Edgar Allan Poe

It is a rather natural assumption after reading his stories and poems that Edgar Allan Poe must have been an atheist. This idea is not necessarily true. Poe's adopted father, John Allan, had young...

Poe had an effect on two major literary genres: the short story and the detective/mystery story. From this, his influence rippled out to have an effect on prose literature as a whole. In 1846, Poe...

Stylistically, Edgar Allan Poe's stories and poems are characterized by elements we might now associate with the horror and gothic genres. There is usually suspense, created in part by an...

Edgar Allan Poe never married a woman named Lenore. His only marriage was a secret one, in 1834, to his 13-year-old cousin Virginia Clemm (they later married publicly).Poe seems to have liked the...

Poe is heavy on the symbolism, and he often repeats symbol use from one story to the next. For example, in "The Masque of the Red Death," when an ebony clock housed in a black and blood-red room...

"Alone" was written when Poe wasn't yet the renowned author he came to be. He wrote this poem when he was only twenty, after a particularly tough year. He had faced quite a bit of literary...

In his essay "The Importance of a Single Effect in a Prose Tale," Poe writes that he unifies a piece of writing around mood. He writes not primarily to develop a plot or a character but to convey a...

Edgar Allan Poe has been hugely influential in the literary world since he began publishing in the mid-1800s. His texts have served as exemplars of how to use sensory detail and how to establish...

In "The Tell-Tale Heart" and "The Cask of Amontillado," both stories are told from the perspective of narrators who may be considered unreliable in their presentation of reality. Both stories...

Poe uses a number of literary devices in "The Lake" (also called "The Lake-To--" in other texts). Poe uses metaphor in the very first line ("In the spring of my youth it was my lot"). Here, the...

A refrain is a line or set of lines that repeats at regular intervals in a poem. With that in mind, "Alone" by Edgar Allan Poe does not have a refrain, but it does have other elements of sound to...

Edgar Allan Poe is famous for his Gothic works containing tales of horror, the macabre, and death. One of his most famous poems is "The Raven" which was published in 1845. "The Masque of the Red...

Practically all of Poe's major works have in common the elements of fear and terror. In "The Masque of the Red Death," a mysterious plague is the source of the terror. In "The Cask of Amontillado"...

Having written and produced a play (Death by the Visitation of God) about Poe's life, and having researched extensively his life through his own words as well as through the letters and journals of...

There are a number of reasons Poe's works remain popular today: First, Poe came up with compelling plots. He knew how to tell a frightening story and how to build suspense. In "A Cask of...

The obvious physical similarity is that in both tales, the idea of walling up the victim occurs to the killer and is carried out. Montresor decides to entomb Fortunato in a niche in the catacombs,...

Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Alone" was never published during his lifetime. He wrote it in 1829 and, as a young man, was experiencing intense, conflicted feelings about his childhood and family life....

Both poems use end rhymes to develop a sense of rhythm or cadence. In "A Dream Within A Dream," Poe uses such rhyming words at the end of lines as "brow" and "now," "deem" and "dream." In "A...

"The Raven" and "Annabel Lee" are both poems by Edgar Allan Poe that address the desolation experienced by a man who has lost his love. In both of these poems, the speaker is experiencing profound...

This poem contains one main simile and one main metaphor. Firstly, the third stanza compares the "holy dream" that Poe experiences to something that cheers him up as if it were "a lonely spirit...

Poe uses both simile and personification to create the strange atmosphere of this poem. The "wanton airs" are personified as "laughingly" dropping through the lattice. He metaphorically describes...

“The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death” both tackle the themes of death, sin and guilt, but in very different ways. Both use irony to tell their stories. In both stories, death...

It is easy to see that Poe's alcoholism and probable drug use influenced his writing. The hallucinatory aspect of Poe's stories seems to have probably been fueled by mind-altering substances. The...

We might assume that both the evening star and the moon in Poe's 1827 romantic and somewhat Gothic poem "Evening Star" are actually symbols of the women in his life. Poe describes the moon and the...

Poe specified that a short story should achieve a single effect. This could be created by the overall tone and mood or by a surprise ending. He did not, of course, say anything about motion...

The setting for this short story is an abandoned chateau in a mountain range called the Appennines that runs the length of the center of Italy. Because the chateau is in a mountain setting, it is...

Edgar Allan Poe's story "Silence-A Fable" can be confusing given the story's form. The story is being told from the perspective of an unnamed listener. Essentially, it is a frame story--meaning...

The word "lionize," in general usage, means to treat an individual or an object "as an object of great interest or importance." We see through the story that the narrator and main character,...

If you read his rather autobiographical poem "Alone," you'll read that he always saw things differently than others did. He was not moved by the same passions as others, nor did he react as others...

I agree with number 4. If you look in most major American literature anthologies, Poe is categorized with the Romantics, mainly because of his Gothic tendencies. While some of Poe's detective...

Alienation is the sense of being isolated or separated from things. Each of the stories you mention include alienation as a theme: In “The Black Cat,” the narrator is alienated from his cat, Pluto,...

The mood in a story is the atmosphere that pervades the work with the intention of evoking a certain emotion or feeling from the reader. Edgar Allan Poe evokes specific moods in his short stories...

Edgar Allan Poe suffered from financial problems for most of his life. He left the University of Virginia for lack of money (he had a $2000 gambling debt), and He was the first well-known American...

Poe is using a characteristic (for him) rhetorical move in which he says how bad it would be to do a certain thing then goes on to do exactly that thing. In this story, he talks about horrible...

There are a number of options that could be selected in answering this question. What is obvious about "Alone" by Poe is that it is a poem is written in the first person, with the speaker being the...

Edgar Allan Poe was interested in many, many topics and wrote about them during his writing career. Though he did write about "death, gloom, despair, and mental illness," as you said, he also had...

Let's first look for the elements that are ever-present in the Gothic genre. These elements consist on specific literary devices which authors use, particularly in the setting, to convey feelings...

"Fairy-Land" begins by describing a fantastical, surreal world of "huge moons" that "wax and wane," "shadowy floods," and "cloudy-looking woods." The moons extinguish the star-light "with the...

One could form a notion of what type of music Edgar Allen Poe listened to through analyzing the era and places in which he lived and the style of writing to which he gravitated. Edgar Allen Poe...

Poe's stories are suspenseful in part because they are written in the voice of the narrator, who seems strange and unreliable. For example, "The Tell-Tale Heart" begins, "True!—nervous—very, very...

"The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is a work of short fiction Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849). It originally appeared in the February 1845 issue of the periodical Godey's Lady's Book. The...

The poetic devices used in Edgar Allan Poe's poem "Dreamland" include the following:Stanzas This poem is divided into five stanzas of varying lengths. Stanza number 1 is eight lines. Stanza number...

Both Edgar Allan Poe and Nathaniel Hawthorne, the authors cited here, are well known for themes of death and mortality occurring in their works. Poe's approach tends to be one exploring the...

Dark Romanticism refers to a subgenre within the romantic movement that dominated literature and the arts between the late eighteenth century and first half of the twentieth in both Europe and the...

"The Angel of the Odd" is a humorous story by Edgar Allan Poe that places a skeptical narrator into a series of absurd situations. Through these actions, the Angel tests the narrator's belief in...

The first person POV has always been an interesting device in literature. For one, you'd think it's extremely similar to an all-knowing third person narrator. They can just as easily say what the...