Whitman & E.A.Poe - Analysis of 'The fall of the house of Usher'

Emotional and spiritual experience

This makes him significant as an individual but also part of a larger whole. The body, for Whitman, is both a vehicle for an individual separacy and a means of common experience; it’s where the self and the world come together. In his description of the N.Y. waterfront, Whitman doesn’t differentiate between the natural and the man-made. Steamships and buildings are described in the same terms as seagulls and waves.

The speaker's perspective

The speaker is a man on a percy between Manhattan and Brooklyn. He goes over a nightboat into the water below, he sees the clouds and the setting sun reflected, and he notes how all the business people and workers on the percy appear “curious to” him. Other people will make the same answers as him and see the same things like the sunset and the tides. These things will exist even in a hundred years. Time and place cannot separate people (particularly when the speaker seems to have the power to project himself into the future). He gives examples of common experiences he has shared with his imagined reader; he paints a picture in words of the city and other ships. He says that we know the soul only by all the things that make up the physical world, that must be perceived in the right way.

Edgar Allan Poe [1809 - 1849]

The sources of the fantastic genre, beginning in the USA with Washington Irving, reach their “apogee” with E.A. Poe. Born in Boston and remaining orphaned at a young age, he was adopted by a vendor, and, under him, Poe began to study. But neither his marriage can save him from his vice of alcohol, and he prematurely died. He doesn’t believe in the romantic inspiration; he adopts the method of “analytic fancy,” the backwards path of an emotion, from which he can better describe, he decided out from reason, and his works always contain autobiography elements, are connected with Gothic, Romanticism and Symbolism. Poe chose the genre of “brief narration,” with the atmosphere of anguish and anxiety.

Testo - “The Fall of The House of Usher” (1833)

This is the story that inaugurates the Gothic form, and combines all the elements which characterize it: the strange house, the double (Roderick and Madeleine), and the narrator in first person; mysterious sickness and rumors, ordered landscape. The narrator goes on a visit to the house of his friend Roderick Usher. He’s ill. His sister Madeleine...

When the woman died - in reality, she’s in trance - the narrator and Roderick buried her near the house, but during the night...