Writing Style of Edgar Allan Poe - Essay Example

Edgar Allen Poe Edgar Allen Poe was born on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts to Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins and David Poe, Jr. Poe grew up notknowing his father, who abandoned him and his family just days after he was born. His mother died when he was young and he was sent to live with a foster family. Unfortunately, death and the losses of loved ones would quickly become concepts that Poe would become familiar with. When Poe first began writing poems and short stories, they were light and cheerful, based on love he felt for some of the girls he was involved in. As more people in his life began to become sick and die, his poems took a dark turn. Poe’s personal tragedies played a huge role in the shaping of his poems, as did his abuse of alcohol and opium that increased throughout his lifetime. After the death of his mother, Poe became afraid of cemeteries, worried that ghosts or bodies would come out of their graves and come after him (Symons, pg. 27). Though it was not nearly as noticeable as it would be in years to come, Poe’s writing during this time gradually turned darker. He started focusing more on life and death, implementing sorrow and death into his poems. The poems during this era are no longer in print, but they were the onset of the writing that Poe’s fans would come to recognize and associate with Poe. The first poem that was first correlated with the death of someone close to Poe was “The Raven,” which was written after Poe’s brother had died from tuberculosis. The poem is a sorrowful one, centered on the never-ending remembrances of lost loved ones. The poem is about a woman named Lenore, and the protagonist of the poem spends the majority of the poem talking to the raven that has come into his home. At first the man is unaware of what has entered his house, but he speaks to it anyway, too lost in his thoughts of his Lenore. He wants to believe that what is in his home is her. The speaker becomes so lost to the point that he drives himself insane. The poem reflects the emotions that Poe felt after his brother died. He and his brother had never been close, a fact that disturbed Poe after his brother died. “The Raven” speaks of constantly remembering someone after they have gone, so much that the deceased person becomes real, yet not real enough to touch or see. The speaker spent the length of the poem hoping that the thing in his house was who he missed the most, but he drove himself insane with these hopes. The same can be said for Poe himself. He spent so much time thinking about the past and missing the relationship he never had with his brother that he slowly began to go crazy, something that continued to show the more poems that he wrote. In 1834, Poe’s foster father died. Poe had never been close to his foster father, having put up with years of abuse from the man, but the death was still very jarring to him. Poe’s short stories and poems began to include sudden death, revealing how the thoughts in his head revolved around the cruel and abusive world that he lived in. Through his writing, he set out to prove that nothing in life was ever stagnant, and just like a quick act of abuse, life could easily turn on someone. It was during these years that Poe felt that he began to understand the workings and injustices of the world by writing about them. In 1847, Virginia, Poe’s wife, began dying from tuberculosis. As he watched his wife slowly succumb to death, Poe penned “The Conqueror Worm” and “Annabel Lee.” “The Conqueror Worm” describes in graphic detail the process of the decaying of dead human bodies by worms and maggots. The poem can be seen in correlation with the deterioration of Virginia’s life (Poe & Fisher, pg. 223). Just as the worms and maggots ate away at the body in the poem, so did the disease in Virginia’s body. “Annabel Lee” had been written after Virginia died and with Virginia in mind even though the title suggests otherwise. The poem, as many other of Poe’s poems, focused on the death of a loved one. However, unlike some of the other poems, this one was obvious in regard to its influence. Poe wrote about the love that his protagonist felt about Annabel Lee and the love that she returned to him. There love was so strong that even the angels were jealous. Annabel Lee eventually dies during a cold storm, being taken into heaven. The protagonist mourns for his love, not knowing what to do without her by his side. It is clear that the death of Virginia inspired the poem, personally taking the place of Annabel Lee, again showing exactly the state of mind that Poe was left in after this death. From a young age until his own death, Edgar Allen Poe witnessed many deaths of the people that he loved and even people that he did not, yet he was still deeply impacted by the loss. Death had been all that he had known by the time that he succumbed to it himself in 1849 after going missing for five days and being found in a haze of delirium (Hennessy, pg. 164). Death and abandonment, often hand-in-hand, became the primary topics in everything that Poe wrote, though it must be pointed out that despite everything that Poe had gone through, he never once ceased to write about it. His poems and short stories were left behind as reminders as to the experiences that Poe went through and how a small part of him had died with each person that left him gradually alone in the world. Through his numerous poems and stories, Poe shared with the world the destruction that could be found in his own personal world. Works Cited Hennessy, Una. Edgar Allan Poe, 1809-1849; A Critical Biography. New York: Haskell House, 1971. Print. Poe, Edgar Allan, and Benjamin Franklin Fisher. The Essential Tales and Poems of Edgar Allan Poe. New York: Barnes & Noble Books, 2004. Print. Symons, Julian. The Life and Works of Edgar Allan Poe. London: House Of Stratus, 2001. Print. Read More