Edgar Allan Poe: Complete Tales and Poems (Amazing Values)

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Byron and Miss Chaworth": 2 - read 10/16/2021. Okay. I didn't understand every reference, not being very familiar with Byron's work or his affairs.

Some Words with a Mummy” reprises “The Thousand-And-Second Tale”, only the mummy compares the current world unfavourably with his own world thousands of years before. There are a few techniques that Poe really works with that help make his stories so unsettling or successful. Poe was a believer in what has been termed Poe’s Single Effect Theory, which is drawn from his review of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s Twice-Told Tales: The Premature Burial": 3 - read 1/2/2022. I have to respect that Poe was probably the first person to write about the fear of being buried alive (which was apparently a common fear in Victorian times), but I prefer Zola's "The Death of Olivier Becaille" more. Zola obviously took inspiration from this, though. Cea mai mare tortură cu putinţă -adevărata durere- nu este cea obştească, ci aceea de unul singur."The samples here are of stories which we would now class as "horror" or "suspense", but which Poe submitted to the public mainly as essays. The Raven is a macabre poem depicting a man driven to excruciating loneliness and grief from being unable to let go of the memories of his dead lover Lenore. It's a tragic tale full of death and sorrow, a tale of how one's unwillingness to let go of dark memories and past tragedies will only push them to the edge of insanity.

Invenţia tehnică ce a pus pe jar fizicienii din secolul XVIII. Citind-o, mi-a pus la încercare spiritul de observaţie, făcându-mă să "disec" şi să fiu sceptic… There is a growing suspicion on the part of the reader that this other William is a doppelganger, especially since he seems to follow the storyteller around the world dogging his footsteps. Despite the cogent rational descriptions, the narrator seems almost to be haunted by his namesake, and is losing his sanity. It is interesting too that the other William seems to be a better version of himself, as if he is acting the part of his conscience.In contrast, in “A Descent into the Maelstrom”, Poe describes the loss of a ship and most of its crew (the narrator survives) in the abyss created by “a great whirlpool of the Maelstrom” in words ostensibly borrowed from the Encyclopaedia Brittanica, to which “my imagination most readily assented”.

I simply cannot let the Halloween season pass without at least once pulling down the tales of Edgar Allan Poe to cozy myself into the unsettling words of the gothic master. A man that became much like a mythological figure in his own right, Poe is best known for his tales of horror and poems like The Raven that have embedded themselves into the public consciousness as classics of spooky storytelling, though he also wrote tales of early science-fiction and practically invented the mold of the detective story with his character Dupin. His stories are feasts of tone that grab you by heart and shake you around. A man with many enemies amongst his contemporaries, though beloved in France by authors such as Charles Baudelaire who wrote in his journal that each morning he prayed to God and Poe, Poe lives on as an essential figure of US Literature that still delights and frightens readers today. On the other hand, Poe adds that “by undue profundity we perplex and enfeeble thought; and it is possible to make even Venus herself vanish from the firmament by a scrutiny too sustained, too concentrated, or too direct.” The man in the poem has lost “Lenore.” But, what is this Lenore? Is she a woman? Is she this man’s lost love? Or is she something much, much, more? I think on the surface level of the poem she is his dead wife. But the archaic references speak of something else. Lenore could perhaps be a universal suggestion of a lost sense of self or even humanity. We are no longer what we once were. It is also rather significant that the man is persecuted only by the natural world. Very much in the Romanticism vein, man stands aside from nature. He has become something different with his modernisation and industrialisation.

So with Poe, we have tone being so central to his stories. The Masque of the Red Death drives almost on tone alone, details compounding upon details until the big reveal at the end with the falling action literally being everyone falling down super dead. Half the enjoyment is just in the atmosphere though, especially in stories like The Tell-Tale Heart where most of the narrative is insisting that he is not ‘ a madman’ and listing all the ways he meticulously plots and executes his murder as a sure sign he is in full control of his faculties. It isn’t convincing, of course, and the irony of it is practically the original “could a depressed person make this?!” meme. Here, let’s revise it: