美国文学埃德加。爱伦坡的诗歌写作风格分析

Essay writing

Question：Edgar Allan Poe, as a pioneer in poetic and fictional techniques, influenced the later literature, discuss these priciples in his typical works.

Edgar Allan Poe was one of the important figures in American literature of romanticism. He was well known as an American poet, short story writer and literature critic and was heiled as a pioneer in poetic and fitional techniques which inflenced the later leterature.

Edgar Allan Poe had a sysmatical theory of his own for poetic composition. For one thing, he insisted that the purpose of poetry lay in the creation of beauty and intensity of emotion rather than teaching of morality. That was to say, poetry should have no social function or responsibility but should be an expression of the isolated artist. Regarding this, poe was considered to be a forerunner of pure poetry. Indeed, poe had an intense passion for beauty. He stated that poet should combined music with poetry so as to provoke readers with a sense of beauty. As a result, the exquisite rhythm and rhyme schemes were widely used in poe’s poetry. For anthor thing, he thought that the most efficient form of beauty which was able to undulate reader’s soul had to be the death, especially the death of a beautiful woman. So the keytone of Poe’s poetry was melancholy and depressed. All these features could be clearly learned in his three most famous poems, The Raven , To Helen and Annabel Lee.

It was of great significance for reader’s understanding of Poe’s poetic theory by reading The Raven. The Raven told of a talking raven’s mysterious visit to a distraught young who was indulged in the grief of the loss of love. Drifting away between wake and dream, the weary young faintly heard someone’s napping at his chamber door. When he opened the door, he was only to find a raven. Then the raven’s nevermore converted the young’s slow lament into madness. Poe wrote the poem as a narrative, rather than creating an allegory or falling into didacticism. The whole poem expressed the narrator’s lamenting his lost love. The theme of the poem

was the death of a beautiful women, namely the young’s love. And the one who read it couldn’t avoid to be involved in the melancholy and depressed atmosphere just the same as the narrator felt. The 18 stanzas poem of six lines each used the complex rhythm and rhyme so as to provid readers with a sense of beauty enjoyment.

Poe also had some famous fictional techniques merited our attention. On the one hand, he was very skillful at depicting human’s inner world or psychological activity, especially that of neurotic. As a consequence, he was regarded as the precursor of abnormal psychology. On the other hand, he hold that a good fiction should only tell one event and stimulate readers so as to impressed them deeply.

The Fall of the House of Usher was a typical representative short story of Poe. It told of a twin, a brother and a sister, who lived in a shadowy house. The sisiter was badly haunted by illness and fall into death. Her brother was neurotic for longtime psychological repression. After the death of the sisiter, the brother invited his friend Usher to accompany him. One heavily rainy night, the sisiter broke out of the coffin and frighten her brother to death. Subsequently, the sister died again. Finally, the house collapsed, and the man usher escaped from it in fear. In the story, the sister symbolized one’s physical illness, while the brother emblemd one’s mental illness. Hence, they represented the death of a man in body and soul. Indeed, the writer set the backdrop on one fixed horrible place—the House of Usher. At the very beginning of the story, the writer created an atmosphere of intension and melancholy, making readrs feel horrible and nerve-strained. In addition, the ending of the fall of the house echoed the beginning . Thus, it made the story as a circle so as to impress the reader deeply.

Besides, the talent of ratiocination brought poe the fame of being a harbinger in the field detective story.

All in all, poe indubitably made great contribution to american and european literature in poetic and short story writing.