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EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849) - Coggle Diagram
EDGAR ALLAN POE (1809-1849)
LIFE
Boston, 1809, son of poor itinerant actors
his father left his family and his mother died of consumption
Edgar was brought up by the Allans and his full name became Edgar Allan Poe
He attended school in England and in the States and university in Virginia, where he ran into debt by gambling, but the Allans refused to pay
he left for Boston and published his first collection of poems, but this didn't bring him money
He moved to Baltimore at his aunt, Maria Clemm, house, and in 1836 he married his cousin Virginia, 13, a pale and childlike beauty like the one celebrated in his works
1847 Virginia died and Poe's health declined because of alcoholism
1849 he was found unconscious in the street in Baltimore and died a few days later
WORKS
first collection of poems
in Boston, soon after he left university
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym
(1838)
Tales of grotesque and arabesque
(1840)
includes
The Black cat
Tales
(1845)
The Raven
(1845)
poem
The Philosophy of composition
(1846)
essay of aesthetic theories
1st principle: brevity
2nd principle: the story should be read in a single sitting to prevent the reader from distraction
Use of the
single effect
, a person or an object arising the reader's curiosity
TALES can be divided into:
Tales of ratiocination or detection
influenced the development of the detective story
Arthur Conan Doyle
Agatha Christie
The private detective Monsieur Dupin is aristocratic, arrogant but rational. He solves crimes by logical reasoning (deductive method) and psychological analysis, who helps him to interpret the thoughts of people even through gestures
Tales of imagination
he went beyond the Gothic tradition to write stories where the
horror
comes
from inside
rathen than from outside
RECEPTION
In America he was accused of perversion, alcoholism and drug addiction
Baudelaire
increased his appreciation by translating his tales
Mallarmé
translated his poems and regarded him as a
forerunner of the Symbolist movement
LITERATURE
Most famous for his
short stories
and
detective stories
art was the only way to give order to a shapeless world
The human self is divided into:
conscience
concerned with duty
soul
concerned with beauty
since poetry was a means to discover beauty, it has nothing to do with truth or morals
intellect
concerned with truth
the most suitable tone for poetry is sadness and melancholy
SETTING
closed
rarely in the daylight
CHARACTERS
confined, walled or buried prematurely
madness
as an aspect of higher awareness
lost contact with reality, their sanity and oftern their lives
THEMES
Perverseness
the impulse to annihilation that rules the dark side of human behaviour
conscience is the most powerful agent of the perverse because it leads the characters to act as they should not act and confess at the end.
Fusion of beauty and death
Fusion of creation and destruction
The double
Death
Man's fear of death is linked to the decay of the body after it stops breathing. In
The Tell-Tale Heart
the narrator's punishment is the incessant beating of the heart of the man he has killed
STYLE
First-person narration
long interior monologues describing guilt, claustrophobia, deviation, fear, desire
Relationship between cause and effect that gives movement