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Edgar Poe’s creative life
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2.1 Edgar Poe’s creative life
Edgar Allan Poe is certainly one of the best known and most popular of American writers. His stories are read by children, probed with the tools of psychoanalysis by critics, and transformed into films. His poems, notably “The Raven”, “To Helen” and “Annable Lee”, are widely anthologized. And his critical notion that a poem should be readable in a single sitting so as not to mute its single effect is a familiar critical principle. More importantly, Poe’s poetic theories, outlined in such pieces as “The Poetic Principle”, “The Rationale of Verse” and “The Philosophy of Composition, had a profound influence on the French symbolist movement.
Before he became a famous poet and short- storey writer, Poe was known as a journalist and magazine editor. He wrote numerous reviews about works now forgotten while producing his own memerable tales and poems. And though he never realized his dream of founding a literary magazine of his own, be contributed to many , including those he edited. Aa a writer for popular periodicals like the “ Broadway Journals” and Graham’s “ Lady’s and Gentleman’s Magazine”, and as an editor of literary periodicalssuch as the “ Southern Literary Messenger” Poe came to understand very well the audiences who read his work. He aimed his work, as he wrote, “ not above the popular, or below the critical, taste” turning the fictional conventions of his own time to odd account. In tales such as “ Ligeia” and “ The Fall of the House of Usher”, for example he put his personal stamp on the gothic horror story. He remodeled the tale of exploration in works like “ A Descent into theMaelstorm”, and he developed the genre of the detective story, or “ tale of racionation” as he called it , with such stories as “ The Gold Bug”, “ The Murders in the Rue Morgue”, and “ The Purlioned Letter”. Still another genre he touched on was science fiction with his fantastic story” The Balloon Hoax”. As various as was Poe’s genius and as varied as were the fictional subgenres he worked in, one element of his work remains consistent: his concern with the workings of the human mind.
Writers as diverse as Bandelaire and Dostoevsky admired Poe’s work. Bandelaire, who translated many of Poe’s tales, in fact , acknowledged Poe’s influence by writing that if Poe hadn’t existed Bandelaire would have had to invent him. Dostoevsky was unstiuting in his praise of Poe’s revelations of minds at war with thenselves. Although Dostoevsky’s own explorations of extreme states of consciosness and his dramatic depictions of behavior honed by guilt are more ambitious and monumental than Poe’s sketches and tales, the Russian writer felt a kindship with Poe.
Poe’s life was as tormented as the minds of his stories narrators. He was born to itinerant actors in Boston. His father died when he was a year old and his mother a year later. Edgar was and his brother and sister were taken as foster children into the Rome of a Richmond tobacco merchant , John Allan . Poe was educated in England and at the University of Vifginia, where he was provided with insafficient funds for food, books , and clothing by John Allan. Living among wealthy young men, Poe resorted to gambling , wich further worsened his financial situation and contributed what was an already seriously strained relationship with his foster father , who disapproved of his literary ambitions. The upshot was that Poe withdrew from the university and was left to make his own way as an author.
In 1837 he moned his familyfrom Baltimore to New York, where he published his only full-length fictional work, “ The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”. In 1840 he published his “ Tales of the Grotesqu and Arabesque” (1840). Poe borrowed the terms “ grotesque” and “ arabesque” from the Romantic poet and novelist Sir Walter Scott, and meant them to suggest the terror associated with the bizarre and the beautiful associated with the poetic. He also meant to suggest that both elements were present in many stories in his collection.
“The Fall of the House of Usher” is among Poe’s most famous and most accomplished tales. The house that falls is both the literal Usher habitation and the family it signifies. The house also represents the mind of Roderick Usher. In its density of detail, bizarre events, and uncanny tone, the story suggest gothic fiction. In its psychological richness and fainted family history, it reaches back to Greek tragedy.
“The Cask of Amontillado” examplifies Poe’s genius at displaying a mad narrator whose intent is to convince his listeners of his sanity. Perhaps Poe’s best- known example of this type is the narrator of “ The Tell- Tale Heart”. But “ The Cask of Amontilado” is an even richer story, with Poe pulling out all the stops in displaying multiple ironies while his narrator fels compelled to tell somebody of the perfect murder he committed fifty years before. The question is why he tells this tale after so many years.
In “The Purloined Letter” Poe gives way to his bent for stories of crime and punishment, this time from the outside point of view of the detective rather than from inside the criminals mind. Rather than considering what he would have done in like circumstances, the detective , Monsieur Dupin, must try to think the way the criminal thought, which is precisely what he does en route to to solving the case . The story celebrates Poe’s appreciation of the rational mind and contains a number of examples of riddles and games in which Poe delighted. It also ends with an elaborate puzzle built on a complex literary allusion, which contains the key Poe uses to unlock the inticacies of the story’s plot.
Poe’s fictional performances delighted audience in his own time continue to engage and intrigue readers today. Even though his style is ornate and his language far from colloquial, he remains a most readable writer, largely because he builds suspense, creates atmosphere , and probes the psychological complexities of his characters’ minds and hearts. If it is the horror of his stories that first draws readers in, it is Poe’s psychological richness and his control of tone that continue to bring them back for repeated readings of some inmatchable stories.
American literature cannot be captured in a simple definition. It reflects the many religious, historical and cultural traditions of the American people, one of the world’s most varied populations. It includes poetry, fictions, drama and other kinds of writing by authors in what is now the United States. It also includes miswritten material, such as the oral literature of the American Indians and folk tales and legends. In addition, American literature accounts of America written by immigrants and visitors from other countries, as well as works by American writers, who spent some or all of their lives abroad.
American literature begins with the legends, myths and poetry of the American Indians, the first people to life in what is now the United States. Indians legends included stories about the origin of the world, the histories of various tribes, and tales of tribal heroes.
The first American literature was neither American nor really literature. It was not American because it was the work mainly of immigrants from England. It was not literature as we know it in the form of poetry, essays, or fiction but rather an interesting mixture of travel accounts and religious writings.
The earliest colonial travel accounts are records of the perils and frustrations that challenged the courage of America’s first settlers.
The purpose of the first writers was to attract dissatisfied inhabitants of the Old World across the ocean to the New. As a result, their travel accounts became a kind of literature to which many groups responded by making the hazardous crossing to America. The earliest settlers included Dutch, Swedes, German, French, Spaniards, Italians, and Portuguese, of the immigrants who came to America in the first three quarters of the seventeenth century, however, the overwhelming majority was English.
The English immigrants who settled on American’s northern seacoast, appropriately called New England, came in order to practice their religion freely. They were either Englishman who wanted to reform the Church of England or people who wanted to have an entirely new church. These two groups combined, especially in what became Massachusetts, came to be known as “Puritans”, so named after those who wished to “purify” the Church of England.
The Puritans followed many of the ideas of the Swiss reformer John Calvin.
Through the Calvinist influence the Puritans emphasized the then common belief that human beings were basically evil and could do nothing about it; and that many of them, though not all, would surely be condemned to hell.
Over the years the Puritans built a way of life that was in harmony with their somber religion, one that stressed hard work, thriff, piety, and sobriety. These were the Puritan values that dominated much of the earliest American writing including the sermons, books, and letters of such noted Puritan clergymen as John Cotton and Cotton Mather. During his life Cotton Mather wrote more than 450 works, an impressive output of religious writings that demonstrate that he was an example, as well as an advocate, of the Puritan ideal of hard work. During the last half of seventeenth century the Atlantic coast was settled both north and south. Colonies still largely English were established. Among the colonists could be found poets and essayists; but no novelists. The absence of novelist is quite understandable: the novel form had not even developed fully in England; the Puritan members of the colonies believed that fiction ought not to be read because it was, by definition, not true.
The American poets who emerged in the seventeenth century adapted the style of established European poets to subject matter confronted in a strange, new environment. Anne Bradstreet was one such poet, who was born in educated in England. She both admired and imitated several English poets. Another important colonial poet, who achieved wide popularity was Michael Wigglesworth.
Twentieth century literary scholars have discovered the manuscripts of a contemporary of Wigglesworth named Edward Taylor, who produced what is perhaps the finest seventeenth century American verse. Taylor never published any of his poetry. In fact, the first of Edward Taylor’s colonial poetry did not reach print until the third decade of the twentieth century.
As the decades passed new generations of American born writers became important. Boston, Massachusetts, was the birthplace of one such American born writer. His name was Benjamin Franklin. The practical world of Benjamin Franklin stands in sharp contrast to the fantasy world created by Washington Irving. Named after George Washington, the first president of the United States, Irving provided a young nation with humorous, fictional accounts of colonial past.
Another writer, James Fennimore Cooper, contributed two of the great stock figures of American mythology: the daring frontiersman and the bold Indian. Cooper’s exciting stories of the American frontier have won a large audience for his books in many parts of the world.
While prose was contributing to development of an American mythology, the first poetry in the United States was also being written; Philip Freneau, one of the first poets of the new nation, wrote in a style which owed something to English models. If Freneau can be considered one of America’s first great nationalist poets, William Cullen Bryant merits a claim to being one of America’s first naturalist poets.
We can’t help saying about such notable poets as Edgar Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, who contributed American literature with their prose and verse.
The earliest writing in America considered of the journals and reports of European explorers and missionaries. These early authors left a rich literature describing their encounters with new lands and civilization. Beginning from these early times the American literature has been developing up to date. Such well-known writers and poets as Edgar Poe, Herman Melville, Mark Twain, Harriet Beecher-Stowe, Theodore Dreiser, Jack London, Ernest Hemingway and others became the pride not only of the American literature but of the whole world literature as well. As any other literature, the American literature reflected all historical events that took place in the world. The American literature suffered different periods: romanticism, realism, modernism etc.
The period of 40s-90s is the period of late romanticism in the literature of the USA. It coincides with the creative work of Edgar Allan Poe, who is considered to be one of the pioneers of National American literature.
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