Me like everyone else is doing a paper on Edgar Allen Poe. I actually just started reading some of his work and it is really interesting. I especially like A dream within a Dream and Alone. I was wondering if anyone could help me pick out certain schemes or poetic techniques he used the most in his work. For example was he big on irony, metaphors etc. I know he was big on his rhyme schemes. I was also curious if he wrote in iambic pantameter or if he used a certain meter.

-- Anonymous, April 11, 2000

Answers

I did use iambic pantamiter in a poem once but you suck ass

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2001

Read Poe's own essays on poetry and other poets at the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore website. There you will get a feel of what Poe recognized as beautiful and skilled. He was less rigid than his theory would have you believe and his soonets by the rule are not his best. "To Helen" is good because like Yeats he worked and reworked a youthful original into a refined and deeper form that did not need so many musical devices. Repetition, the "beautiful line", playfulness, experimentation, repeating symbols. Too much to comment on here. Get a good essay or commentary. For me it was a revelation see how interwoven the word music was in the sense that it created resonance and harmonies beyond mere rhymes or internal rhymes. Yet he was not a mere "jingle man". Though the music and emotion came first the poem takes life through choices of images and ideas that spring from and sometimes replace mere musicality. A very intellectual exercise no matter how easy and popular some of his poems seem to be. Oh, as to meter. Check out his stories where sentences are written in natural meter with poetic force and imagery that give the tales a special value beyond mere talespinning.

-- Anonymous, May 03, 2001