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Characteristics of Edgar Poe’s short stories
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2.2 Characteristics of Edgar Poe’s short stories
The American poet Edgar Allan Poe, was also a master of the prose tale. A gifted, tormented man, Poe thought about proper function of literature for more than any of his predecessors, with the result that he became the first great American literary critic. He Developed a theory of poetry which was in disagreement with what most poets of the mid-nineteenth century believed. Unlike many poets, Poe was not an advocate of long poems. According to him, only a short poem could sustain the level of emotion in the reader that was generated by all good poetry. Besides Poe worked as an editor and contributor to magazines in several cities. He unsuccessfully tried to found and edit his won magazine, which would have granted him financial security and artistic control in what he considered a hostile literary marketplace.
Poe was never a good businessman but he was a good editor. His writing as a critic was especially well known. For Poe was not only a man with a fine mind who was a good writer; he had very clear opinions about the art of writing and had no fear at all about publishing those opinions. If he didn’t like a book or a poem or a story he cut it and the writer into pieces with his words.
During his lifetime, Poe made many enemies through his challenge to moralistic limits on literature, his confrontation with the New England literary establishment, and his biting critical style. Some readers too easily identified Poe with the mentally disturbed narrators of his tales, a belief reinforced by Rufus Griswold, Poe’s literary executor. Griswold wrote a malicious obituary and memoir of Poe that combined half-truth and outright falsehoods about Poe’s personal habits and conduct. Griswold portrayed Poe as envious, conceited, arrogant, and bad-tempered. Griswold’s portrait severely damaged Poe’s reputation and delayed a serious consideration of the writer’s place in American literature. But Poe’s later rediscovery by the French poets Charles Baudelaire, Stephane Mallarme, and Paul Valery helped restore his reputation.
But was he? Poe was born in Boston in January of 1809 the son of traveling actors. His father deserted the family. After his mother died in 1811, Poe becomes a ward of John Allan, a wealthy Richmond merchant. The Allan family lived in Great Britain from 1815 to 1820 before returning to Richmond. In 1826, Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia. There he acquired gambling debts that John Allan refused to pay. Eventually, Poe was forced to withdraw from the university.
Poe’s relationship with Allan deteriorated, and the young man enlisted in the USA army in 1827. During the same year, Poe’s first book was published. Its title was “Tamerlane and other Poems”, by “a Bostonian”. While waiting for an appointment to the US Military Academy, Poe published his second volume of poems: “All Araaf, “Tamerlane”, and “Minor poems”(1829). Both collections show the influence of the English poet Lord Byron. In 1830, Poe entered the US. Military Academy at West Point, N. Y., where he excelled in the4 study of languages. But he was expelled in 1831 for neglecting his duties.
Poe’s “Poems” (1831) contained two important poems “to Helen” and “Israfel”. He began to publish tales in the early 1830’s while living with his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia. Poe suffered financial difficulties, especially after being ignored in John Allan’s will. He received help from American novelist John P. Kennedy in winning an editorial post with the “southern literary messenger” in Richmond. In 1836, Poe married Virginia Clemm, his 13year old cousin. For the “Messenger”, Poe contributed reviews, original or revised poems and stories, and two installments of “The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym”.
Poe produced several of his finest tales in the late 1830’s, including “Ligeia”, “The Fall of the House of Usher”, and “William Wilson”. These and other stories were incorporated into “Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque” (1834). In 1841, he became an editor of “Graham’s Magazine”, to which he contributed “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”.
Poe won greater recognition with “The God Bug” (1843), a prize winning tale that appeared in Philadelphia’s Dollar Newspaper. The poem “ The Raven” (1845) made him famous. Two more collections “ Tales” and “ The Raven and the other Poems”, appeared in 1845. Early in 1845, Poe antagonized many people with a scathing campaign against the popular. American poet Henry Wadworth Longfellow for supposed plagiarism. At a public appearance in Boston later that year, Poe admitted to being drunk, which further alienated the public.
Poe’s later years were colored by economic hardship and ill health. Nevertheless, he published the story “The Cask of Amontillado” (1846), “The Philosophy of Composition” (1846), and part of his “Marginalia”, a collection of critical notes written for various periodical during the 1840’s.
Virginia Poe died of tuberculosis in 1847, after five years of illness. Poe then sank into poor health, and his literary productivity declined. In the middle and late 1840’s, he sought to support himself as a lecturer. His lecture on “The Universe” was expanded into Eurika: A Prose Poem(1848), which explores the mysteries of the Universe.
In 1849, Poe became engaged to marry the widowed Sarah Elmira Royster Shelton, his boyhood sweetheart. On his way to bring Mrs. Clemm to the wedding, Poe stopped in Baltimore. On October 3, he was found semiconscious and delirious outside a tavern used as a polling place. The cause of his death four days later was listed as “congestion of the brain”, though the precise circumstances of his death have never been fully explained.
As professor F. Cowles Strickland shard, that Edgar Poe drank too much, that he learned how to drink; the trouble is that he didn’t. Most men did not drink badly of another man just because he drank; but if the man didn’t know how to drink if he drank too much or at the wrong time of day or in the wrong place then men felt that drinking was wrong. Poe was one who didn’t know how. But he didn’t drink all the time. If that had been true he could no have written anything. There were long periods when Poe didn’t drink at all; but there were other periods when he felt he couldn’t continue to exist without drinking. Thus Poe, created trouble for himself. This is not the only example of how Poe did the wrong thing, knowing that it was the wrong thing. Apparently it was a part of his character to do so. Poe recognized this problem in himself. In his story “The Black Cat” he wrote;
“Who has not, a hundred times, found himself doing wrong, doing some evil thing for no other reason than because he knows he should not? Are not we humans at all times pushed, ever driven in some unknown way to break the lay just because we understand it to be the law?”[2]
Poe had lived a hard life, and during most of that life the dreams he dreamed remained only dreams. He drank to escape from the troubles of the real worlds. He escaped into his dream world in his poems and in many of his finest stories. Poe himself said that he was a dreamer. Think, he said, think of that moment when you are about to go to sleep, but are mot yet sleeping. You dream strange dreams. If you go to sleep you forget them. Poe claimed that he could come near to sleeping and then call himself back to the real world, remembering the dreams of the half world from which he had just come. These, he said, were the materials of some of his writings. If he said it, we may believe that it is true. But in addition to that, he filled his poems and his stories with the dreams he dreamed when not asleep yet. Poe began his career as a poet and composed or revised poems throughout his career. A tone of amused distance can be detected even in poems that critics consider serious. However, these elements coexist with themes that are more typical of the Romantic Movement, such as dreams and nightmares.
As it was mentioned, Poe’s creative life coincides with the period of Romanticism in American literature, and this was the age of Romanticism in Europe. And American still considered Europe to be the best source of new ideas. One of the most important Romantic ideas was the escape from reality, poems and stories could take people out of real life into a dream world where they felt and say and heard things that never were and never will be.
And besides, it was the time, when the United States went through some of the greatest changes in its history of the 19th century it was still mainly a country of farmers. Trade and manufacturing were growing more important with each decade but it was not until the 1870’s that a majority of Americans were making a living in non-farming occupation . In the middle of the century Negro slavery was still fact of American life. But after Civil War the nation entered a period of vast commercial expansion. Railroads Stretched form one end of the country to the other. Factories were built. Cities grew bigger. Fortunes were made. Edgar Poe was against the business, which was made mot to the favor of the country, he was a son of his century and an American patriot and tried to rise the American people’s level of beauty and to prove that the poetry might exist in America. He wrote about it in his article “Poets and American Poetry”. He didn’t separate himself from that that created railways, factories, he said “we” about “all” who could create both a locomotive and poetry.
Poe handled such material through images and tropes designed to signify uncertain states of consciousness represented as lakes, seas waves, and vapors.
Nearly all Poe’s criticism on poetry was written for the magazines for which he worked. Although the pieces were published intermittently, they reflect a remarkable coherent self-conscious view of poetry and the creative process. Poe wrote “The Philosophy of Composition” to explain how he composed “The Raven”. The essay opposes the romantic assumption that the poet works in a “fine frenzy” of pure inspiration. Instead, Poe wrote a carefully deliberate account of poetic creation. The essay analyses the central role of “effect” the conscious choice of an emotional atmosphere that is more important than incident, character, and versification. Poe also offered his famous pronouncement that the death of a beautiful woman is the most poetical topic in the world. In “The Poetic Principle” (1850).
Poe clamed that poetry works to achieve an elevating exciting of the soul, an emotional state that could not be long sustained. He further declared that a long poem is a contradiction in terms.
Poe believed that a poem’s emotional impact was enhanced by music or “sweet sound”. He thus devoted considerable attention to techniques of versification, especially in his essay. “The Rationale of Verse” (1848)
Poe’s “Sonnet To Science”(1829) subtly shows how beauty is destroyed by the coldness of the modern scientific intellect. “To Helen”(1831) is a brilliant example of precision and balance and perhaps Poe’s classic poetic statement on the idealization of women.
Despite its theatrical effects and stylistic flaws, “The Raven” (1845) is Poe’s best-known poem and one of the most famous works in American literature. If treats his favorite theme, the death of a beautiful woman.
This theme also appears in “The Sleeper” (1841) and “Ulalume” (1847). In all three poems, Poe chose elaborate musical and metrical effects, aspects of his verse that have been widely criticized and parodied.
Reflecting his interest in musical effects, Poe made no rigid distinction between music and poetry. “Eldarado” (1849), which originated as a song of the American West about the California gold rush, is an outstanding example. Poe went beyond the poem’s topical mature. The theme is universalized, as a knight learns that the true Eldarado is a wealth beyond this world.
The brilliance of Poe can be seen in the two poems “Israfel” and “Annabel Lee”. The poems are as melodious as Bryant’s but more dramatic in their effects. “Israfel” is Poe’s poetic apology for himself, while “Annabel Lee” mourns the death of a beautiful girl, a recurring subject in Poe’s writing.
One of the most remarkable things about the pair of poems is their melody. They are sinkable, not as a popular or concert song is, but with a wild kind of word music. As we read these lines, aloud or to ourselves, we will probably be able to understand why Poe was considered so skillful a poet. The rhythms of “Israfel” are rapid; the lines move fast. The beat is strong and skillfully varied. The vowel sounds are higher than in ordinary writing, helping to make the voice that reads them sound like a musical instrument such as the harp.
It is worth nothing that the above mentioned poems have nothing to do with America. Unlike those of some of his contemporaries, Poe’s subjects and themes were either universal or exotic. He had little interest in the topical or everyday occurrences, seeking instead to avoid factuality or logical clarity that would make a poem understanding to the common intellect. For the most part, Poe’s poems do not truly illuminate they are not expected to have plot. He continually emphasized estrangement, disappearance, silence, oblivion, and all ideas which suggest nonbeing. If was the idea of approximating nothingness that most excited him in his own poetry and that of other poets.
Here below I want to present Edgar Poe’s two selections.
Selection 1
In the motto, taken from the Koran, Poe took a few liberties with the description of Israfel by adding the words, “Whose heart strings are a lute”. The words were probably suggested by a passage in a poem, “Le Refus” by the French poet, Beranger (1780-1857). The song embodies Poe’s wish for a beauty superior to that of earth, more approaching the divine. The final stanzas voice the poet’s despair at the restritions of his environment. The poem first appeared in Poe’s Poems (1831) and was carried several times in later editions.
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