Edgar Allen Poe
Edgar Allen Poe
To most people, Edgar Allan Poe was a troubled soul that had many psychological issues. Some people think that his works mimicked his own mental torment and torture; others thought that he was an American writer romantically doomed to failure by events and emotions too great for him to handle. His writings reflect each theory, and his style was very unique and unusual for the time period in which they were written. The artistic liberties and risks that Poe took in his works sparked the beginning of what we call the Romanticism Period. The hardships and tragedies which Edgar Allan Poe faced throughout his life played a big part in influencing his writing, how his writing influenced the period, and how it affected his mental stability. Poe was a published author by the age of eighteen. His first volume was Tamerlane and Other Poems, which was published anonymously. He won his first prize in a Baltimore newspaper contest for his short story, “Ms. Found in a Bottle”. Receiving little acknowledgement for his poetry, Poe turned to writing fiction. His belief that a piece of writing should be short enough to read in one sitting caused him to write only in brevity. Throughout his lifetime a few of his most famous writings were, “The Raven”, “The Haunted Palace”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “The Bells”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The City in the Sea”. At first Poe’s writing was not exceedingly popular, but he still tried to support himself solely on his writing, leaving himself in a state of severe poverty. He began to work as an editor but lost a majority of these jobs because of his habit for incorporating his own opinion into the editing of other people’s work. His accusation against Longfellow for plagiarism made him unpopular with many American writers and readers and lost himself a lot of readers and fans. Edgar Allan Poe lived during the Romanticism Period which he, along with Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne, helped develop. The three authors were known as Dark Romantics, which in term means they wrote about the darker more mysterious views of the human mind and body. At this point in history, American authors were trying to find ways to separate themselves from British Literature due to pride, and these three authors were some of the ones that were finding new ways to express themselves and took risks in their writing. Romantic writers were greatly influenced by time periods and literary eras before their own. Transcendentalism played a role in influencing Poe’s views on life. Transcendentalists believed in individualism, love of liberty, and that truth should be based on a reason. They also believed that reason ruled over intuition, which the Romantics believed the opposite. Poe was considered an anti-transcendentalist because of his belief that individual emotion and intuition ruled over reason. Romanticism is debatably the largest literary movement of the late 1700s and to this day Poe and other Romantic’s writings influence writers. The dark nature of Poe’s works brought a gothic style to the time period, and he had a principle that every piece of writing should focus on one main emotion or mood. Most of Poe’s works were written in a melancholy mood of horror or terror, and the nature of each piece of work was never in line with the reality of man’s nature. They portrayed twisted, malevolent, and nightmarish emotions, full of death and suffering. Although they were not Biblically based or morally correct, the effects of sin on human kind were also a topic brought out in Poe’s writings. He also had the belief that the human mind was divided into three compartments: intellect, soul, and conscience. He believed that each of the three compartments was separate and that, neither truth nor morality, was linked with the soul. Because American Literature was just beginning to separate from British Literature and becoming its own unique form, the Romantics had a major impact on other writers of their time and even on those after their time. Romantics formed stories based on emotions, typically their own, and gave insight to their lives from the inside. Poe showed a lot of his innermost thoughts in his writings and the narrator of his stories were typically from his own point of view.