FREE ESSAY ON EDGAR ALLEN POE FROM INSIDE

EDGAR ALLEN POE FROM INSIDE

Many romanticists focused on the contemplation of the natural world, but few dared to
journey down the road of the unexplainable into the supernatural realms. Only one man,
Edgar Allen Poe, crossed the threshold between the real world and the dark and dreary
habitat of his mind. 
Unlike the masses, Poe disregarded the French revolutionary philosophy, humanitarianism,
reform, the new interpretation of nature, and exploration of the past.
He worked on exploiting the purely imaginative faculty of his mind and focused on the
realm of mystery and horror (Blankenship, 216). He treaded the rich and sometimes dank
soil of the Gothic and grotesque. His tales littered with distraught narrators, deranged
heroes, and doomed heroines caused the atmosphere of his work to fall somewhere between a
nightmare and hallucination (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). All of his fictions contain an
evident irritation with the commonplace and a penchant for intellectual and emotional
extremes (Conn, 133). Poe distinguished himself from many of his contemporaries and
successors with his feverish search of perfection. To Poe literature was a serious
vocation expressing the beauty and poignancy of life and to be effective required
flawlessness. One of his few weaknesses however was his intellectual detachment from his
time and environment (Blankenship, 216). Poe is most noted for his incredible short
stories of the bizarre and insane (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). Poe does not invent the short
story, but he is one of the first to distinguish between a story that is short and a
short story by defining one. Poe simply states that a short story should emphasize unity
or the totality of the impression and brevity because the unity of the story is lost in a
mass of details. Also, the writer must chose the desired effect and then create incidents
to assist in the creation of that effect (Blankenship, 260).
In addition to the unexplainable, supernatural realms and the consequences of allowing
our wants to impel our choices and actions in life, the arts and sciences were recurrent
topics for Poe in his poetry. Many times it seemed as if art and science were characters
playing the roles of opposite foes, and the same could be said for sanity and insanity.
Poe reminds the reader that there is a fine line between sanity and insanity, love and
hate, and even the dream world and the real world. It is as if Poe saw dreams as an
entrance to the subconscious mind where the line between reality and the imaginary
diverged and then blended in a violent, continuous cycle of blurred creativity that
bordered on insanity. 
In "Sonnet-to Science" it would seem from his choice of words used to describe science
that he thought of science as quite evil. Poe used words like preyest, Vulture, and torn,
to describe science's impact on mankind. Apparently, Poe did not view science or the
advances made by science as a good thing, rather he felt that science alterest all things
with thy peering eyes.(2) The eye for most poets has long been considered a window to the
soul and as such Poe must have thought that science was becoming to God-like if it had
such power to alter all things just by examining them closely. It would seem that he felt
certain things about the human psyche or form needed to remain a secret from man. He most
certainly felt that science was trespassing on matters of the heart in terms of the heart
representing emotion and ones experiences in life as denoted in the line, "Why preyest
thou thus upon the poet's heart(3)". It was as if he thought that the realities as
unearthed by science were destroying the heart of man by replacing emotion with an
emphasis toward reasoning and intellect which might be construed by a poet as cold
detachment. 
In "Silence--A Sonnet," Poe seemed to be addressing the corporate silence as the symbolic
nature of death almost as a personage separate from evilness. Support for this appears in
the tenth line: He is the corporate Silence: dread him not! The rest of the poem appeared
to be a speech in the intrinsic nature of evil, but Poe was clear to point out his
conclusion that death-the corporate silence is not evil in itself: No power hath he of
evil in himself. There is a sense that Poe wanted to emphasize that there are boundaries
(There is a twofold Silence- sea and shore(5)) while at the same time showing that in
nature there is very little control ultimately over eventual outcomes (Newly with grass
o'ergrown(7) ). Finally, there is confusion over whether nature's control over man or
evil's control over man is winning or losing the battle once "Silence" steps in to assert
the ultimate spin on the fate of man.
One story, "The Masque of the Red Death" clearly illuminates the chief impressions of
horror fear and melancholy that Poe sought to create. "The Masque of the Red Death" takes
place during the course of a particularly gruesome plague. The only true character,
Prince Prospero, calls together a thousand of his friends to go into seclusion with him
at one of his castellated abbeys until the plague has ended. A masquerade is thrown in
seven distinct, joining rooms and the guests arrive in their elegant costumes and begin
to partake in the festivities. The night is interrupted when a masked presence enters the
room dressed in the garments of the dead with the symptoms of the plague of red death.
The uninvited guest moves from room to room until confronted by the Prince Prospero in
the apartment arrayed in black. Prince Prospero suddenly falls dead at the intruder's
feet and the crowd descends upon the intruder to find that the costume is "untenanted by
any tangible form (Poe, Edgar Allan, 1406)." The guests soon begin to die as all
acknowledged the presence of the Red Death (Poe, Edgar Allan: The Masque of the Red
Death, 1). The story is shrouded in a great amount of symbolism. For instance the seven
rooms are symbolic of the seven stages of life including death--the black velvet chamber.
The Prince must pass from the blue room through all of the other rooms to the black
chamber to catch up with the Masque of the Red Death. The ebony clock symbolizes our
internal clocks with its "clear and loud and deep and exceedingly musical (1403)"
chiming. The theme of the story is chilling--death cannot be avoided it is internal demon
that holds an "illimitable dominion over all (1406)."
Edgar Allen Poe explored the dark side of romanticism and made the line between sanity
and insanity virtually vanish. His life and literature are best summed up by his own
words, "They who dream by day are cognizant of many things which escape those who only
dream by night (American Romanticism, 145)"