Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe is a man constantly searching for beauty to depart from the mental and moral ugliness in his life. This reflects in his the poetry and short stories. Poe sees evil as a major threat to himself and to man due to the fact that he lives in its presence. It is easy to establish this fact when looking at the tragedies in his own life relating to the deaths of his young mother, wife, and others he loved. It is no wonder that he sees the absence of beauty as evil, because he felt the terror and tragedy of the loss of his own life. In Poe's literature it seems that beauty, or the absence of beauty, determines the true value of life. Did Poe actually experience true beauty and feel the pain of its death, or was it something he never truly found? Never the less, it is obviously a major cause of his pain, and his literature is a reflection of this absence. Edgar Allan Poe was perhaps one of the most widely read and controversial writers in America's narrative history. He was born in Boston in 1809 to a family of traveling actors. His name at birth was simply Edgar Poe, but after the early death of both of his parents, he was taken in by the Allans. Thus he obtained the adopted name of Allan wh
" In "The Fall of the House of Usher" beauty is the only thing that keeps things alive. Then the sister Madeline comes into the picture. " Seven American Stylists from Poe to Mailer: An Introduction. She was physically and spiritually delightful. "Helen, thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore" (Poe 1-2). Asselineau believes:These divergences are indeed perfectly justified and stem to a large extent from the constant contrast between the real and the Ideal (the capital was his) in Poe's own life and from the consequent duplicity (in the etymological meaning of the word) of his personality (12). Madeline's beauty had kept the evil down and covered up. In "The Tell Tale Heart" when the old man's eyes is closed he would not be killed because his eye is not considered ugly. This same theme remains evident in Poe's poems. Did Poe ever experience the true beauty that he speaks of in his literature and then lose it, or was it merely an idea drove by self-torture to make him mad? Never the less, Poe's life seemed to be dramatically dependent on the idea of beauty. The ugliness brings about a very unpleasant feeling to the narrator. Once Madeline becomes ill, her brother Roderick also becomes ill.
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