Poe's Heroes To Insanity And Death example essay topic

Death is a central theme in the work of Edgar Allan Poe. Some assume this to be because of the death of many of his loved ones; others seem to think he is merely insane and uses this topic because of the fascination readers have with death. His concentration of such matters as bizarre deaths and torture leaves some to doubt his sanity, others consider Poe a literary pioneer as Michael L. Burdock once said. (Leone 102) Poe's parents were touring actors and both passed away before he was three years of age. From there he went to live with John Allan who was a merchant in Richmond, Virginia.

He attended five years of school in England and in 1826 he entered the University of Virginia, but only stayed one year due to gambling depts he refused to pay. Allan prevented Poe's return to the University of Virginia and broke off Poe's engagement to his first love, Sarah Elmira Royster. Later he enlisted in the army, and not long after being in the army Allan secured Poe's release from the army and made him an appointment at West Point. After six months Poe contrived to be dismissed from West Point for disobedience of orders. Poe's fellow cadets gave funds for the publication of Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. The most contradictory judgments have been laid on Poe's character.

Reverend Rufus Griswold uses quotes like "he is a drunkard and drug addict who walked the streets, in madness or melancholy, with lips moving in indistinct curses". (American Writers 409) Baudelaire says that Poe is a "fallen angel who remembered heaven". (American Writers 409) Whereas Emerson looks down upon that jingle man who shook his bells and called their sound poetry. (American Writers 409) Tennyson admires him as an equal and Yeats proclaims that he is obviously the greatest of American poets, and always, and for all lands, a great lyric poet. Some critics have therefore made claims that Poe is a mere mystified who writes his stories only to please the public and follow the current fashion. The imaginative terror which haunts his soul, like any form of fear, whatever its occasion or immediate cause may be, appears in particular the vivid descriptions of the deaths of his characters, especially in "Lig eia".

Sometimes it takes a form of fear of the unavoidable, an insufferable vertigo and an unspeakable horror which overwhelms the heroes soul just as he is swallowed by a bottomless pit, as in "MS. Found in a Bottle". Several critics, says John Guesser, point out Montresor's irrational behavior just before he walls in Fortunato, to the ambiguity of the Montresor coat of arms, and to indications that the narrator suffers from a guilty conscience, to support their contention that Montresor does not satisfy the criteria for the perfect act of revenge that he enumerates at the start of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Cask of Amontillado". Building on those arguments, I would like to suggest that Fortunato literally and figuratively gets the last laugh in the tale because he knows what lies ahead for Montresor and himself in the next world. Significantly, Fortunato is the one who first alludes to what J. Gerald Kennedy calls Montresor's "theological" guilt when he calls out, "For the love of God, Montresor", shortly before Poe entombs the man. Some interpreters, according to John Grues sor, have read Fortunato as Montresor's double, emphasizing among other things the similarities between their names, which critics typically associate with fortune and treasure, respectively. Although I do not dismiss the presence of doubling in the story, Montresor may represent one half of humankind's dual nature and Fortunato the other.

There are also differences between the Latin root words on which each name is based: Tresor comes from thesaurus, meaning a storehouse or hoard; Fortunato derives from fortunatas, translated as made prosperous or happy. Although fortune can refer to money or wealth, it can also be an abstract term referring to luck, fate, and destiny in a way that the more concrete treasure cannot. Put simply, Fortunato is fortune's favorite -- the Lady Fortunato, none other than Lady Luck -- and, by extension, God's favorite; Montresor, in contrast, roots in the physical and material world. As Montresor himself remarks, "Fortunato is the golden boy" Montresor is not as fortunate, or as he asserts, but losses his status and / or his contentment to someone who is unfortunate, like Montresor, Fortunato's happiness is a daily injury. Thus, Montresor conceives and executes an ingenious plan, which appears to succeed, for revenging himself on fortune's friend.

Sealed in the Montresor family vaults, Fortunato loses everything. (Poe's The Cask Of The Amontillado) The tales of imagination are the undisputed in domain of fear. Poe again and again tries to make us experience the same feelings as the narrator of "The House of the Fall of the Usher."a sense of insufferable gloom pervaded my spirit... There was an iciness, a sinking, a sickening of the heart... There can be no doubt that the consciousness of the rapid increase of my superstition... served mainly to accelerate the increase itself. Such, I have long known, is the paradoxical law of all sentiments having terror as a basis...

An irrepressible tremor gradually pervaded my frame; and, at length, there sat upon my very heart an incubus of utterly causeless alarm". (American Writers 414) This irrational fear, which rises gradually and eventually invades the whole being, soon leads Poe's heroes to insanity and death. He believes that all humans have basic fears. He felt that battles were a necessity to help us confront our fears and lives unpleasant realities.

Poe found those basic fears that are bone chilling. Such an accumulation of horrid details inevitably leads the reader to ask theirself whether Poe is sincere when he writes these tales, whether they were the unessential play of his imagination or the true expression of the terror which he really feels in his inmost heart. That is for the reader to decide. There is room for hesitation, for in Poe's times there is a call for Gothic romance themes and fantastic tales which he seems to share and at any rate deliberately exploit. (American Writers 415) Poe's reasoning, or, as he calls the faculty, his ratiocinative mind, represents one aspect of his sensibility -- the opposite, as it is, of his Romanticism with its emphasis on both the exploration of extreme psychological states of terror and guilt, and the transcendence of such emotions in ideality. Poe takes certain aspects of the Romantic movement to their limits -- his tales of terror and poems.

At the same time, Poe inherits the enlightenment's rage for order, for systematization. His psyche is deeply divided; he adopts the eighteenth century's facultative psychology, separating intellect, emotion, and moral sense. In his critical writings he proclaims that poetry must deal only with beauty, not with truth or virtue, the subjects fit for prose. (The Artist of the Beautiful) According to J. Gerald Kennedy, Poe writes about death in such an overly sentimental way. He writes about death in an unrealistic victorian way because it is a convention of his day- he wants to sell books- he does not believe in beautiful or sentimental death. Kennedy examines Poe's poems and stories to show how he uses death to evoke a mood and to make certain points in his writing.

(Leone 94) Some of the audiences viewers are harsh on him similar to this example according to J. Gerald Kennedy; "here we find a writer whose entire oeuvre is marked by a compulsive interest in the dimensionality of death: its physical signs, the phenomenology of dying, the death bed scene, the appearance of corpse, the effects of decomposition, the details of burial, the danger of premature interment, the reanimation of the dead, the lure of tombs and cemeteries, the nature of mourning and loss, the experience of dread, the compulsion to inflict death upon another, and the perverse desire to seek one's own death". (Leone 92) For Poe imagery is dominated by the gigantic presence of death; but death held contradictory meanings and its tangible image changes throughout the course of his engagement with writing. Interestingly, in his tale "The Black Cat" Poe almost seems to foresee the circumstances of his own death: "Pluto -- this is the cat's name -- was my favorite pet and playmate... (Ouch! A rabid end to Poe) Maybe Poe thinks that he has a hereditary illness in his family, like in "The Fall of the House of the Usher", to die. He passes his hereditary disease down to his family.

His characters are like his family, so he writes about his hereditary disease. Sometimes Poe writes about love; for Poe the death of a women poses in absolute terms, the paradox of our creaturely condition. The beauty of women seems a sign of the eternal, and apparent proof of paradise and immortality. (Leone 99) In "Lenore" (1831) and "Annabel Lee" (1849) are verse lamentations on the death of beautiful young women.

In those poems Poe is writing about his own girlfriends and wives that have passed away before their time. Poe's poetic treatment of dying women indicated that death intensified female beauty and brought about a purification of loveliness a good example is in "Lenore". Poe is looking for love, not rejection. That is why he mourns on the losses of his wives and girlfriends instead of putting them behind him. Everyone Poe touches dies. Anyone who is born in a broken family of death is destined for death theirself.

That is how Poe perceives his life. Poe's most famous poem "The Raven" emphasizes on a loss of a loved one. As mentioned from earlier in the paper, Poe writes about the death of his loved ones. The Speaker of the poem is typically identified as a student, that is, a seeker of knowledge. That we find him at the outset poring over "many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore" suggests interests beyond reviving his lost love or termination of his grief.

(Poe's "The Raven") Poe establishes an implicit metaphorical relationship between death and beauty in his poetic texts. In Poe's poetry he dramatizes the intensity level of the plot. He uses his imagination to implicit ize the idea that when some critics read it the material is indescribable. He may be understood as the problem with beauty, its earthly fate, and its translation according to Kennedy. (Leone 94) Poe constantly allows unavowable thoughts and feelings to rise from the inmost recesses of his soul and give shape to his tales horrid images. Poe, however does not underestimate the importance of intuition, as this note shows: "That the imagination has not been unjustly ranked as supreme among the mental faculties, appears from the intense consciousness, on the part of the imaginative man, that the faculty in question being his soul often to a glimpse of things supernal and eternal- to the very verge of the great secrets...

Some of the most profound knowledge- has oriented from a highly simulated imagination. Great intellects guess well". (American Writers 422) Poe prefers to lay emphasis on analysis and conscious arrangement which can all be clearly definable in his poetry. Poe is famous for a number of haunting creative and bone chilling stories. We cannot read or reread his best tales and poems without a thrill. Though his heroes behave in a horrid manner in rather inauthentic settings and speak an unreal language, we feel a secret kinship with them.

The same nightmarish monsters which haunt them roam the deeper layers of our minds. Their fears and obsessions are ours too- at least potentially. They echo in our souls and make us aware of unplumbed depths in our inmost hearts.