What makes edgar allan poe a romantic

Throughout Poe's fiction, much of the behavior of his characters must be viewed and can be explained best in terms of the Romantic period in which he wrote. Usually in a Romantic story, the setting is in some obscure or unknown place, or else it is set at some distant time in the past. The purpose for this is so that none of Poe's readers would be diverted by references to contemporary ideas; Poe created new worlds so that his readers would concentrate wholly on the themes or atmospheres with which he infused his stories.

Poe believed that the highest art existed in a realm that was different from this world, and in order to create this realm, vagueness and indefiniteness were necessary to alienate the reader from the everyday world and to thrust him toward the ideal and the beautiful.

Thus, Poe's stories are set either in some unknown place, such as in "The Fall of the House of Usher," or else they are set in some romantic castle on the Rhine, or in an abbey in some remote part of England, as in "Ligeia," or else they are set during the period of the Spanish Inquisition the fourteenth century , as in "The Pit and the Pendulum. Even Poe's detective fiction is set in France rather than in America, thus giving it a Romantic distance from the reader.

Often the characters are not named or else they are given only a semblance of a name. The narrator in "Ligeia" does not even know the Lady Ligeia's last name nor that of her family. With the exception of a story like "The Cask of Amontillado," where the narrator is addressed by another character, or a story like "William Wilson," where the title identifies the pseudonym of the narrator, we usually do not know the names of the narrators of the other stories discussed in this volume, or even the names of the narrators of most of Poes other works.

For a Romantic like Poe, the emphasis of literature ought to be on the final effect and the emotion produced thereby. Yet, most of these writers in different ways also exhibited the darker tones of Romanticism when dealing with American life. Edgar Allan Poe is perhaps the best-known American Romantic who worked in the so-called Gothic mode. His poems and stories explore the darker side of the Romantic imagination, dealing with the Grotesque, the supernatural, and the horrifying.

Poe also rejected the rational and the intellectual in favour of the intuitive and the emotional, a dominant characteristic of the Romantic Movement. Hence, in his critical theories and through his art, Poe emphasized that didactic and intellectual elements had no place in art. The subject matter of art should rather deal with the emotions, and the greatest art was that which had a direct effect on the emotions. For Nathaniel Hawthorne literature also seemed to depend on the possibility of the Gothic.

Hence, of particular interest to Hawthorne was the nature of evil. Like his contemporary Poe, Hawthorne also made extensive use of symbols. Would not this, in other words, be the separation of the intellect from the heart. Some critics think that Poe was only a marketer of Gothic horror borrowed from the German models popular during his time.

For this reason, it is necessary to take a closer look at American Romanticism as a literary movement first. American Romanticism or the American Renaissance, cf. The rise of Romanticism in Britain contributed to the emergence of literature in America. Romanticism challenged conventional ways of thinking and aesthetic traditions and championed the authority of the individual mind responding to the environment without regard to social conventions or moral prohibition.

English Romanticism was thus influenced by the Gothic and characterized by an internalization of Gothic forms: Gothic objects, settings, situation became figures of inner states of the mind and the emotions.

Romanticism differs significantly from Classicism, the period Romanticism rejected. When he became ill, I prayed so hard, but he passed away. Explain The romantic literature period started in the late s and expanded through the early s; this period showcased the works of Mary Shelley, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, Edgar Allan Poe and many more writers. Romanticism movement was specifically diverse; its elements arranged from nature beauty and truth to gothic and the supernatural events.

Gothic Literature create suspense for the reader by involving madness. For Poe to deal with this he drank and poured his feelings into his works.

However, these themes were also prominent during the American Romantic Era, especially in the case of Edgar Allan Poe. Poe, a traditional writer recognized for his ability to write in ways of extreme morbidity. The period of the late eighteenth century and beginning of the nineteenth was cosidered the Romantic era in Europe and in America. This movement was a large scale rebellion against the Englightment period ideas where science and logic ruled the literary arts.

Authors took several approaches on how to convey to the readers social and metaphysical opinions through the tone in a series of novels published. Poe did not approve of the work of the Transcendentalists and was a Prolific writer himself.

It is made apparent that Poe suffered from a troubled past and that greatly affected. Get Access. Powerful Essays. Emotion over Reason in the Romantic Poetry. Read More. Satisfactory Essays. Better Essays. Good Essays. Romanticism In Literature Words 2 Pages. Romanticism In Literature. Best Essays. Effects of Realism in Literature and Art. Taking a Look at the Romanticist Movement. Romanticism in Tintern Abbey and The Thorn. The Romantic Period in Literature.

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