Edgar Allan Poe (1809–1849)

The brilliance of Poe (born in the beginning of the 19th century) is obvious. A notable American Romantic poet, he was also a master of the prose tale. A gifted man, Poe thought about the proper function of literature with the result that he became the first great American literary critic.

He developed a theory of poetry which was a disagreement with what most poets of the mid-nineteenth century believed. According to Poe, only a short poem could sustain the necessary level of emotion in the reader. The poems are melodious and dramatic in their effects.

Both in his poetry and his short stories he wrote about dying ladies, about sickness, abnormal rather than normal love (– all traditional topic of Romanticism).

Edgar Allan Poe is considered (to be) one of the three America’s first great short story writers (the other two are Nathaniel Hawthorne and Washington Irving).  His definition of the genre (= literary form) states that everything in a story (or tale)- every incident, combination of events, every word – must aid the author in achieving a preconceived emotional effects. For Poe the advantage of the short prose narrative over the novel is that it maintains the unity of the reader’s interest from the beginning to the end. Unlike the novel, which cannot be read at one sitting, a short story is less subject to the influence of the outside world.

Poe felt (=believed) that the writer should conceive his stories with deliberate care in order to achieve “a single unique or single effect”, beginning with the initial (=first) sentence of the story.

Poe published over seventy short stories in his short life (he lived only forty years / he died at the age of 40). His best short stories deal with either logical reasoning as in his detective or mystery) stories or terror, as in case of “The Cask of Amontilliado.” Poe’s tales of terror are, perhaps, more widely known to the general reader than his detective stories.

Poe’s short, narrative prose style (as found in the two categories characteristic of his fiction – the already mentioned mystery and terror) has widely influenced the form and purpose of the short story, not only in the United States, but also around the world.

Probably, the story best illustrating Poe’s terror series is “The Cask of Amontilliado”. Every word here contributes toward the single effect of terror which the story conveys.

Besides the Romantic writing that he did so effectively, Poe also pioneered in the development of the detective story. He prided himself on his ability to reason, and several of his best short stories are justly noted for their deductive skill. The strange world depicted in many of Poe’s writings was the product of his fertile mind and was never intended to reflect the real world, in America or elsewhere.