Hawthorne Vs Poe

Poe and Hawthorne, two authors of Dark Romanticism and Gothic literature, were contemporaries and wrote within the same literary period in the 19th century. They have both left their mark and signature on various literary genres that are still studied and analyzed to this day. “The Fall of the House of Usher” and The Scarlett Letter were all of one brood , equally as imaginative and as metaphorical and symbolic. Both authors seemed to be obsessed with the power of blackness due to their dark view on life resulting from their harsh childhood; they both have been orphaned from an early age. They were known to write short stories that tackle themes such as seclusion (“Rappaccini’s Daughter”), guilt (“Ethan Brand”), obsession (“The Tell-Tale

Poe and Hawthorne’s work is so creative, artistic and obscure that the readers are bound to see darkness combining with splendor in their depiction offering the symbolic character of a great fiction and the dark wisdom of a deeper mind . Both authors study the conflict between the most common binary opposition; good and evil using the dark and light imagery as in “The Fall of the House of Usher” or “Young Goodman Brown”. Longfellow borrowed this very phrase “a dream within a dream” from Poe and applied it to Hawthorne suggesting that such fantasy maybe shared, through conscious imitation or unconscious plagiarism . In addition, Edgar Allan Poe referred to the Transcendentalists as “Frogpondians” and repeatedly mocked their writing. Similarly, Nathaniel Hawthorne, who was marginally associated with the movement, eventually developed distaste for their utopian idealism . Alternatively, Poe and Hawthorne had their differences and distinctness in their point of views and techniques; Poe wrote for the sake of writing “art for art’s sake ” and Hawthorne had a philosophy and wanted to convey a