edgar allan poe literary devices essay

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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)

Annabel Lee Summary & Analysis by Edgar Allan Poe

Line-by-Line Explanation & Analysis
Poetic Devices
Vocabulary & References
Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme
Line-by-Line Explanations

"Annabel Lee" is the last poem composed by Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost figures of American literature. It was written in 1849 and published not long after the author's death in the same year. It features a subject that appears frequently in Poe's writing: the death of a young, beautiful woman. The poem is narrated by Annabel Lee's lover, who forcefully rails against the people—and supernatural beings—who tried to get in the way of their love. Ultimately, the speaker claims that his bond with Annabel Lee was so strong that, even after her death, they are still together.

Read the full text of “Annabel Lee”

The Full Text of “Annabel Lee”

1 It was many and many a year ago,

2 In a kingdom by the sea,

3 That a maiden there lived whom you may know

4 By the name of Annabel Lee;

5 And this maiden she lived with no other thought

6 Than to love and be loved by me.

7 I was a child and she was a child,

8 In this kingdom by the sea,

9 But we loved with a love that was more than love—

10 I and my Annabel Lee—

11 With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven

12 Coveted her and me.

13 And this was the reason that, long ago,

14 In this kingdom by the sea,

15 A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

16 My beautiful Annabel Lee;

17 So that her highborn kinsmen came

18 And bore her away from me,

19 To shut her up in a sepulchre

20 In this kingdom by the sea.

21 The angels, not half so happy in Heaven,

22 Went envying her and me—

23 Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know,

24 In this kingdom by the sea)

25 That the wind came out of the cloud by night,

26 Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

27 But our love it was stronger by far than the love

28 Of those who were older than we—

29 Of many far wiser than we—

30 And neither the angels in Heaven above

31 Nor the demons down under the sea

32 Can ever dissever my soul from the soul

33 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

34 For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams

35 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

36 And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes

37 Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

38 And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side

39 Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride,

40 In her sepulchre there by the sea—

41 In her tomb by the sounding sea.

“Annabel Lee” Summary

“annabel lee” themes.

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Death and Grief

Line-by-line explanation & analysis of “annabel lee”.

It was many and many a year ago, In a kingdom by the sea, That a maiden there lived whom you may know By the name of Annabel Lee;

And this maiden she lived with no other thought Than to love and be loved by me.

I was a child and she was a child, In this kingdom by the sea, But we loved with a love that was more than love— I and my Annabel Lee— With a love that the wingèd seraphs of Heaven Coveted her and me.

Lines 13-20

And this was the reason that, long ago, In this kingdom by the sea, A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling My beautiful Annabel Lee; So that her highborn kinsmen came And bore her away from me, To shut her up in a sepulchre In this kingdom by the sea.

Lines 21-26

The angels, not half so happy in Heaven, Went envying her and me— Yes!—that was the reason (as all men know, In this kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the cloud by night, Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.

Lines 27-33

But our love it was stronger by far than the love Of those who were older than we— Of many far wiser than we— And neither the angels in Heaven above Nor the demons down under the sea Can ever dissever my soul from the soul Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;

Lines 34-41

For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, In her sepulchre there by the sea— In her tomb by the sounding sea.

“Annabel Lee” Symbols

The Natural World

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“Annabel Lee” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Alliteration.

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Pathetic Fallacy

Parallelism, antimetabole, “annabel lee” vocabulary.

Select any word below to get its definition in the context of the poem. The words are listed in the order in which they appear in the poem.

Wingéd seraphs
Highborn kinsmen
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Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Annabel Lee”

Rhyme scheme, “annabel lee” speaker, “annabel lee” setting, literary and historical context of “annabel lee”, more “annabel lee” resources, external resources.

Poe's Letters — A collection of Poe's correspondence.

Joan Baez — A musical setting of the poem by 60s legend Joan Baez.

Radio Documentary — A BBC documentary looking at Poe's life and work.

More poems and biography — Poetry Foundation resources on Poe.

A Reading — The poem read by Garrison Keillor.

LitCharts on Other Poems by Edgar Allan Poe

A Dream Within a Dream

Sonnet to Science

The Conqueror Worm

Ask LitCharts AI: The answer to your questions

Literary Devices in “The Cask of Amontillado” by Edgar Allan Poe Essay

Introduction, figurative/symbolic expressions, works cited.

The ‘ Cask of Amontillado’ is a literary classic story, which can pass as an ordinary narrative piece of literature to the average ordinary reader. To readers with a critical eye however, the figurative speech, and the hyperbole contained in the story cannot go unnoticed.

Irony – Montresor, who is committed to punishing a perceived wrong, is also committed to carrying out a wrong without being punished for it. By his own admission, Montressor states that “a wrong is unredressed when retribution overtakes its redresser” (Poe 3).

As such, Montressor states that he would punish the person who inflicted him with injuries, because to him, the wrongs committed against him were worthy of punishment. Ironically, though, Montresor states that he would be avenging insults with death, since he perceived that as the ultimate revenge. Unfortunately, Fortunato seems not to have suffered the pain of dying, as Montresor would have liked.

Paradox – Montresor triggers a paradox by juxtaposing in the same sentence the phrase “punish with impunity,” two words that are ordinarily antithetical. As human nature would have it, people are often quicker to see weaknesses in other while ignoring their more apparent flaws. As such, Montresor finds his companion’s “transgression” worthy of the cruelest death, and believes that his cause is so right that he deserves to get away with it.

Sarcasm – In human speech, very few styles of expression are as cruel as sarcasm. Although in this case Fortunato is ignorant of the sarcasm, Montresor is nevertheless invoking it when he says, “my dear Fortunato, you are luckily met”’ (Poe 3). It is as if Montresor, if he were understood for his true intentions, were saying, ‘It is your ill-luck that you have met me today’.

It is often the cruelest hearts that fashion the most effective sarcasms: sarcasms so sharp-edged that they slice through their target audience’s ears without their ever getting to understand their full true meaning. The cruelty resident in Montresor’s dark mind is exhibited in his solitary musing: “I was so pleased to see him that I thought I never should have done wringing his hands” (Poe 3).

Oxymoron – Montresor engages in oxymoronic speech by describing the attendant’s abandonment of their duties at his palazzo as “making merry in honor of the time” (Poe 4). This was in direct disregard for his instructions to them not to leave the house at all while he is away.

Of course, there is the implication that he knew beforehand what they would do. By the attendants behaving just as he had anticipated, Montresor gets his perfect alibi. To protect themselves from the charge of absconding duty, they would swear that he had been on a journey and had not at all returned that whole day.

Hyperbole – There is a sense of this in Fortunato’s statement that he drinks to “the buried that repose around us” (Poe 5). Dead bodies may be immobile but as to whether they are at rest, is a matter of conjecture.

Poe’s tale can be interpreted as an allegory of the pain, death, and the senselessness of vengeance. To reflect all the three identified themes, Poe (knowingly or unknowingly) divided his story into three parts. In the first part, Monstresor is infuriated by what he perceives as an insult from Fortunato.

As a result, he vows to inflict vengeance on Fortunato. This part of the story symbolizes people’s desire to avenge for the wrongs committed against them, and to inflict pain on the people who wrong them. As reflected in the conclusion of Poe’s tale, while inflicting pain on a person may seem like the perfect vengeance, it does not fetch as much pleasure as the avenger would like to.

The tale also makes an attempt to convince readers that death, is not necessarily a painful or even bitter experience to those who are dead or dying. This is symbolized by what sounds like Fortunato’s laughter when he finally realizes his fate. Poe also hints at the emptiness of revenge through Montresor’s description of his feeling as “sick” soon as he realized he had just killed Fortunato.

The second part of Poe’s take is apparent when Montresor lures Fortunato underground, and gets him drunk. The third part of the tale on the other hand is reflected in the long journey that two take, only for Montresor to encourage Fortunato into reaching “the extremity of the niche” (Poe 7), where he found iron staples hindering his progress further into the crypt.

Here, Montresor chained Fortunato up, ready to avenge the perceived wrongs committed against him. His vengeance was only pleasurable for a short period, because Fortunato’s cry only lasted several minutes. At the end, Fortunato made fun of his tormentor, and upon his death Montresor admits that his “heart grew sick” (Poe 8).

Poe, Edgar Allan. The Cask of Amontillado . Feedbooks, n.d. Web.

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Bibliography

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Repetition is the frequent use of certain words and phrases in literary works. This allows the author to subtly suggest certain interpretations, emphasize key ideas, or create a specific atmosphere .

The narrator often repeats certain words and uses the same sentence structure two or three times in a row, recreating the sensation of obsessive thoughts experienced by someone who is mentally imbalanced. For example, in the first paragraph, the narrator repeatedly uses “mad,” “nervous,” “heard.” These words foreshadow what happens in the rest of the story and highlight the ideas the narrator is focused on. Additionally, the narration repeats the same short syntax , as in the case of “not destroyed them” and “not dulled them.” These parallel structures create a sense of abruptness and obsessiveness.

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The Essays, Sketches and Lectures of Edgar Allan Poe

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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.

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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

Bibliography:

Brigham, Clarence S., Edgar Allan Poe's Contributions to Alexander's Weekly Messenger , Proceedings of the American Antiquarian Society , April 1943. (Also reprinted separately.)
Edsall, Thomas, ed., The Poe Catalogue , Baltimore: The 19th Century Shop, 1992. (This catalogue includes a few reprints of material which are not noted elsewhere.)
Harrison, James A[lbert]., ed, The Complete Works of Edgar Allan Poe , 17 vols, New York: T. Crowell, 1902.
Heartman, Charles F. and James R. Canny, A Bilbiography of First Printings of the Writings of Edgar Allan Poe , Hattiesburg, MS: The Book Farm, 1943. (The best overall bibliography of Poe, although it does contain errors and is somewhat outdated.)
Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Eureka , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004 (Poe's text, edited and with an introduction, notes and textual variants)
Levine, Stuart and Susan F., eds., Edgar Allan Poe: Critical Theory , Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2009 (Poe's texts, edited and with introductory material, notes and textual variants)
Mabbott, Thomas Ollive, ed., The Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe ; (Vols 2-3 Tales and Sketches ), Cambridge, Mass.: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1978. (Second printing 1979)
Pollin, Burton R., ed., The Collected Writings of Edgar Allan Poe ; Vols. III & IV - The Broadway Journal: Non-Fictional Prose , New York: Gordian Press, 1986; Vol. V - The Southern Literary Messenger: Non-Fictional Prose , New York: Gordian Press, 1997.
Thompson, G. Richard, ed. , Essays and Reviews , New York: The Library of America, 1984. (A good basic collection.)
Vines, Lois D., ed., Poe Abroad: Influence, Reputation, Affinities , Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1999. (An extremely useful compendium of articles by various authors, divided by country or region.)
Woodberry, George E[dward]. and Stedman, Edmund Clarence, The Works of Edgar Allan Poe , 10 vols, Chicago, 1894-1895. (Reprinted in 1903 and 1914.)

[S:1 - JAS] - Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore - Works - The Essays, Sketches and Lectures of Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Theory and Criticism

Home › Literature › Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

Literary Criticism of Edgar Allan Poe

By NASRULLAH MAMBROL on November 30, 2017 • ( 1 )

Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) was the first major American writer explicitly to advocate the autonomy of poetry, the freeing of poetry from moral or educational or intellectual imperatives. His fundamental strategy for perceiving such autonomy was to view poetry not as an object but as a series of effects. Hence, while his views are broadly Romantic like Emerson ’s, they differ deeply from Emerson ’s in that they present an affective and expressionist view of poetry. While he is usually considered a Romantic, Poe’s concern with technique and construction exhibit a formalist disposition and anticipate some of the more modern formalistic theories.

Poe’s genius has often been seen as pathological: he lost both his parents at an early age, was informally adopted and later broke with his adoptive parents; he abandoned his studies at the University of Virginia , which he had entered in 1826; he was expelled from West Point Military Academy in 1831; he led a controversial life as a contributor to, and editor of, journals; he indulged in bouts of drinking, suffered from depression and paranoia. Yet his image as an outcast, his emphasis on beauty rather than morality or truth, his view of poetry as affording us a glimpse of an ideal world, as well as his insistence on the close union of poetry and music, exerted a considerable fascination and impact on writers such as Baudelaire , who translated a number of his tales, and Mallarmé , who translated his poems, as well as Lacan , who published in 1966 his seminar on Poe’s story The Purloined Letter .

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 purports to explain the origins of his own poem The Raven. Other critical essays include The Poetic Principle and The Rationale of Verse . In The Philosophy of Composition , Poe urges that a poet should begin with the “consideration of an effect,” i.e., the response that will be produced in the reader or listener.13 He also urges that the poet should keep “originality always in view” ( PC , 178). This effect, he insists, must be produced as a “unity of impression.” Poe does not believe that such a unified impression can be achieved by a long poem; since poetry “intensely excites, by elevating, the soul,” and since intense excitement must by nature be brief, a long poem “is, in fact, merely a succession of brief ones – that is to say, of brief poetical effects” ( PC, 180). A poem such as Paradise Lost , Poe argues, is at least one half composed of prose, with which the poetic passages are interspersed. Hence the first poetic requirement, unity of impression, cannot be satisfied in a long poem.

Poe’s second major claim for the nature of poetry is that it must be “universally appreciable,” and it is beauty that has the power universally to please. Hence, “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem . . . That pleasure which is at once the most intense, the most elevating, and the most pure, is, I believe, found in the contemplation of the beautiful” ( PC, 181). Poe points out that beauty is not, as is commonly supposed, “a quality, . . . but an effect,” an “intense and pure elevation of soul – not of intellect, or of heart.” Truth, which is the aim of the intellect, or passion, which represents an excitement of the heart, says Poe, are both more easily attainable in prose than poetry. In fact, both of these are antagonistic to beauty, “which is the atmosphere and the essence of the poem” ( PC, 182). Hence beauty – not truth, or emotion, or goodness – is the peculiar province of poetry. Moreover, beauty is reconceived by Poe not as a quality belonging to an object but as an effect in the subject; his views, perhaps influenced by Kant via Coleridge , stop short of Kant’s sophistication. Whereas, for Kant, beauty was a mode of apprehension on the part of the subject, for Poe it is a response caused in the reader or listener by the literary object or poem. These are the general points made in Poe’s essay, the remainder of which attempts to explain the stages of the composition of “The Raven.”

Poe’s subsequent essay, The Poetic Principle (1850), offers a fuller account of his aesthetics. Here also, he urges that a long poem is a contradiction in terms since it cannot sustain the unity, the “totality of effect or impression,” that is the “vital requisite” in all works of art. Poe warns also that a poem may be “improperly brief ” such that it degenerates into epigrammatism. A poem that is very short cannot produce “a profound or enduring effect” ( PP, 890).

One of Poe’s chief endeavors in this essay is to identify and undermine what he calls “the heresy of The Didactic ,” which refers to the view that “the ultimate object of all Poetry is Truth” and that every poem “should inculcate a moral.” As against this, Poe insists that the most dignified and noble work is the “poem per se – this poem which is a poem and nothing more – this poem written solely for the poem’s sake” ( PP, 892– 893). This is perhaps the first insistence on artistic or poetic autonomy by an American writer; it may be significant, as emerges later in his text, that Poe somewhat aligned himself with Southern values and resented the domination of American letters by Northern liberalism, as instanced by the influence of the North American Review ( PP , 899). Poe himself wrote for the Southern Literary Messenger , eventually rising to the editorship of this journal. In this context, Poe’s insistence on artistic autonomy may have been a call to consider the beauty of a poem regardless of its political, as well as its moral, content; given that his notion of beauty was somewhat Platonic , it may also have been an attempt to lift art out of and above the sphere of everyday life and its entanglement in bitter political and social struggles.

At any rate, Poe makes a sharp distinction between “the truthful and the poetical modes” of apprehension and inculcation. Truth, he says, demands a severity of language: “We must be simple, precise, terse. We must be cool, calm, unimpassioned.” Such a mood, says Poe, “is the exact converse of the poetical” (“PP,” 893). Such a seemingly Platonic distinction between the language and mode of philosophy as against those of poetry has of course been challenged by many modern writers. Poe locates his views in a broader model of the mind which somewhat recalls Kant’s location of aesthetic judgment as situated between the realm of understanding (which addresses the realm of phenomena) and the realm of practical reason (comprehending the realm of morality). Poe likewise divides the mind into three aspects: “Pure Intellect, Taste, and the Moral Sense.” He places taste in the middle, acknowledging that it has “intimate relations” with the other two aspects; but he observes a distinction between these three offices: the intellect is concerned with truth; taste apprehends the beautiful; and moral sense disposes us toward duty (“PP,” 893). By situating his view of poetic autonomy within such a scheme, Poe is following a Kantian procedure of both identifying a subjective faculty specifically as aesthetic, and establishing boundaries between distinct human endeavors or attributes, boundaries which cannot be violated. Poe admits that the precepts of duty or even the lessons of truth can be introduced into a poem; but they must subserve the ultimate purpose of art, and must be placed “in proper subjection to that Beauty which is the atmosphere and the real essence of the poem” (“PP,” 895).

Hence poetry should not be realistic, merely copying or imitating the beauties that lie before us. Rather, poetry is “a wild effort to reach the Beauty above . . . to attain a portion of that Loveliness whose very elements, perhaps, appertain to eternity alone”; it is a “struggle to apprehend the supernal Loveliness” (“PP,” 894). Platonic passages such as these, urging the poet to rise above the transient world and to focus his gaze upon the eternal form of Beauty, must have attracted Baudelaire and some of the French Symbolists such as Mallarmé. Poe uses the term poetry in a broad sense, to cover all of the arts; but he sees a very close connection between poetry and music; in fact he defines poetry as “The Rhythmical Creation of Beauty. Its sole arbiter is Taste . . . In the contemplation of Beauty we alone find it possible to attain that pleasurable elevation, or excitement, of the soul, which we recognize as the Poetic Sentiment, and which is so easily distinguished from Truth, which is the satisfaction of the Reason, or from Passion, which is the excitement of the Heart” (“PP,” 895). What is not Platonic, however, is the isolated exaltation of Beauty over truth and goodness; the harmony that was possible, even in theory, in Plato’s system, between these forms or essences, between these multifold dimensions of human endeavor, has disintegrated into a desperate craving for a beauty that is not found in the actual world, and a retreat from the increasingly troubled realms of truth and morality.

The-Works-of-Edgar-Allan-Poe---Volume-1-by-Edgar-Allan-Poe

Poe defines the “poetic principle” as “the Human Aspiration for Supernal Beauty,” a quest for an excitement of the soul that is distinct from the intoxication of the heart or the satisfaction of reason. Truth may be instrumental in this quest inasmuch as it leads us to “perceive a harmony where none was apparent before.” The experience of such a harmony is “the true poetical effect” (“PP,” 906). Once again, we glimpse here reflections of Kantian ideas, refracted perhaps through Coleridge. The poet, according to Poe, recognizes in many phenomena the ambrosia that nourishes his soul, especially in “all unworldly motives – in all holy impulses – in all chivalrous, generous, and selfsacrificing deeds” (“PP,” 906). What is interesting here is that all of these phenomena appear to pertain to morality: the very morality that is expelled from the poet’s quest for beauty returns as the very ground of this quest, resurrected in aesthetic form on the ground of its own beauty. In other words, morality becomes an integral part of the aesthetic endeavor, and becomes justified on aesthetic grounds. Once again, art is seen as salvific, displacing the function of religion in serving as our guide to the world beyond.

Source: A History of Literary Criticism : From Plato to the Present Editor(s): M. A. R. Habib

“The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe: Analysis

The narrative poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1845, is a renowned masterpiece of American Gothic literature.

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary,
Over many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore—
While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
“‘Tis some visitor,” I muttered, “tapping at my chamber door—
Only this and nothing more.”
Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak December;
And each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.
Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow
From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore—
For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Nameless here for evermore.
And the silken, sad, uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me—filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before;
So that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating
“‘Tis some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door—
Some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door;—
This it is and nothing more.”
Presently my soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer,
“Sir,” said I, “or Madam, truly your forgiveness I implore;
But the fact is I was napping, and so gently you came rapping,
And so faintly you came tapping, tapping at my chamber door,
That I scarce was sure I heard you”—here I opened wide the door;—
Darkness there and nothing more.
Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,
Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before;
But the silence was unbroken, and the stillness gave no token,
And the only word there spoken was the whispered word, “Lenore?”
This I whispered, and an echo murmured back the word, “Lenore!”—
Merely this and nothing more.
Back into the chamber turning, all my soul within me burning,
Soon again I heard a tapping somewhat louder than before.
“Surely,” said I, “surely that is something at my window lattice;
Let me see, then, what thereat is, and this mystery explore—
Let my heart be still a moment and this mystery explore;—
‘Tis the wind and nothing more!”
Open here I flung the shutter, when, with many a flirt and flutter,
In there stepped a stately Raven of the saintly days of yore;
Not the least obeisance made he; not a minute stopped or stayed he;
But, with mien of lord or lady, perched above my chamber door—
Perched upon a bust of Pallas just above my chamber door—
Perched, and sat, and nothing more.
Then this ebony bird beguiling my sad fancy into smiling,
By the grave and stern decorum of the countenance it wore,
“Though thy crest be shorn and shaven, thou,” I said, “art sure no craven,
Ghastly grim and ancient Raven wandering from the Nightly shore—
Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!”
Quoth the Raven “Nevermore.”
Much I marvelled this ungainly fowl to hear discourse so plainly,
Though its answer little meaning—little relevancy bore;
For we cannot help agreeing that no living human being
Ever yet was blessed with seeing bird above his chamber door—
Bird or beast upon the sculptured bust above his chamber door,
With such name as “Nevermore.”
But the Raven, sitting lonely on the placid bust, spoke only
That one word, as if his soul in that one word he did outpour.
Nothing farther then he uttered—not a feather then he fluttered—
Till I scarcely more than muttered “Other friends have flown before—
On the morrow he will leave me, as my Hopes have flown before.”
Then the bird said “Nevermore.”
Startled at the stillness broken by reply so aptly spoken,
“Doubtless,” said I, “what it utters is its only stock and store
Caught from some unhappy master whom unmerciful Disaster
Followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore—
Till the dirges of his Hope that melancholy burden bore
Of ‘Never—nevermore’.”
But the Raven still beguiling all my fancy into smiling,
Straight I wheeled a cushioned seat in front of bird, and bust and door;
Then, upon the velvet sinking, I betook myself to linking
Fancy unto fancy, thinking what this ominous bird of yore—
What this grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt, and ominous bird of yore
Meant in croaking “Nevermore.”
This I sat engaged in guessing, but no syllable expressing
To the fowl whose fiery eyes now burned into my bosom’s core;
This and more I sat divining, with my head at ease reclining
On the cushion’s velvet lining that the lamp-light gloated o’er,
But whose velvet-violet lining with the lamp-light gloating o’er,
She shall press, ah, nevermore!
Then, methought, the air grew denser, perfumed from an unseen censer
Swung by Seraphim whose foot-falls tinkled on the tufted floor.
“Wretch,” I cried, “thy God hath lent thee—by these angels he hath sent thee
Respite—respite and nepenthe from thy memories of Lenore;
Quaff, oh quaff this kind nepenthe and forget this lost Lenore!”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!—
Whether Tempter sent, or whether tempest tossed thee here ashore,
Desolate yet all undaunted, on this desert land enchanted—
On this home by Horror haunted—tell me truly, I implore—
Is there— is there balm in Gilead?—tell me—tell me, I implore!”
“Prophet!” said I, “thing of evil!—prophet still, if bird or devil!
By that Heaven that bends above us—by that God we both adore—
Tell this soul with sorrow laden if, within the distant Aidenn,
It shall clasp a sainted maiden whom the angels name Lenore—
Clasp a rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore.”
“Be that word our sign of parting, bird or fiend!” I shrieked, upstarting—
“Get thee back into the tempest and the Night’s Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul hath spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!—quit the bust above my door!
Take thy beak from out my heart, and take thy form from off my door!”
And the Raven, never flitting, still is sitting, still is sitting
On the pallid bust of Pallas just above my chamber door;
And his eyes have all the seeming of a demon’s that is dreaming,
And the lamp-light o’er him streaming throws his shadow on the floor;
And my soul from out that shadow that lies floating on the floor
Shall be lifted—nevermore!

Introduction: “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Table of Contents

The narrative poem “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe, originally published in 1845, is a renowned masterpiece of American Gothic literature. The poem’s evocative imagery, complex structure, and exploration of grief and the supernatural have cemented its enduring legacy. “The Raven” established Poe’s reputation as a master of the macabre and continues to resonate powerfully with readers today.

Annotations of “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Narrative of “the raven” by edgar allan poe.

The poem begins with the narrator, who is sitting alone in his chamber, feeling weak and weary as he reads old books of forgotten lore.
As he nods off, he hears a tapping at his chamber door and assumes it is just a visitor.
The tapping continues, and he begins to feel anxious about who could be knocking on his door so late at night.
He works up the courage to answer the door and finds only darkness outside.
When he returns to his chamber, he hears a whisper of the name “Lenore” and assumes it is just his imagination.
He tries to shake off his fear and convince himself that the tapping was just the wind.
Suddenly, a raven appears in his room and perches above his chamber door.
The narrator is surprised by the bird’s presence and begins to ask it questions.
He observes the raven’s somber countenance and admires its regal appearance.
He asks the bird its name, but it only replies “Nevermore.”
The narrator becomes obsessed with the bird and continues to ask it questions, even though he knows it can only answer with the word “Nevermore.”
He reflects on the sorrow he feels for the loss of Lenore and wonders if the raven was sent to him as a divine messenger.
The narrator starts to feel hopeless and believes that he will never be able to escape his grief.
He decides to ask the raven if there is any hope for him to find peace, but it only replies with the same word, “Nevermore.”
The narrator realizes that the raven is a symbol of his despair and that he will never be able to escape his sorrow.
The poem ends with the narrator being haunted by the raven’s presence and feeling trapped in his own grief.

Literary Devices in “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Sound and poetic devices in “the raven” by edgar allan poe, functions of literary devices in “the raven” by edgar allan poe.

Creating Atmosphere: Poe uses descriptive language and repetition to create a melancholic and ominous atmosphere throughout the poem. The opening lines set the scene with a sense of dread and unease, while the repeated tapping at the chamber door builds tension and suspense. The use of vivid imagery and sensory details, such as the “quaint and curious” volumes of forgotten lore and the “ghost” of dying embers, further contribute to the overall atmosphere of darkness and foreboding.
Establishing Theme: The main theme of the poem is the narrator’s grief and despair over the loss of his beloved Lenore. Poe uses symbolism, such as the raven representing death and the bust of Pallas representing wisdom, to reinforce this theme. The repeated refrain of “Nevermore” serves as a haunting reminder of the narrator’s inability to escape his sorrow and the inevitability of death.
Creating Tone: The use of rhyme and meter, as well as the repetition of certain phrases and sounds, contributes to the overall tone of the poem. The frequent use of internal rhyme and alliteration gives the poem a musical quality that contrasts with its dark subject matter. The raven’s monotonous repetition of “Nevermore” creates a sense of hopelessness and despair that pervades the poem.
Developing Character: The narrator’s character is revealed through his thoughts, actions, and dialogue. His obsession with Lenore and his descent into madness are conveyed through his erratic behavior and his interactions with the raven. Poe also uses irony, such as the narrator’s attempts to reason with the bird, to create a sense of absurdity that adds to the overall tragicomic tone of the poem.

Themes in “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Loss and Grief: One of the central themes of “The Raven” is loss and grief. The narrator is mourning the death of his beloved Lenore and is unable to find solace in anything. This is shown in the lines, “Eagerly I wished the morrow;—vainly I had sought to borrow/From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore” (lines 9-10). The Raven itself can also be seen as a symbol of grief, as it comes to represent the narrator’s inability to move on from his loss.
Madness and Despair: Another major theme in “The Raven” is madness and despair. The narrator is clearly struggling with his mental state, as shown in lines like “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing,/Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (lines 25-26). As the Raven continues to haunt him, the narrator becomes increasingly unhinged and begins to question his own sanity.
Death and Mortality: Death and mortality are also recurring themes in “The Raven”. The Raven itself is often associated with death, and the narrator repeatedly asks it about the afterlife. This is shown in the lines, “Tell me what thy lordly name is on the Night’s Plutonian shore!” (line 47). The narrator is clearly preoccupied with the idea of death, both as it relates to his lost Lenore and to his own mortality.
Isolation and Loneliness: The final major theme in “The Raven” is isolation and loneliness. The narrator is alone in his chamber with only his grief and his thoughts for company. This is shown in lines like, “Deep into that darkness peering, long I stood there wondering, fearing” (line 25). The arrival of the Raven, while at first seeming like a comfort, only serves to increase the narrator’s sense of isolation, as the bird refuses to offer any comfort or companionship.

Literary Theories and Interpretations “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Essay topics, questions and thesis statements about “the raven” by edgar allan poe, 1. topic: the symbolism of “the raven”.

Question: How does Edgar Allan Poe use symbolism in “The Raven” to convey the narrator’s sense of loss and grief?
Thesis Statement: Through the use of symbolism, Edgar Allan Poe masterfully conveys the narrator’s overwhelming sense of loss and grief in “The Raven.”

2. Topic: The Narrator’s Mental State in “The Raven”

Question: What is the true nature of the narrator’s mental state in “The Raven,” and how does Poe use language and tone to convey it?
Thesis Statement: Edgar Allan Poe’s use of language and tone in “The Raven” suggests that the narrator is not only grieving, but also struggling with his own mental state, ultimately leading to his descent into madness.

3. Topic: The Gothic Elements in “The Raven”

Question: How does Edgar Allan Poe use gothic elements in “The Raven” to create a haunting and eerie atmosphere?
Thesis Statement: Edgar Allan Poe’s masterful use of gothic elements in “The Raven” contributes to the poem’s haunting and eerie atmosphere, immersing the reader in the narrator’s world of grief and despair.

4. Topic: The Theme of Death in “The Raven”

Question: What is the central theme of “The Raven,” and how does Poe use the raven as a symbol of death to explore this theme?
Thesis Statement: In “The Raven,” Edgar Allan Poe explores the theme of death through the use of the raven as a powerful symbol, ultimately revealing the narrator’s acceptance of his own mortality.

Short Question-Answer about “The Raven” by Edgar Allan Poe

Literary works similar to “the raven” by edgar allan poe.

“The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” by Samuel Taylor Coleridge: This long narrative poem shares “The Raven”‘s focus on the supernatural, a brooding atmosphere, and themes of guilt, despair, and isolation. Both poems explore the consequences of a single act and the psychological toll it can take.
“Lenore” by Gottfried August Bürger: This German ballad was a significant influence on Poe. It explores the devastation of losing a beloved and features a similar sense of longing and unremitting grief as found in “The Raven.”
“Sonnets to Orpheus” by Rainer Maria Rilke: Though written later, these sonnets grapple with similar themes of death, mourning, and the transformative power of grief. Both “The Raven” and Rilke’s sonnets explore the human struggle to make sense of loss in a vast and indifferent universe.
“Annabel Lee” by Edgar Allan Poe: Another of Poe’s own works, this poem also focuses on lost love and a haunting sense of longing after death. It shares a similarly mournful tone and explores the idea that love can persist even beyond the grave.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” by Edgar Allan Poe: While a short story, it shares thematic similarities with “The Raven” in its exploration of a character’s descent into madness and guilt. Both works delve into the darkest corners of the human psyche.
Gothic Novels ( Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole): These novels often share a similar focus on the supernatural, macabre settings, and the psychological torment of the characters. They all contribute to the same literary tradition that valued emotional intensity and the exploration of the darker side of the human experience.

Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts in the United States of America on January 19, 1809. He was the son of professional actors David and Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins Poe. His father left the family shortly after his birth, while his mother, Elizabeth died a year later. He was just three at that time. John Allan and Frances Allan, who gave him their family name and raised him in Richmond without any process of formal adoption.

John Allan took great care of his Edgar Allan Poe’s education and sent him to the best schools. Later, he got admission in the University of Virginia where Poe won great honors for himself. However, he fell into gambling and brought debts for his foster father. John refused to pay for him after which Poe had to leave his education. When he returned to Richmond, John Allan almost left him high and dry due to his fury over Poe’s gambling.

Married Life and Tragedy

He soon joined his aunt Maria Clemm in Maryland. They went to Richmond where he joined the publishing industry. Soon he married his young cousin, Virginia, in 1835 and succeeded in establishing his career as a writer. At first, Poe had very little success in writing. Later to his dismay, he found his wife suffering from tuberculosis. She died in 1847, leaving Poe to defend the onslaughts of acute depression, from which he never recovered.

Despite moving to Richmond and later Baltimore, he could not overcome depression and failed to cope with the loss after his wife’s death. He was found unconscious in 1849 in Baltimore and died four days later on October 07, 1849. Doctors suggested that he might have lost his life due to rabies.

Some Important Facts of His Life

He is buried in Westminster Presbyterian Graveyard in the State of Baltimore.
Poe receives the second funeral 160 years after his death at Baltimore with 700 guests.
Rufus Wilmot Griswold has written Poe’s obituary with a fake name “Ludwig”.
Edgar Allan Poem Museum has been set up in Richmond in his memory.

Writing Career

Faced with acute poverty and a shortage of money, he joined the US army after moving to Boston. It was the year of 1827 and just two years after that, he started writing poems and published his first collection Tamerlane and Other Poems in 1829 and later published another collection Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. However, he was disheartened over not meeting any critical reception in the literary circles. After leaving the US army, he joined the military academy but left it for good. Soon, he started his editing career with the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. He did not stop there. He joined various other journals as an editor. Some of them include Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine . Later, he joined the Broadway Journal and became a good story writer. Until then, he established himself as an excellent short story writer and has written well-known stories such as “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” Later, he turned to poetry and the publication of “ The Raven .”

After establishing his career first as an editor and then as a critic, poet, and short story writer, Edgar Allan Poe could not earn enough to live a comfortable life. He became prominent due to his analytical method of creating gothic stories. However, he formed a distinct style on account of his terror-filled type of detective and horror short fiction . Various critics have termed him a modern short story writer, while some have seen him part of the movement writing “art for art’s sake.” Some French critics have termed his style as a precursor of the detective fiction. Most of his stories have first-person narratives with a compelling atmosphere in which they act and comprise mentally weak but seemingly stable characters . Although various critics have termed Poe, a Gothic writer, yet various others have called him the father of horror literature. The recurring themes of most of his poems and short stories are always death. He has also written about other things but that is satirical and often exaggerates things to the point of irony . Regarding literary devices , he often turns to hyperboles , heavy diction and repetition to make the tones of his stories,

Poe’s Works

Best Poems: Edgar Allan Poe has tried his hands in both poetry as well as short fiction. Some of his best poems include “ Annabel Lee ”, “The City in the Sea”, “ Eldorado ”, “To Helen”, “ The Haunted Palace ”, “Tamerlane”, “Ulalume” and “ A Dream Within a Dream .”
Best Short Stories: Some of the best stories or tales that he has written include “The Black Cat”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, “The Pit and the Pendulum”, “The Tell-Tale Heart”, “Hop-Frog” and “The Fall of the House of Usher.” There are several other stories too.
Other Notable Works: Besides these, he has also written a play , Politian, a novel , The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, and some essays including “The Poetic Principle” and “Eureka: A Prose Poem.”

Poe’s Impacts on Future Literature

Edgar Allan Poe has left deep imprints on the American as well as international literature. In fact, writers who write in Gothic, detective or horror tradition, take inspiration from Poe and his style of creating suspense in their storyline. He is credited with starting the movement in which a literary piece is written for the sake of art. Nearly every other American writer writing in detective or horror style, such as Clive Barker or Stephen King, have followed his footsteps. The genre of horror fiction owes a great deal to Poe for its popularity. Even in criticism, he has been ranked as the one who has focused on structure and effects of style on the fiction.

Edgar Allan Poe’s Famous Quotes

“I became insane, with long intervals of horrible sanity.” (A Terrible Evil, A Letter)
“We loved with a love that was more than love.” (Annabel Lee)
“All that we see or seem is but a dream within a dream.” (A Dream within a Dream)
“Those who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who dream only by night .” (Eleonora)

10 Best Edgar Allan Poe Poems
10 Dramatic Uses of Apostrophe by Edgar Allan Poe
Literary Writing Style of Edgar Allan Poe
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
John Milton
Annabel Lee
Percy Bysshe Shelley
John Masefield
Randall Mann
Rupert Brooke
Emily Bronte
Christopher Marlowe
Alfred Lord Tennyson
Anne Bradstreet
Benjamin Franklin
Henry van Dyke
Ellen Bryant Voigt
Stephen Foster
Thomas Hood
Raymond A. Foss
Robert Burns
Amber Flora Thomas
Alicia Elsbeth Stallings
Dorothy Parker
Claude McKay
Eugene Field
Langston Hughes
William Butler Yeats
Robert W. Service
A Dream within a Dream
The Conqueror Worm
To My Mother
The Haunted Palace
To — — –. Ulalume: A Ballad

Work & Careers
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Literary Writing Style of Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe's Rhetorical Patterns. Poe uses almost every other rhetorical device to make his writing style forceful. These patterns include comparison and contrast, repetition, anaphoras, and above all, rhetorical questions. This passage from his story "The Tell-Tale Heart" shows the use of repetition, pauses, and rhetorical questions ...
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A Tale" 642). Thus, the author uses literary devices and language effects to create a double-natured personality that would enable multilayered work. As compared with the mentioned work, "The Masque of the Red Death" differs in its frequently used words, which has significance. The initial tone of the story is pompous, majestic, and ...
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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 ...
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In ''The Tell-Tale Heart,'' Edgar Allan Poe uses various literary devices, such as symbolism, simile, point of view, and imagery to create a specific effect in his writing. Symbolism is the use of ...
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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 ...
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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 ...
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The Raven by Edgar Allan Poe (Poem + Analysis)
Poetic Form: Narrative. Time Period: 19th Century. This poem is a haunting and melancholic poem that explores themes of grief, loss, and mortality. It showcases Edgar Allan Poe's skillful use of language. View Poetry + Review Corner. This popular narrative poem is written in the first person. ' The Raven ' personifies the feeling of intense ...
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"Annabel Lee" is the last poem composed by Edgar Allan Poe, one of the foremost figures of American literature. It was written in 1849 and published not long after the author's death in the same year. It features a subject that appears frequently in Poe's writing: the death of a young, beautiful woman.
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Thanks for exploring this SuperSummary Study Guide of "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe. A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student ...
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literary devices are tools used by writers to convey their emotions, ideas, and themes to make texts more appealing to the reader. Edgar Allan Poe has used various literary devices to make his poems visual and appealing. Some of the major literary devices have been analyzed below. Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds in the same line. For example, the sound of /i/ in "But a ...
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Article contents

Poe's Persona

Early Poetry

Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque

The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket

Poe's Criticism

The Raven and Other Poems

Poe, the Detective Story, and Science Fiction

Poe's Influence

Selected Works

Further Reading

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Annabel Lee Summary & Analysis by Edgar Allan Poe

The Full Text of “Annabel Lee”

“Annabel Lee” Summary

Death and Grief

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Lines 21-26

Lines 27-33

Lines 34-41

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The Natural World

“Annabel Lee” Poetic Devices & Figurative Language

Pathetic Fallacy

Form, Meter, & Rhyme Scheme of “Annabel Lee”

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Edgar Allan Poe

Married Life and Tragedy

Some Important Facts of His Life

Writing Career

Poe’s Works

Poe’s Impacts on Future Literature

Edgar Allan Poe’s Famous Quotes

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