen for themselves how efficient and wise they (the narrator) are (Poe par. 3).

The narrator strategically makes use of concession as a means of ethical appeal. They try to impress the audience by proving that they can make frank confessions. They create the impression that they are a good person with a strong and confident streak. They try to prove that they can confidently concede and nullify opposing points of view.

The nature of Poe’s character in the story can be summed up from John Claggart’s psychoanalysis perspective (as cited in Melville). Thus, “the narrator’s even temper and discerning bearing would seem to point to an individual peculiarly exposed to the law of reason” (Melville 76). The narrator has little or nothing to do with reason.

They only employ it as an ‘ambidexterity’ means of irrational affections. Such evaluation implies that the narrator is engaging in wanton atrocities that appear to be the reserve of the insane. They are engaging in such acts based on very ‘direct’ and ‘cool’ judgement. As such, one can conclude that the narrator is a mad man and very dangerous.

According to Zimmerman ( Moral Insanity or Paranoid Schizophrenia? 42), Poe effectively maintains an objective distance in telling the story and watches as the reader tackles the etiological irony that follows. Poe uses rhetoric consciously and deliberately in most of his homicidal tales.

He also engages in irony in most of his arguments. Most of Poe’s characters try to justify their actions using ‘reasonable’ excuses that are not so ‘reasonable’. Such an approach is apparent in The Tell-Tale Heart story.

Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, London: Hogarth P., 1949. Print.

Freud, Sigmund. Dream Psychology: Psychoanalysis for Beginners , New York: James A. McCann Co., 1920. Print.

Ki, Magdalen. “Ego-Evil and the Tell-Tale Heart.” Renascence 61.1 (2008): 25-38. Print.

Melville, Herman. Billy Budd, Sailor, Chicago: University of Chicago, 1962. Print.

Pitcher, Edward. “The physiognomical meaning of Poe’s The Tell-Tale Heart.” Studies in Short Fiction 16.3 (1979): 231-233. Print.

Poe, Edgar 1922, The Tell-Tale Heart . Web.

Zimmerman, Brett. “Frantic Forensic Oratory: Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” Style 35.1 (2001): 34-49. Print.

—. “Moral Insanity or Paranoid Schizophrenia: Poe’s ‘The Tell-Tale Heart’.” Mosaic 25 (1992): 39-48. Print.

Zizek, Slavoj. Looking Awry , Cambridge: MIT, 1991. Print.

Chicago (A-D)
Chicago (N-B)

IvyPanda. (2024, January 2). The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-criticism-of-edgar-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-from-a-psychological-approach-term-paper/

"The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique." IvyPanda , 2 Jan. 2024, ivypanda.com/essays/literary-criticism-of-edgar-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-from-a-psychological-approach-term-paper/.

IvyPanda . (2024) 'The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique'. 2 January.

IvyPanda . 2024. "The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-criticism-of-edgar-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-from-a-psychological-approach-term-paper/.

1. IvyPanda . "The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-criticism-of-edgar-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-from-a-psychological-approach-term-paper/.

Bibliography

IvyPanda . "The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique." January 2, 2024. https://ivypanda.com/essays/literary-criticism-of-edgar-poes-the-tell-tale-heart-from-a-psychological-approach-term-paper/.

Consumer Decision-Making Models: Analysis & Critique
Piedmont Media's Algorithm
The Tell-Tale Heart (1843)
Edgar Allan Poe: ''The Tell-Tale Heart'' and "The Cask of Amontillado"
The Tell-Tale Heart Essay
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Allan Edgar Poe
O. Henry’s “The Gift of the Magi” and Poe’s “The Tell-Tale Heart”
The Rejection in the Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allan Poe
Edger Allen Poe's “The Tell-Tale Heart” Analysis
Human Vices in "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Poe
The Moths and the Woman Warrior
My papa’s waltz
Edward Cullen's Character in the "Twilight"
"Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl" by Harriet Jacobs: Urging Abolitionism Movements
The Literary Renaissance: The Many Faces of Modernism

IMAGES

Edgar Allan Poe's The Raven: Summary and Analysis Free Essay Example
Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Tell Tale Heart” Psychological Criticism Free
Analysis "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe Free Essay Example
"The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe Free Essay Example
Edgar Allan Poe and Dark Romanticism Essay Example
The Tell Tale Heart

VIDEO

An essay on criticism by Alexander Pope || summary and analysis
Unmasking Edgar Allan Poe
The Raven and The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe
Miscellaneous Poe: Poems and Short Stories by Edgar Allan Poe
The Haunting Legacy of Edgar Allan Poe
"Eleonora" by Edgar Allan Poe: A Short Story Analysis

COMMENTS

Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe
Poe's most famous tales include The Black Cat, The Fall of the House of Usher (1839), and The Cask of Amontillado (1846), and among his notable poems are To Helen, Israfel, The City in the Sea, and The Haunted Palace.His poem The Raven (1842) was widely popular.Some of Poe's radical insights into poetry and criticism are expressed in his essay The Philosophy of Composition (1846), which ...
Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's Stories
1 reply. During his life, Edgar Allan Poe (1809 - 1849) was a figure of controversy and so became reasonably well known in literary circles. Two of his works were recognized with prizes: Manuscript Found in a Bottle and The Gold-Bug. The Raven, his most famous poem, created a sensation when it was published and became something of a best ...
The Raven Essays and Criticism
The continuing presence of the raven is a constant torment and reminder of his grief, and a source of horror for the reader. Poe's choice of language and setting also reinforce the theme of ...
A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Tell-Tale Heart'
Summary. First, a brief summary of 'The Tell-Tale Heart'. An unnamed narrator confesses that he has murdered an old man, apparently because of the old man's 'Evil Eye' which drove the narrator to kill him. He then describes how he crept into the old man's bedroom while he slept and stabbed him, dragging the corpse away and ...
The Cask of Amontillado Essays and Criticism
Edgar Allan Poe, the master of the macabre, understood the fine line between good and evil, between the holy and the profane. He knew how to penetrate the subconscious of his readers by subtly ...
Edgar Allan Poe American Literature Analysis
Essays and criticism on Edgar Allan Poe, including the works "The Fall of the House of Usher", "The Murders in the Rue Morgue", "The Tell-Tale Heart", "The Cask of Amontillado ...
The Philosophy of Composition by Edgar Allan Poe
The Philosophy of Composition. Edgar Allan Poe was an editor, journalist, poet, literary critic, and short story writer. Known for his gothic tales and psychological dramas, his stories include "The Cask of Amontillado," "The Fall of the House of Usher," and "The Tell-Tale Heart.". In 1845 he published The Raven and Other Poems.
Poe, Edgar Allan
Early Poetry. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston on 19 January 1809, the son of the itinerant actors David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold, both of whom died when he was still an infant.He was brought up by the Richmond tobacco merchant John Allan, with whom he had a difficult relationship.Educated in London and then, for a brief period, at the University of Virginia, Poe entered the U.S. Army in ...
LibGuides: Edgar Allan Poe: Criticism & Commentary
Edgar Allan Poe and neurology. "Edgar Allan Poe was one of the most celebrated writers of all time. He published several masterpieces, some of which include references to neurological diseases. Poe suffered from recurrent depression, suggesting a bipolar disorder, as well as alcohol and drug abuse, which in fact led to his death from ...
A Summary and Analysis of Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Philosophy of
By Dr Oliver Tearle (Loughborough University) 'The Philosophy of Composition' is an 1846 essay by Edgar Allan Poe (1809-49). Although he wrote the essay in order to explain how he came to write his hugely successful poem 'The Raven', it has become a key non-fiction work - probably the key work - produced by Poe, and an important document in helping us to understand his approach to ...
Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's stature as a major figure in world literature is primarily based on his ingenious and profound short stories, poems, and critical theories, which established a highly influential rationale for the short form in both poetry and fiction. Regarded in literary histories and handbooks as the architect of the modern short story, Poe was also the principal forerunner of the "art ...
Project MUSE
In this section, three essays by Evans analyze the historical context of Poe's work via a thorough examination of primary sources contemporaneous with Poe's literary career. In the first essay, "The Great New York Fire of 1845 and Edgar Allan Poe's 'The Bells,'" Evans historicizes some of the major events that transpired during ...
Edgar Allan Poe: Themes & Literary Analysis of Stories and Poems
Edgar Allan Poe. Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer of primarily poetry and short stories that explored themes of death, regret, and lost love. Read the overview below to gain an understanding of the author and his work and explore the previews of analysis and criticism that invite further interpretation.
The Essays, Sketches and Lectures of Edgar Allan Poe
The Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by Edmund C. Stedman and George E. Woodberry (Chicago: Stone and Kimball, 1894-1895 — The essays are collected in volume 7 and Eureka will be found in volume 9) The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe, edited by James A. Harrison (New York: T. Y. Crowell, 1902 — The essays are collected in volume 14 and ...
Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe
The full range of literary traditions comes to life in the Twayne Critical Essays Series. Volume editors have carefully selected critical essays that represent the full spectrum of controversies, trends and methodologies relating to each author's work. Essays include writings from the author's native country and abroad, with interpretations from the time they were writing, through the present ...
Edgar Allan Poe Critical Essays
Though he is best known for his classics of gothic horror such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" and his portraits of madmen and grotesques such as "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask ...
Edgar Allan Poe and Literary Criticism
Edgar Allan Poe first came to the attention of the literary world as a magazine editor and critic. He wrote nearly one thousand essays, reviews, articles, columns, and critical notices that appeared in magazines, newspapers, and annuals. Poe was among the first to propose setting standards by which to judge literary works, and created his own ...
The Edgar Allan Poe Review
The Edgar Allan Poe Review publishes peer-reviewed scholarly essays; book, film, theater, dance, and music reviews; and creative work related to Edgar Allan Poe, his work, and his influence. Also included are the following regular features: Marginalia (short, nonpeer reviewed notes), interviews with Poe scholars, the Poe in Cyberspace column, and Poe Studies Association updates. The Edgar ...
The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe
Essays and criticism on Edgar Allan Poe - The Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe, Edgar Allan Poe ... Critique of Pure Reason, trans. by N. K. Smith (London, 1933), pp. 257-275, et seq.
The Tell-Tale Heart Psychological Analysis & Critique
Most of Poe's characters try to justify their actions using 'reasonable' excuses that are not so 'reasonable'. Such an approach is apparent in The Tell-Tale Heart story. Works Cited. Bonaparte, Marie. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe: A Psycho-Analytic Interpretation, London: Hogarth P., 1949. Print. Freud, Sigmund.
A Critique of Annabel Lee, a Poem by Edgar Allan Poe
"Annabel Lee" is a poem about a beautiful but agonizing memory to the narrator. The speaker is commemorating his lost love who is Annabel Lee. As narrated by the speaker, he knew Annabel Lee a long time ago when she was still a girl, and they all lived in a place that was near the sea. In t...
Edgar Allan Poe
SOURCE: "Poe as a Literary Critic," in Poe as a Literary Critic, edited by N. Bryllion Fagin, The Johns Hopkins Press, 1946, pp. 1-15. [The following essay is a contemporary unpublished critique ...
75 Edgar Allan Poe Quotes on Life, Love and Writing
Edgar Allan Poe was an American writer, editor, poet and literary critic. The Boston native only lived until he was 40 years old, but he was one of the most famous literary pioneers. His body of ...
Annabel Lee Essays and Criticism
PDF Cite Share. "Annabel Lee" was the last of Edgar Allan Poe's poems to be published, appearing October 9, 1849, in the New York Tribune, two days after the author's death. Since the poem first ...