Edgar Allan Poe

Life

E. A. Poe was an orphan since he was two and he was adopted by a family of merchants. He went to university but because of his interest for playing cards he had to leave his classical studies. He wrote for newspapers and magazines. He married his little cousin Virginia with whom he lived a difficult and poor marriage. When she died he fell into a depressive condition and he was addicted to opium and alcohol. In total poverty he died at the age of 40 for the abuse of alcohol.

Works

His literary production may be divided into four parts: poetry, essays and articles, tales of imagination, tales of ratiocination.

His most famous and successful book was Tale of the Grotesque and of the Arabesque (1839). Poe is the father of that school of exotic literature of Wild, Boudlaire, Rimbaud.

Themes and Style

Poe liked the model of the short tale because he hated length in literature. Most of that tale is taken by the description of the settings, the place and the time. His purpose was to create an atmosphere to involve the reader and estrange him from his reality.

A book that have been read in more than one time doesn't totally involve the reader because between a sitting and another he comes back to his true, peaceful and rational life destroying all the atmosphere genially created.

The reader doesn't know this new imaginary world and he is frightened because he can't control it: any unexpected thing can happen, and he can't defend himself with the use of his reason to interpret logically the events because it is suffocated and the actions are ruled by the unconscious.

The geniality of Poe is his ability to have the control of the reader by neutralizing the barrier of his reason and arriving directly at his unconscious, absolute kingdom of the atavic fears, pleasures, desires. The reader, stung in this neuralgic zone, is really terrorised and the emotion is so strong and exciting that he likes it.

For example, the concept of been buried, trapped or enclosed is a symbol that has an immense power with its contrast between the safety of the enclosure (the womb) and the horror of the trap. And the concept of falling, of losing a grip or a foothold is a symbol of the loss by reason of the control of the realty and the descent into the unknown of the unconscious. In this sense the fear of the dead coming to life derives from the rupture of the boundaries between life and death, sleep and wake, dream and reality that causes the loss for the mind of the possibility to distinguish the imaginary from the real, the true from the false.

European Influences

Poe's Romantic sensibility, Gothic tendencies, pre-Decadent use of language and themes appealed to European readers. Poe is near to the later Symbolist Movement for is concept of Death-Beauty and Mallarmè and Boudlaire (who translated his works in 1865) liked him.

Tone

Poe avoided a moral or a didactic tone in his writing. He's far from offering a model of right-living typical of the mainstream of contemporary American literature. American literature at the beginning of the 19^th century was optimistic, patriotic and "sane" with an emphasis on Nature-Beauty-Life. Poe, in a decadent and grotesque position, emphasized the concept of Death-Beauty. According to him literature must only appeal to the reader's sensibility and there is nothing more melancholy than Death: pleasure is superior to truth or morality.