Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849)

 Poe was taken in by the wealthy tobacco merchant John Allan

and his wife Frances Valentine Allan in Richmond
 Mr. Allan reared Poe to be a businessman and a Virginia
gentleman, but Poe dreamt of emulating his childhood hero, the
British poet Lord Byron
 At the age of twenty-seven, Poe married Virginia Clemm, who
was not yet fourteen
 He returned to Richmond in the summer of 1849 and
reconnected with his first fiancée, Elmira Royster Shelton.
 However, on the way to Philadelphia, Poe stopped in Baltimore
and disappeared for five days. He was sent to hospital, where
Poe spent the last days of his life far from home and surrounded
by strangers. The exact cause of Poe’s death remains a mystery.
 Major works
- The first book of short stories, Tales of the Grotesque and
Arabesque (1837)
 Berenice, Morella and The Tell-Tale Heart, – early tales
 The publication of “The Raven” in 1845 made Poe a
household name
 The Philosophy of Composition (1846), The Rationale of
Verse (1848), and The Poetic Principle, popular essays
 The Fall of the House of Usher (1939), The Black Cat,
The Masque of the Red Death – short stories
 The novel Arthur Gordon Pym (1838) is Poe’s longest
work
  Edgar Allan Poe
Poe is a representative of the Gothic literature, a genre
that rose with Romanticism in Britain in the late
eighteenth century, explores the dark side of human
experience—death, alienation, nightmares, ghosts, and
haunted landscapes. Poe brought the Gothic to America.
American Gothic literature dramatizes a culture plagued
by poverty and slavery through characters afflicted with
various forms of insanity and melancholy. Poe,
America’s foremost southern writer before William
Faulkner, generated a Gothic ethos from his own
experiences in Virginia and other slaveholding
territories, and the black and white imagery in his
stories reflects a growing national anxiety over the issue
of slavery.
 Edgar Allan Poe
Poe also introduced of a new form of short fiction—
the detective story—in tales featuring the Parisian
crime solver C. Auguste Dupin. The detective story
follows naturally from Poe’s interest in puzzles,
word games, and secret codes, which he loved to
present and decode in the pages of the Messenger to
dazzle his readers. The word “detective” did not exist
in English at the time that Poe was writing, but the
genre has become a fundamental mode of twentieth-
century literature and film. Dupin and his techniques
of psychological inquiry have informed countless
sleuths, including Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s Sherlock
Holmes and Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe.
Edgar Allan Poe
 Themes, Motifs & Symbols
Themes
Love and Hate
Poe explores the similarity of love and hate in his works. He
portrays the psychological complexity of these two supposedly
opposite emotions, emphasizing the ways they enigmatically blend
into each other. Poe’s psychological insight anticipates the theories
of Sigmund Freud, the founder of psychoanalysis and one of the
twentieth century’s most influential thinkers. Poe, like Freud,
interpreted love and hate as universal emotions, thereby severed
from the specific conditions of time and space.
The Gothic terror is the result of the narrator’s simultaneous love
for himself and hatred of his rival. The double shows that love and
hate are inseparable and suggests that they may simply be two
forms of the most intense form of human emotion. The narrator
loves himself, but when feelings of self-hatred arise in him, he
projects that hatred onto an imaginary copy of himself.
Themes
Self vs. Alter Ego
In many of Poe’s Gothic works, characters wage internal
conflicts by creating imaginary alter egos or assuming
alternate and opposite personalities. The narrator uses the
alter ego to separate himself from his insanity. He projects
his inner turmoil onto his alter ego and is able to forget that
the trouble resides within him. The alter ego becomes a
rival of the self because its resemblance to the self is
unmistakable. Suicide results from the delusion that the
alter ego is something real that can be eliminated in order to
leave the self in peace.
 Themes
The power of the dead over the living
Poe often gives memory the power to keep the
dead alive. Poe distorts this otherwise
commonplace literary theme by bringing the
dead literally back to life, employing memory
as the trigger that reawakens the dead, who are
usually women. While the narrator’s memories
belong only to his own mind, Poe allows these
memories to exert force in the physical world.
The memory of the dead shows the power of
love to resist even the permanence of death.
 Motifs
The Masquerade
At masquerades Poe’s characters abandon social conventions and leave
themselves vulnerable to crime. The masquerade carries the traditional
meanings of joy and social liberation. Reality is suspended, and people
can temporarily assume another identity. The masquerade is enchanting
because guests wear a variety of exotic and grotesque costumes, but the
narrator and his double don the same Spanish outfit. The double Wilson
haunts the narrator by denying him the thrill of unique transformation. In
a crowd full of guests in costumes, the narrator feels comfortably
anonymous enough to attempt to murder his double. Lastly, in “The
Masque of the Red Death,” the ultimate victory of the plague over the
selfish retreat of Prince Prospero and his guests occurs during the
palace’s lavish masquerade ball. The mysterious guest’s gruesome
costume, which shows the bloody effects of the Red Death, mocks the
larger horror of Prospero’s party in the midst of his suffering peasants.
The pretense of costume allows the guest to enter the ball, and bring the
guests their death in person.
 Motifs
Animals
In Poe’s murder stories, homicide requires animalistic element. Animals
kill, they die, and animal imagery provokes and informs crimes committed
between men. Animals signal the absence of human reason and morality,
but sometimes humans prove less rational than their beastly counterparts.
In “The Black Cat,” the murder of Pluto results from the narrator’s loss of
reason and plunge into “perverseness,” The story’s second cat behaves
cunningly, leading the narrator into a more serious crime in the murder of
his wife, and then betraying him to the police. The role reversal—irrational
humans vs. rational animals—indicates that Poe considers murder a
fundamentally animalistic, and therefore inhuman act. In “The Tell-Tale
Heart,” the murderer dehumanize his victims by likening him to animal.
The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” claims to hate and murder the old
man’s “vulture eye,” which he describes as “pale blue with a film over it.”
He attempts to justify his actions by implicitly comparing himself to a
helpless creature threatened by a hideous scavenger.
Symbols
The Whirlpool
In the works of Poe the whirlpool symbolizes
insanity. When the whirlpool transports the
narrator from the peaceful South Seas to the
surreal waters of the South Pole, it also
symbolically transports him out of the space
of scientific rationality to that of the
imaginative fancy of the German moralists.
 Symbols
Eyes

In “The Tell-Tale Heart,” the narrator fixates on the idea that an old man is
looking at him with the Evil Eye and transmitting a curse on him. At the same
time that the narrator obsesses over the eye, he wants to separate the old man
from the Evil Eye in order to spare the old man from his violent reaction to
the eye. The narrator reveals his inability to recognize that the “eye” is the
“I,” or identity, of the old man. The eyes symbolize the essence of human
identity, which cannot be separated from the body. The eye cannot be killed
without causing the man to die. Similarly, in “Ligeia,” the narrator is unable
to see behind Ligeia’s dark and mysterious eyes. Because the eyes symbolize
her Gothic identity, they conceal Ligeia’s mysterious knowledge, a knowledge
that both guides and haunts the narrator.
 Symbols
“Fortunato”
In “The Cask of Amontillado,” Poe uses
Fortunato’s name symbolically, as an ironic
device. Though his name means “the fortunate
one” in Italian, Fortunato meets an unfortunate
fate as the victim of Montresor’s revenge.
Fortunato adds to the irony of his name by
wearing the costume of a court jester. While
Fortunato plays in jest, Montresor sets out to
fool him, with murderous results.
 Important quotations
“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…”
Annabel Lee
 Important quotations
 “… 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…”
The Raven