Research Paper (Edgar Allan Poe)

(Buranelli 11) Early Life Edgar Allan Poe is born in Boston, January 19 1809

(Buranelli 11) Early Life 1811 His mother dies in Richmond; and, now orphaned, he is taken in by the John Allan and christened Edgar Allan Poe

(Buranelli 11) Early Life (1815)He goes to England with the Allan's.

(Buranelli 11) Early Life (1820) He returns to Richmond with the Allans.

(Buranelli 11) Pursuing Career (1826)He enters the University of Virginia, and becomes engaged to Elmira Royster, only to have the engagement interrupted by her parents.

(Buranelli 11) Pursuing Career (1827) He leaves university, quarrels with John Allan, goes to Boston, enlists in the U.S. Army. Publications: Tamerlane and other poems

(Buranelli 11) Death (1829) he is discharged from the army following death of Mrs. Allan. Publications: Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane and Minor Poems.

(Buranelli 11) Conflict (1830) He enters West Point but deliberately gets himself expelled for want of financial support by John Allan.

(Buranelli 11) Pursuing Career (1831) He begins a period of obscurity in New York and Baltimore. Publications: Poems

(Buranelli 11) Pursuing Career (1832) His whereabouts remain uncertain Publications: \"Metzengerstien\"

(Buranelli 11) Career Life (1833) He wins a prize from the Baltimore Saturday Visiter for \"MS. Found in a Bottle.\"

(Buranelli 11) Death (1834) John Allan dies without mentioning Poe in his will

(Buranelli 11) Career Life (1835) Poe becomes editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in December. Publications: \"Berenice\" \"Morella\" \"Hans Pfaal\"

(Buranelli 11) Marriage (1836) He marries his cousin, Virginia Clemm. Publications: The review of Drake's Culprit Fay

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1837) Forced to leave the southern Literary Messenger in January, he goes to New York

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1838) He publishes \"Author Gordon pym\" before leaving for Philadelphia where \"ligeia\" appears

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1839) He becomes an editor of Burton's Gentlemen's Magazine in June. \"William Wilson,\" \"The fall of the House of Usher,\" \"The conversation of Eiros and Charmion,\" \"The haunted Palace.\"

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1840) He works with cryptograms, then leaves Burton's Gentlemen's magazine in June with the plans for his own periodical to be called the Penn Magazine. Publications: Publications: Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque, \"The Man of the Crowd,\" the review of Longfellow's Voices of the Night.

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1841) He becomes an editor of Graham's Magazine in april. Publications: \"The murders in the Rue Morgue,\" \"A Descent into the Maelstrom,\" the review of macaulay's Essays.

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1842) He leaves Graham's Magazine in May, still hoping for his own journal, now to be called the Stylus. Publications: \"Eleanora,\" \"The Oval Portrait,\" \"The Masque of the Red Death,\" \"the Mystery of Marie Roget,\" the reivews of Dickens' Barnaby Rudge, Longfellow's Ballads and other Poems, Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1843) He wins a prize from the Philadelphia Dollar Newspaper for \"The Gold Bug\" Publications: The Pit and the Pendulum,\" \"The tell-tale Heart,\" \"The Black Cat.\"

(Buranelli 12) General Life (1844) He moves to New York his home for the rest of his life Publications: \"The Balloon Hoax,\" \"The Premature Burial,\" \"The Oblong Box.\"

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1845) He publishes \"The Raven,\" which causes an overnight sensation, and becomes an editor of the Broadway Journal in March. publications: Tales, The Raven and other Poems

(Buranelli 12) Career Life (1846) After presiding over the end of the Broadway Journal in January, he moves to the cottage at Fordam. Publications: \"The Cask of amontillado,\" \"The literari,\" \"The philosophy of Composition,\" the review of Bryant's Poems.

(Buranelli 12) Death (1847) After harrowing illness, Virginia Poe dies on January 29 leaving Poe despondent. Publications: \"The Domain of Arnheim,\" \"Ulalume\"

(Buranelli 12) Romance (1848) Poe has his romance with Mrs. Whitman, and delivers the Poetic Principle\" as a lecture. Publications: ¨Eureka¨

(Buranelli 12) Romance (1849) Poe has his romances with Mrs. Richmond and Mrs. Shelton (Elmira Royste). Publications, ¨For Annie¨ ¨annabel Lee,¨ ¨Eldorado,¨ ¨The Bells,¨ the review of Lowell'a Fable for Critics Poe dies in Baltimore, October 7th

(Buranelli 17) Career The problems of Poe concerns much more than the dark side of his genius. yet it cannot be denied that he himself has obscured the dimensions of the problem by the very success with which he writes of horror, terror, strange fantasies and psychological abnormalities.

(Buranelli 17) Career It is only natural that the sanity of the author should become suspect, and that he should appear to be a gifted psychopath describing with consummate artistry his person instabilities and abnormalities.

(Buranelli 19) Career He works with melancholy (\"The Fall of the House of Usher\"). He probes fascination, into horrible obsessions (\"The Tell-Tale Heart\")

(Buranelli 19) Career It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little mire than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology... Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytic study may properly begin:...

(Buranelli 25) Fall of the House of Usher As a child he spend some years in Britain where he had attended a school at Stoke Newington and had seen the building that sets the stage for \"William Wilson\"; 'My earliest recollections of school-life, are connected with a large, rambling Elizabethan house, in a misty-looking village of England, where were a vast number of gigantic and gnarled trees, and where all the houses were excessively ancient.' Poe often drew upon this memory for his settings-as in \"The Fall of the House of Usher,\" which concerns the fate of a moldering Gothic mansion as well as the fate of a decayed aristocratic family that comes over an imaginative human being when he meets face-to-face the Gothic past.

(Buranelli 29) Tell-Tale Heart and Pit and the Pendulum His was no mood of superficial romantic melancholy or dramatic Gothic imagining when he wrote \"The Black Cat,\" \"The Tell-Tale Heart,\" \"Ligeia,\" \"the Pit and the Pendulum.\" There is not escaping the inference that these stories 'move' because of the impact of his personal experience, no matter what practical or artistic motives he may have for writing them.

(Buranelli 32) The Tell-Tale Heart Poe was forever inflicting this kind of compulsive self-defeat. He, who wanted so badly to shine and to be admired, repeatedly created the conditions i which he was sure to be pitied, snubbed, insulted, and humiliated. From himself he drew the understanding of compulsions that enabled him to write not only \"The Imp of the Perverse\" but also \"The Black Cat\" and \"the Tell-Tale Heart.\"

(Buranelli 19) Career It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little mire than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology... Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytic study may properly begin:...

(Buranelli 19) Career It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little mire than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology... Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytic study may properly begin:...

(Buranelli 19) Career It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little mire than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology... Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytic study may properly begin:...

(Buranelli 19) Career It is false to call him little more than an artist of nightmares, hallucinations, insane crimes and weird beauties, little mire than an intuitive poetic genius dabbling in pretentious logic when he is not lost in the black forest of pathological psychology... Poe is a dreamer (in the widest sense of the term), and that is where an analytic study may properly begin:...

(Buranelli 30) Career The primal calamity was part of Poe''s nature, the native weaknesses that he brought into the world with him. A deadly streak of melancholia possessed hum and erupted within his psyche even in the best of outward circumstances...

(Buranelli 31) Career Poe's nerves were never robust from the moment of birth; he never learned to control them under the pressure of great excitement or crises of responsibility; and he lacked the moral stability to avoid looking for an escape hatch when the pressure became intolerable. Notoriously, he sought the bottle for a companion in hiss retreat from reality; and the fact that he was no habitual drunkard supports rather than impugns this truth about his character.

(Buranelli 31) Death He asserted in a letter to Sarah Whitman, written about a year before his death, that he drank, not for pleasure, but to get away from 'torturing memories... insupportable loneliness... a dread of some strange impending doom.' His statement is correct as far as it goes, but its needs to be integrated in a more general principle: He felt tempted by alcohol in any moment of emotional upheaval, even one of optimism or exaltation.

(Buranelli 33) Birth/ Family The seeds of Poe''s spiritual malady were cultivating during his infancy. When he was two years old, the father of the family, David Poe, disappeared, leaving the mother trapped in a predicament that might be called tragic or pathetic if it did not beggar adjectives like these.

(Buranelli 33) Family Elizabeth Poe, although still in her twenties, was poverty-stricken, wasted by tuberculosis, caring as best she could for one infant, worried about a second from whom she was separated, and pregnant again, and compelled to go out on the boards and play comic roles whenever she could get a billing. She were the circumstances in which her daughter, Rosalie Poe, was born.

(Buranelli 33) Family Undoubtedly the mature Edgar Poe referred to his mother so infrequently because he could not bear to talk about her martyrdom. She contributed something to the creation of his young, beautiful, gifted, delicate, doomed heroines like Madeline Usher. Beyond that he avoided the subject of his mother , stopping short with the observation based on his age when she died: 'I myself never knew her.'

(Buranelli 33) Infancy Adoption The seeds grew in his infancy and then sprouted monstrous growths as they were watered by repeated misfortunes. Lifted from sordid surroundings when the John Allans took him in, he knew a comfortable life until crushing disappointment hurled him back into the mire, all the more deeply for his having learned what it felt like to be out of it.

(Buranelli 34) Infancy Adoption He accompanied the Allans to Britain; he played the role of a young Virginia aristocrat in their Richmond home; yet he lived on the edge of the abyss because they never adopted him. Legally he had no redress when John Allan cut him without a penny.

(Buranelli 34) College Poe''s year at UVA foreshadowed the coming catastrophe. He excelled in his studies, but they had to compete with cards and liquor. He was not a real gambler, nor was he a particularly good drinker (later in life a glass of wine would make him tipsy). But he was a convivial companion who fell easily into the standard university life of the Virginia gentry, with the result that he soon ran up gambling debts that he could not pay, that John Allan would not pay. He had to leave without a degree although he took with him the insight into college ways that he subsequently used in \"William Wilson.\"

(Buranelli 27) Information on THE RAVEN When Poe reviewed Undine, he deplored \"out anti-romantic national character.\" That self-defense lurks in the phrase scarcely needs to be said, but the truth in the indictment is not easy to estimate since the American public was romantic in its taste to this extent at least, that it read Gothic stories. It read Poe's. Gold to most lyric poetry, it appreciated the strange music of \"The Raven\" and made the poet famous.(93) Poe says he began \"The Raven\" by deciding that he wanted about a hundred lines and that he ended with a hundred and eight. His objective is to elevate the souls of his readers by suggesting to them intimations of the perfect beauty that lies beyond the world. He here adds that the tone of the highest beauty in poetry is sadness and that melancholy, therefore, is \"The most legitimate of all the poetical tones.\" (99) Poe's theory of poetry makes the death of a beautiful woman the most poetic of themes. His theory is undoubtedly defective;; but he certainly acted on a sound instinct when he allowed it to guide his pen in writing \"Annabel Lee,\" \"The Raven,\" \"Lenore,\" and the other poems like them.(101) When Poe came to the most celebrated o his poe,s, he chose to explain his method of operation. His \"Philosophy of Composition\" deals not only with the genesis of \"The Raven\" but also with the meaning of its symbols. The poem, of course, has a melancholy atmosphere which derives fro what Poe's theory considers to be the most poetic of subjects-the death of a beautiful women. Poe, who is fond of repeating feminine names, gives to this deceased woman the name Lenore. The poem turns on the questioning o the raven by the bereaved lover, and the answer to every question is \"Nevermore.\" The climax of the poem comes when the raven responds with \"nevermore\" to the question of whether the lover and his mistress may ever, in some future life, be reunited. (102) The raven is the principal symbol. by the common consent of mankind, the raven, with its jet black feathers and harsh croak, represents fate; It is , as Poe says a\"bird of ill omen.\" Therefore he found it pertinent to his poem. He then added a symbolical interpretation of his own. He tells us that his raven is \"emblematically of Mournful and Never-ending Remembrance,\" which means that the bereaved lover, who is trying \"to borrow/ From my books surcease of sorrow-sorrow for the lost Lenore,\" will now have his sorrow brought home to him in the most acute way by this creature tat precisely stands for memory. The symbolism reveals itself in the last stanza, which Poe wrote first since it is the culmination of the effect he wants to achieve.

(Howarth (Sub author: Robinson 94) Information on \"The tell-Tale Heart\" Poe's \"The Tell-Tale Heart\" consists of a monologue in which an accused murderer protests his sanity rather than his innocence. The point of view is the criminal's, but the tone is ironic in that his protestation of sanity produces an opposite effect upon the reader. From these two premises stem multiple levels of action in the story. The criminal, for example, appears obsessed with defending his psychic self at whatever cost, but actually his drive is self-destructive since successful defense upon either implied charge--of murder or of criminal insanity--automatically involves admission of guilt upon the other. A second major theme in \"The Tell-Tale Heart\" is the murderer's psychological identification with the man he kills. Similar sensory details connect the two men. The vulture eye which the subject casts upon the narrator is duplicated in the \"single thin ray\" [V, 89] of the lantern that falls upon his own eye; like the unshuttered lantern, it is always one eye that is mentioned, never two. one man hears the creaking of the lantern hinge, the other the slipping of a finger upon the fastening. Both lie awake at midnight, \"hearkening to the death-watched in the wall\" [V, 90]. Most of all the identity is implied in the key psychological occurrence in the story- the madman's mistaking his own heartbeat for that of his victim, both before and after the murder. These two physiological themes- the indefinite expression of subjective time and the psychic merging of killer and killed -are linked closely together in the story. This is illustrated in the narrator's commentary after he was awakened the old man by an incautious sound and watch waits for the other to move:...

(Howarth (Sub author: Hill 55) Information on \"The Fall Of The House of Usher\" At the end of Edgar Allan Poe's \"The Fall of House of Usher,\" Madeline Usher escapes from her tomb and throws herself upon her brother, Roderick, bearing him to his death. (55)These details are important: the air in the vault half smothers the torches--indicating a lack of sufficient oxygen; the floor of the vault and the passageway to it are copper covered--making it even more difficult for air to enter; the lid of the coffin is screwed down--Madeline's body is secured within the coffin; the door is of iron and of immense weigh and is fastened from the outside- it would be impossible to open it from within, especially if one were weak from illness, left without food, water, and light, and had an insufficient air supply.The narrator observes in Roderick 'a mind from which darkness, as if an inherent positive quality, poured forth upon all objects in one unceasing radiation of gloom.' The insane belief that Madeline lives is the 'oppressive secret\" Roderick vainly struggles to reveal. He thinks that if Madeline, the House, and he himself have a common soul, they will have a common death. yet he is alive. Thus, reasons his unbalanced mind, Madeline must be alive too. He cannot tell his friend, however, simply because he cannot yet admit to burying her alive. Late, under the pressure of extreme terror, he will reveal the deed. This is Poe's grand achievement in \"The Fall of the house of Usher\"; he not only creates one man, Roderick, going mad, but creates two; he not only created one man who conjures a hallucination, but he has the narrator cross over into Roderick's world so that he too sees it Thus, through the dual hallucination, Poe adds a new dimension to the portrayal of madness.

Information on THE PIT AND THE PENDULUM (Buranelli 76) If these stories represent realism to the utmost degree. Poe knows how to use other kinds of realism. \"The pit and the Pendulum\" has for its central figure a man who is no psychopath, but rather one whose sanity is a necessary ingredient of the plot. Because his mind is whole and his senses keen, he feels sweating terror as he watches the dreadful pendulum descending toward him from the ceiling; if he were in a state of shock, he would be incapable of his subsequent exploration of his cell, following his escape from the pendulum, that leads him to the brink of the pit from which he is snatched back to his rescuers.(Buranelli 79) \"The Pit and the Pendulum\" His drama occasionally slips into melodrama, as in \"The Pit and the Pendulum\" when the walls of the dungeon are brought together mechanically to force the prisoner into the abyss.

(Buranelli 17) Overall literature pieces He has helped to sketch the popular image that derives from such works as \"The Raven,\" \"The Murders in the Rue Morgue,\" \"The fall of the House of Usher,\" \"The Pit and the Pendulum,\" \"The Tell-Tale Heart,\" and \"The Black Cat.\"