Edgar Allen Poe

2 Pages 396 Words

Poe is unquestionably one of the great American writers of all time. He was far ahead of his time

with his vision of a special area of human experience the "inner world" of dream,

hallucination, and imagination. There is a distinct connection between Poe's nightmarish life and

his works. His fictional works resemble a distressed individual who has a pattern of dreams

night after night with the same repeating tone of terror. Critics interpret his works as being a

search going deep into himself and arriving at the unplumbed mystery of his innerself. He has

accomplished himself with that search and characterized the twentieth century with his art. Few

poets followed their own theories more completely than Poe. His popularity is due to his

consistency in producing a universal appealing effect. "A Poe setting, atmosphere, or situation is

instantly recognizable." All of his poetry is based on carefully thought out principles of artistic

creativity, and his biggest concern as a poet was the effect he could produce on the reader with

those principles.Poe's poetry covered these themes in a way that they all compliment each other.

The theme most revolved around by the others is ideal beauty. In using marshalling verse,

imagery, rythym, rhyme, and subject matter a poet tries to capture the impression of beauty.

Poe's simple definition for beauty was this: "The pleasurable excitement of the soul as it

reaches for a perfection beyond this earth." When attaining the unattainable, supernatural beauty

a poet cannot use ordinary logic or reason, he must grasp it only aesthetically, not rationally. Poe

felt that for a poet to seek appropriate images for ideal beauty he should avoid concrete, ordinary

objects of everyday life. Realms of dream, fantasy, the subconscious, and glimpses of life after

death are more appropriate images. Poe's simple task in poetry was to induce a state ...