If you think Edgar Allan Poe's writing is dark and heavy, you haven't heard HIS story. Poe was constantly immersed in a morbid environment; both his parents died, his foster parents died, his brother died, and his wife died. Poe was familiar, probably way too familiar, with struggles, both internal and external. Poe struggled with poverty, unrequited love, coping with loss, fulfilling his dreams as a writer, maintaining a reputation, and keeping his sanity constantly throughout his life and career. His father figure never supported him or his dreams, making Poe that much more determined and equally as much more rebellious. Poe constantly sought to seek something greatER and more colorful and otherworldly. Mystery and morbidity follow Poe to the grave, he himself dying tragically and suddenly far away from his family and friends.
On a basic level, it is easy to connect Poe to his work because they toy with the ideas of loss, fear, insanity, and overwhelming emotions, all of which Poe can obviously relate to. Another element of understanding is gained when you link Poe to the Romantic movement. Poe's surreal stories become less random and more insightful. They can be seen as a protest against not only his foster father but the mindset of the time, which was very money and profit driven. Poe chose to express, both in his life and writing, ideas of freedom that were imaginative and beyond his reality. Poe chose to believe in the power of seeing something beyond your reality that seems impossible, whether it be fulfilling your dream, finding love, finding excitement and adventure, bringing back those you've lost, or conversing with a talking bird.
Hey Bell this is so good! A point that many people, including myself, glossed over is that Poe's works were blatantly representational of characteristics regarding the Romantic Movement. Well done
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ReplyDeleteI think anyone would agree that Poe's life was a constant struggle and that obviously ties to why his literature is so dark but I have to ask, how exactly is Poe's writing romantic? Romanticism as I know it is "sugarcoating" a time or situation to highlight the good or pleasant parts of it. Whatever Poe did, he definitely did not "sugarcoat" things. If anything, he tried to make the situations seem WORSE than they already were to add to that depressing tone.
ReplyDeleteRomanticism, Britannica Classic: “The Spirit of Romanticism” [Credit: Encyclopædia Britannica, Inc.] attitude or intellectual orientation that characterized many works of literature, painting, music, architecture, criticism, and historiography in Western civilization over a period from the late 18th to the mid-19th century. Romanticism can be seen as a rejection of the precepts of order, calm, harmony, balance, idealization, and rationality that typified Classicism in general and late 18th-century Neoclassicism in particular. It was also to some extent a reaction against the Enlightenment and against 18th-century rationalism and physical materialism in general. Romanticism emphasized the individual, the subjective, the irrational, the imaginative, the personal, the spontaneous, the emotional, the visionary, and the transcendental.
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