Edgar Allan Poe - 1809-1849

EDGAR ALLAN POE 1809-1848

He was an important figure of American literature. He excelled in several types of writing, publishing tales of terror and supernatural agency, detective stories, romantic and narrative poetry, burlesques, hoaxes, and literary criticism. The facts of his life have been hard to determine because many legends about him circulated even before he died, some spread by Poe himself.

Yet we know that his parents Elisabeth Arnold and David Poe Jr. were actors. Edgar, second of three children, was born in Boston on January 19, 1809. Two years later his parents died and John Allan and his wife took Edgar in and renamed him Edgar Allan but they never adopted him legally. He started studying at the University of Virginia in 1826, but there were hostilities between him and his foster father, he began to drink and to gamble to pay his debts, so he had to leave the university his first year was completed. Then he joined the army and in 1827 he paid for the printing of Tamerlane and Other Poems.

Released from the army with the rank of sergeant major, he was admitted to West Point in 1830, but was expelled in 1831. Some friends among the cadets collected funds to publish his poems, which appeared in May of the same year. Poe went to Baltimore where he married his cousin Virginia Clemm and where he published "The Fall of the House of Usher" and "William Wilson". He continued writing and publishing many collections of short stories and collections of his poetry until he died on October 7, 1849, "of congestion of the brain".

THE FALL OF THE HOUSE OF THE USHER (Burton's Gentleman's Magazine, September 1839)

It is a short story of terror written in narrative prose. The story begins with the unnamed narrator arriving in front of what he calls the "melancholy" House of Usher and while he's contemplating the House he's pervaded by a sense of gloom, a depression of soul. He notices a thin crack extending from the roof down the

A family evil, the nature of his malady: it is, he says, a whichacuteness of the senses. Causes him sufferance from an Moreover the narrator notices another feature of his mental condition, which is the idea, based on certain superstitious impressions, that the mansion his hunted or alive. Roderick than admits that the origin of the gloom that pervades him may be the severe and long-continued illness of his sister Madeline, who's diagnosis is unusual. In fact she is apathetic and she as frequent affections of a partially cataleptical, and that same evening she succumbs and the narrator has no chance to see her again.

In the following days the two man spend their time painting or reading together to alleviate Roderick's melancholy and the narrator also listen to one of his friend's ballad, named The Hunted Place, which is suggestive because of Usher's opinion about the sentience of all vegetable thing, a belief connected with the gray stones of the home of his forefathers.

evening Roderick informs his guest that Madeline is dead and that he wants to preserve her corpse for two weeks in a vault within the wall of the building, so the narrator helps him to entomb Madeline, and at this point of the story he discovers that they were twins and he also notices that Madeline's cheeks are too rosy for a dead person. After the entombment, Roderick changes and his terror starts to affect the narrator too. When a storm begins, he can't sleep because of these feelings and he also hears indefinite sounds that scare him even more. Suddenly, Roderick comes to his room and the narrator tries to calm his friend and himself by reading a novel. But while he's reading, he continues to hear strange noises until Roderick's behavior changes and he confesses that they have entombed Madeline alive. At this point, the door opens and Madeline appears. She falls crying upon her brother and they both fall as corpses. The narrator, terrified, escapes and while he's running, a light

Made him turn and he sees the full moon shining through the fissure extending from the roof to the base of the House, which was now rapidly widened, making the building rushing asunder and the deep tarn closing silently over the fragments of the House of Usher.

RECURRENT: gloom, melancholy, nervous agitation

1. We can suppose that Roderick decides to bury Madeline to prevent "resurrection men" from stealing her corpse for experimentation, as was common in the 18th and 19th centuries for medical schools in need of cadavers;
2. Twins share a connection that may be either incestuous or metaphysical;
3. Roderick's illness is related to Madeline's illness, they're both tied to the mansion;
4. Roderick falls to his death in a manner similar to the House's cracking and sinking;
5. Madeline may be the physical embodiment of the supernatural and metaphysical worlds or she could be the personification of Roderick's torment and fear.

THE MAN OF THE CROWD

(Graham's Magazine, December 1840)

The Characters of Man

It is a short story introduced with an epigraph from by Jean de La Bruyère. "Ce grand malheur, de ne pouvoir être seul"

The epigraph is in French and says "The misery of being unable to be alone".

The text begins with a short intro which introduces the content of the story mentioning a certain German book which it does not permit itself to be read, as some secrets which do not permit themselves to be told.

The story itself begins with an unnamed narrator which, after an unnamed illness, sits in an unnamed Coffee-House in London. He found himself in an happy mood and felt a calm but inquisitive interest in everything. As the darkness come on, the narrator starts looking at the crowd outside the window which fascinates him and he considers how isolated people think they are. He takes time to categorize the different type of people he sees until the night come and he lost interest in the scene.

So he starts to examine individual faces - decrepit old man, some sixty-five or seventy years of age - and he notices a who idiosyncrasy absorbs his total attention because of the absolute of his expression. So the narrator decides to go out of the coffee shop to follow the man, who leads him through bazaars and shops, buying nothing, to the most the heart of the mighty poor and stinking quarter of the city and then back into London until the evening of the next day. Finally exhausted, the narrator stands in front of the old man, who still doesn't notice him, and says to himself that this old man is the type and the genius of deep crime, who refuses to be alone. He is the man of the crowd and it will be in vain to follow him because there is nothing more to learn about him. The story ends with the same German sentence of the opening lines of the text, because talking about the Man of the Crowd the narrator says that the worst heart of the world does not permit itself to be read and maybe that is one.

of the great mercies of God.

1. The narrator is obsessed by the old man because he is the only one in the crowd that the narrator can't categorize, but the two man may be the two side of the same person. The old man represents a secret side of the narrator, but he is unable to see this. Moreover the old man walk in the crowd as he doesn't want to be alone, maybe searching for a friend or to escape the memory of a crime.

THE TELL-TALE HEART (The Pioneer, January 1843)

It is a short story relayed in first-person by an unnamed narrator who tries to convince the reader that he is not mad, although he is suffering from a disease, over-acuteness of the senses.which is nervousness, that causes him He also says he doesn't know how the idea of the murder entered in his head because he loved the man he killed, but he was obsessed with this idea, maybe because of the man's filmy pale blue eye, which made his blood ran cold. So the narrator start telling the story of the murder he

He committed emphasizing the wisely cautious calculation of his actions and how and with what he proceeded. With many details he describes what he did the week before the every night, about midnight, he gently opened the old man's door, put murder: in a dark lantern, then he slowly thrust in his head and cautiously undo the lantern so that a single ray of light fell upon what he call the "vulture" eye. He Evil Eye did this for seven nights, but the never opened, so it was impossible for him to kill the old man. But the eighth night, while doing all the passages of this ritual, he starts to fell his own power and he can barely contain his feelings of triumph, until he chuckles at the idea of what he's doing and the old man startles in the bad. However, the narrator keeps pushing the door and got his head in when his thumb slips upon the lantern's fastening, waking up the old man. For about an hour the narrator keeps quite still, listening to the growing awe of the old man.

He decides to undo the lantern, and again a single ray of light fell upon the vulture eye, which is wide open this time. The narrator starts low, dull, quick sound feeling furious and hears a which is the beating of the old man's heart. The more the sound grows louder, as the old man's terror is growing, the more the narrator gets excited to uncontrollable wrath. So with a loud yell he opens the lantern and gets into the room, the old man screams once, before the killer drags him to the floor and pulls the heavy bed over him. The narrator sits upon the bed smiling until the man dies. Then he dismembers the body and puts the pieces over the floorboards, making sure that no signs or proof of the crime remain. He is very confident about himself even when three police officers knock at the door at four am, because a neighbor hears a.