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Edgar Allan Poe Insanity

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Edgar Allan Poe had the most terrible, grotesque, pathetic, and heart wrenching life out of every well known American author. Poe’s tortured soul created what some argue to be some of the most celebrated and influential pieces of literature in American culture. His works are best known for their dark themes of death and insanity, contrasted with beauty. By looking into the life of Edgar Allan Poe, one can deduce the reasons behind his centralization on specifically dark elements.
Edgar was born to a pair of traveling actors in Boston in January 19, 1809 but his parents died within three years of his birth and he was taken in by a family in Richmond (“Who Was Edgar Allan Poe”). Edgar’s mother, Elizabeth, was very beautiful and when she was …show more content…

This repetition of viewing his mother committing suicide and coming back to life again instilled Edgar’s confusion with life and death at a young age in his young and impressionable mind, especially since his widowed mother did not have enough money for a babysitter, Edgar sat in the middle seat of the front row watching her performance eight times a week. Later, Edgar mother got a job in Richmond Virginia, but as soon as she arrived, she fell sick with consumption. Edgar happened to be looking at his mother when she died and stated that she looked even more beautiful in death than in life (Engel, …show more content…

Youth, beauty, women, and death became main figures in Poe literature mainly because of his experience with beloved women in his life dying. An odd symbolism choice made in many of Edgar’s works was the tie between the color red and death. Many tie this back to fact that many important women in his life died of consumption. It was a horrible death in which the victim drowns in their own blood. Having seen this happen to a few women in his life, Edgar utilized the color along with his four previously mentioned themes (Engel,

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Edgar Allan Poe is known in America is the William Shakespeare of the lunatic asylum, which is distinguished by Tony Magistrate in his article “Poe, Edgar Allan 1809-1849” (8). Poe illustrates his characters with unstable minds and the inability to maintain self-control over their darkest urges. His stories are told in the first person by male narrators that make even the hesitant readers thrust into a crazed obsession of the horror stories (Magistrate 8). Poe used supernatural themes to address and to discover social anxieties concerning madness, disease, and death in a psychological version of Gothic literature. According to J. Gerald Kennedy in his book Phantasms of Death in Poe’s Fiction, Poe thought about death and the human soul more than the average person might (128).

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Every individual person has their own unique way of coping with grief. For Edgar Allan Poe, he utilized his grief to generate dark and intense tones in his stories. The initial death of his mother, due to tuberculosis, prompted a series of deaths of women whom Poe loved. It would not be incorrect to understand that these deaths incidentally inspired how Poe wrote his stories, taking into consideration the dreary and spooky style in which the stories were written. In Edgar Allan Poe’s works “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Raven,” beautiful and dead women are portrayed as the mere objects for Poe’s general mood of his poems, as the representation of the dead women Poe loved in his formative years, and as the spiritual motivation of the narrator’s

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Death of a Beautiful Woman Edgar Allan Poe uses the death of women as a main topic in many of his stories, including “Annabel Lee” and “The Fall Of The House Of Usher.” Poe’s writing about death is most likely a correlation to the fact that he comes from a childhood where most of the women in his life--his mom, foster mom, first love, and wife--die of tuberculous. In “Annabel Lee” and “The Fall Of The House Of Usher” Poe uses the recurring motif of women dying to reflect his grief. Poe uses his poems and short stories to relieve his heartbreak from the women in his life who pass away, in particular his wife Virginia.

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While many characters of Edgar Allan Poe are completely reliable, the main character from the first person narrative “The Tell-Tale Heart” is completely insane. He tells the readers that he is not mad because of all the careful planning he did in order to kill an old man with a vulture eye. Based on the evidence presented in the 8th Amendment of the Death Penalty the main character should be sentenced to psychiatric hospital because as stated by the evidence from the text the narrator killed the old man because of non existent “vulture eye”, heard loud heartbeats of the dead man, and he confessed to his crime. To begin, the main character is a delusional madman because he killed a man because of an eye. No sane person would kill anybody because

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Every night, he sat front row and witnessed his mother die on stage and come back to life off. Edgar had to witness Elizabeth’s death many times, until the death was permanent when he was about four years old. Elizabeth’s life was tragically terminated by consumption one night after the play. The death was the earliest incident of losing a loved one who Poe cared deeply about in his life. The angst he felt for the casualty of his mother was put into his poem “To My Mother.”

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Edgar Allen Poe was born at the start of the Romantic Era, which was a time period that swept rational thought aside and introduced a new way of thinking and feeling with an emphasis on emotion. Poe encapsulated raw feelings into his poems and inspired many poets to dive deep into their emotional psyche and create work that would reshape the manner in which people think about death, love, and spirituality. Poe experienced a lot of trauma at a very young age and was orphaned. Moving from one household to the next, Poe began to write prose. During his stay with his Aunt Maria, Edgar met Virginia, his first cousin that was much younger than him.

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On January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, a young woman lay screaming in bed. Her name was Eliza Poe, and she was in the throes of childbirth. Unbeknownst to her, the son she bore that day would go on to become one of America’s most prolific and beloved poets, as well as a household name: Edgar Allan Poe. Unfortunately, in life, Poe struggled financially, physically, and mentally; he died drunk and alone, and his body was found in the street. However, Edgar Allan Poe’s work not only posthumously generated an enormous amount of fame for him, but also greatly influenced the literary movement known as romanticism.

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Edgar Allan Poe is very well known for his short stories having to do with a dark and eerie tone but was the stories actually “stories” or more to do with psychology and how his brain could of had issues that affected his writing. Throughout Poe’s short stories does the recurring mental health issues his characters face have to do with the gothic and romanticism movement or more with his own issues. As well as how his rough life and the common loss in it could have had major effects how he wrote the way he did and why certain stories were created. With a recurring tone of mental health issues throughout Poe’s short stories, could that be the cause of something deeper rooted rather than just the romanticism movement that surrounded his writing.

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Poe utilizes archetypes of death and love, common elements in creating gothic literature. Hi poem “Annabel Lee” is a tale of two lovers who “loved with a love that was more than love” and though the two are separated by death, they “could never dissever [their] soul from the

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Edgar Allan Poe writing were very creepiest and crazy. Poe was one of the most known poets of all time. Poe wrote a lot of stories before he became famous. I say that Poe was a great poet. Poe was one of the creepiest writers of all time.

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Edgar Allan Poe’s literature can be related to many aspects of modern human nature even though it was written over a hundred and fifty years ago. The three stories analyzed can be related to the human obsession with death. Death fascinates many humans in the fact that it can happen in so many ways. Poe’s visual descriptions of death add a different twist to your average murder, which can be very appealing to a reader.

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Not Mad, Differently Sane: American Literature Shaped by Poe’s Life Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as one of the most famous authors of all time. He is known for his horrific tales and his cynical view on life. Because of his personal tragedies it is only fitting that, as troubled as Poe was, he would write such stories. But he didn’t just write Gothic Literature, he is also the father of the first detective novels. Poe’s life and death is cloaked in mystery, but we do know that his tragedies shaped his life and ours through the form of his writing.

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Edgar Allan Poe said, “The death of a beautiful woman is, unquestionably, the most poetical topic in the world” (good reads, 1). Although not many of Edgar Allan Poe’s works surrounded the idea of the death of a woman, most of his poems, if not all, portrayed death. He became renowned for his stories and poems about mystery and horror (bio, 1). The extent of Poe’s influence on our culture is immense. He, in fact, was nicknamed “Father of the Detective Story”, because of all of his brilliant tales of mystery and adventure (bio, 1).

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Among the sundry influential writers in the history of American literature, Edgar Allan Poe claimed ownership of the fields he entered. Deeply burdened by the hardships of life, Poe’s famous stories changed American literature by introducing a new form of writing, the short story. His complex personality made it possible for him to resist interpretations and broad generalizations, and his heroic criticism set the standards high for years to come. In his efforts toward being one of the first writers to make a living solely by his pen, Poe is remembered as America’s greatest writer, and the writer of greatest significance in the world of literature. Born into a family deeply involved in the arts with both of his parents being dedicated actors,

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