Edgar Allan Poe is not known for being a light-hearted and cheerful poet. His writing is more macabre and somber. His form and style stood out as the main difference among poets of the time. Since Poe himself was a literary critic, these two techniques of writing captured the attention of the audience and set him apart from other artists of the pen. All the words and details were planned within his poetry.
There wasn’t a single word that did not contribute to the overall poem he was writing. This combined with the ability to be read all at the same time was what Poe coined the ‘Unity of Effect.’ A completely tormented mind, his works are a semantic wink to his genius. It is this genius that lies partly in his dark, sinister and sickly personality. Few writers have been creators of so many forms of escapism like Edgar Allan Poe, and even fewer have searched to escape from themselves in so desperate a way.
Poe’s claustrophobic life consisted of a succession of attempts to escape, most of them without success. So he again tried to flee poverty working in excess, but never succeeded for a long time. He fled the loneliness with his marriage, probably chaste, full of love and bad fortune, with a fragile cousin. The drink offered an oblivion that constantly attracted him, with increasingly destructive consequences. All of Poe’s work is made up of a current of interiority, an obsession with the dark corners of subconscious, known back then perhaps only by Mary Shelley, who wrote the famous “Frankenstein” in 1818.
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Poe knew how to take advantage of all the resources available to writers, such as exclamation points, script doubles, italics, repetition, capital letters in the first letters and sometimes of the whole word, to accentuate the sense of urgency of their gothic stories. If the chords melodramatic of an organ could speak, they would sound as the narrator of a Poe story. Poe almost always uses a first-person narrator. Ultimately, all his stories are stories about claustrophobia, regardless of whether they include a space literarily confined, a wider house but without air and lonely, or the psychological prison of the damaged mind of a character. The Poe’s treatment of the female characters reflects their essential solitude.
Many of his narrators get married, but none gets a lasting connection with their bride. Even his character most satisfied with himself, the amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin, he only has a friend and no companion. My absolute all-time favorite poem of his is ‘The Raven’. While on deployment for the first time, I took comfort in the writings of Poe. A friend of mine within the same division told me once about how had to memorize the entire poem, ‘The Raven’ for a class when he was growing up. I thought to myself that it was ridiculous, but then still found myself memorizing stanza after stanza.
There was something about Poe that completely intrigued me. This was not only true for me alone. Many people found Poe’s dark, macabre, melodramatic and claustrophobic poetry to be inviting. Although mine was probably due to not being on dry land for 9 months. Anyone would be solemn after that. The tone of his voice will never again be repeated in history. Only a few poems or literary works have ever had the kind of immediate and overwhelming response that Edgar Allan Poe’s poetic masterpiece “The Raven” achieved.
Poe went from a literary critic and short-story writer of moderate renown, then to a celebrity and household name almost overnight. Poe defined poetry as ‘the rhythmic creation of beauty’. He had very clear ideas about what could be qualified as ‘poetry’ and what not. Although Poe elaborated his poetic conception in a series of essays called ‘The Poetic Principle”, their basic ideas remained quite stable over time. Another famous poem by Poe to the lost love, ‘Annabel Lee’, ends tragically when the narrator lies next to his life and love, ‘in the sepulcher by the sea, / in her grave at side of the sonorous sea”.
Poe dedicated his longest essay on the art of poetry, ‘The Rationale of Verse’, to an extremely complicated vision of the rhythm and the metric. But the importance of sound in his work cannot be underestimated. A master of rhythm, his meticulous approach, syllable to syllable, to the sound of the verse produced one of the most unforgettable of American literature.
