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Example research essay topic: Edgar Allan Poe Poe Edgar Allan - 1,505 words

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Edgar Allan Poe Edgar Allan Poe's contributions to American literature have become increasingly more prominent as the years have passed. As short fiction has become a more accepted genre in literary circles, Poe's theories are studied with more passion. Although he lived a rather melancholy existence, Poe did experience moments of joy, and desired to capture beauty through poetical form. Indeed, what he left behind for the literary world was his gifted genius, revealed through his poetry, fiction, and criticism. The darkness that seemed to surround Poe's life began as an infant. Poe was born January 19, 1809 in Boston Massachusetts, the second son of David and Eliza Poe.

Soon afterward, David Poe abandoned the family. Two-years later Eliza passed away, succumbing to tuberculosis. After her death, Poe, his infant sister, Rosalie, and brother William were separated. William was sent to live with their paternal grandparents.

Poe moved to Richmond Virginia to live with John and Fannie Allan; Rosalie was taken in by another family in Richmond (Silverman 1 - 15). John Allan was a successful businessman; the poverty that Poe had been accustomed to was a thing of the past. Although not extravagant with Poe, John Allan ensured that he had a Brassfield 2 quality education. While in living in England with the Allan's, he attended private academies and continued his education in private schools when they returned to the states. Poe enrolled at the University of Virginia in 1826.

While there, he accumulated a large debt. He appealed to John Allan to repay the debts but Allan refused. He believed that Poe was in debt due to gambling and his addiction to alcohol (Silverman 29 - 38). The greatest contributor to Poe's despair would have to be his self-inflicted addiction to alcohol. His foster family's social status made his alcoholism a shameful vice, and a source of conflict. Using it as an escape of sorts, Poe's life was greatly affected by the substance, disrupting his work, his first engagement, and his time with his foster family.

After he left his family, he tried to make a life in Boston, where he found his relatives poor, but giving. Reunited with his brother, William, Poe found him dying at the haunting age of 24. His writing became more insistent, as he found himself rejected by several newspapers. He eventually married his cousin, Virginia, who became a symbol to him as the ideal woman. In 1837, he moved to New York, where he engaged in literary wars with his contemporaries.

Highly opinionated, Poe was not timid about criticizing the great poets and writers of his time. Poe continued to pursue his writing, and in 1947, Virginia died of tuberculosis, which left him understandably broken. However, upon her death, Poe still used her as his muse, finding the inspiration to write of death and love and reunion. He died on October 7, 1849 (Hart 521 - 2). Throughout his short-lived life, Edgar Allan Poe compiled a collection of literature, offering poetry, short fiction and literary criticism. In fact, perhaps even more than his poetry and short fiction, Poe's criticism is what has endured, and has recently come into its own.

In his Brassfield 3 day, Poe was always trying to find his place among the literati. Hart writes, There have been strongly divergent evaluations of Poe's literary significance, from Emerson's dismissal of him as the jingle man and Lowells three-fifths genius and two fifths sheer fudge to Yeats declaration, always and for all lands a great lyric poet' (522). The criticism of his poetry and writing was a direct criticism on his theories, as he implemented his theories in all of his writing. As Charles E. May notes, Poe's demand that inner coherence rather than external correspondence be the criteria by which to judge the artwork and his identification of plot with form played a significant role in the creation of his own fiction and the development of his thought (117).

His The Philosophy of Composition and The Poetical Principle are two pieces of criticism, which will be forever debated. Essentially, Poe believed that length was extremely important. Poe said, If any literary work is too long to be read at one sitting, we must be content to dispense with the immensely important effect derivable from unity of impression for, if two sittings be required, the affairs of the world interfere, and every thing like totality is at once destroyed (May 129). Thus, length was the very key to the enjoyment of a poem or a short story. Unity was a very important element in Poe's writing.

As May says, The single unifying factor in all of Poe's works is the concept of unity itself (11). Poe was deeply concerned with the relationship of words and their effect on the reader. He was also driven to create a dream world, one self-contained within the writing itself, without the help of external forces. He did not want his writing to be dependent on any outside variable. May adds, And the function of Brassfield 4 language is not to mirror external reality but to create a self-contained realm of reality that corresponds only to the basic human desire for total unity (11). Consequently, in Poe's writing one can find these theories at use.

Now that short fiction has become an accepted genre, Poe's theories have become even more important. For the short story, Poe believed in an inverse approach to writing. He believed that the writer should have one single effect, which motivated the entire piece of literature. The writer would come up with the end, and find the means by which to achieve it.

Poe said once in a review of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales: A skillful literary artist has constructed a tale. If wise, he has not fashioned his thoughts to accommodate his incidents: but having conceived, with deliberate care, a certain unique or single effect to be wrought out, he then invents such incidents he then combines such events as may best aid him in establishing this preconceived effect (May 124). For example, in A Descent into the Maelstrom, Poe spends most of the story setting up the situation. He creates a whole world, one that is natural in its setting, but so extreme, that it becomes unnatural.

By the end of the story, the situation is finally established, with the denouement being imminent, as well. Again, the story revolves around the one single effect (Poe 48 - 61). With poetry, Poe believed in its power to convey the beautiful Poe thought that art must attempt to convey the souls vision of beauty, for man could not duplicate the Great Design. He could only attempt to reproduce the effect that an intuitive perception of perfect order would stimulate (Jacobs 297). As previously mentioned, he also felt that there could never exist the Brassfield 5 long poem.

Poe said in The Poetic Principle, : I hold that a long poem does not exist. I maintain that the phrase, a long poem, is simply a flat contradiction in terms (May 130). In what is arguably Poe's most famous work, The Raven, he attempts to put his theories into practice, creating a world independent of any outside force. He employs the mechanical in this poem and uses the Raven to express his opinion that beauty can be found in repetition, in something as mechanical as this. Poetry manages to convey the beauty of the human soul, and can even be achieved by the most mechanical of devices. As Barbara Johnson observed, It is as though a talking bird were the perfect figure for the poetic parroting (Rosenheim and Rachman 43).

Poe's mastery of his theories allows him to write a highly artificial poem that describes the signifier as an artifice that somehow captures the genuine (Rosenheim and Rachman 47). Again, Poe desires to create another world, an artificial creation, but in the process conveys the beauty he desires. Edgar Allan Poe's life was one full of despair and depression. Perhaps it was this state of mind which made him fearless, allowing him to voice his opinion in spite of the criticism directed at him. Today, his words are being regarded with a newfound significance, for short fiction has become a genre in and of itself. His theories on writing will continue to be studied for generations to come.

Though his place in literary circles was uncertain before, his place in the literary cannon is undeniable today. Bibliography Hart, James David. The Oxford Companion to American Literature. New York: Oxford University Press, 1983 Jacobs, Robert D.

Poe: Journalist &# 038; Critic. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1969. May, Charles E. Edgar Allan Poe: A Study of the Short Fiction.

Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1991. Poe, Edgar Allan. Tales of Mystery and Imagination. Hertfordshire: Wordsworth Editions Limited, 1993 Rosenheim, Shawn, and Stephen Rachman, eds. The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995 Silverman, Kenneth.

Edgar A. Poe, Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance. New York: Harper 1992


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Research essay sample on Edgar Allan Poe Poe Edgar Allan

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