I have huge paper due tomorrow and I can't quite get started. My prompt is to describe how Poe is going astray from European styles and helping to establish an American style. I can't construct a valid thesis because I'm unsure of what the European style of Poe's time was like. PLEASE email me if you can help me AT ALL! I just need some basic info. to get started on. Thanks!

-- Anonymous, December 02, 2001

Answers

Check out Poe's own essays and articles at www.eapoe.org. His article on Coleridge, the great British poet-theorist, the essays on poetry and compostion and American writing. Poe decried both the imitative Eurpoean style and the unwarranted hyping of American literature as too tied to Europe as a measure. We are mainly talking of British writing which was influenced by the classic and continental developments(Germany, France, Italy)in the neoclassic and new romantic movements. Poe is brief and covering what you are interested in. Then you can go to references and articles also listed on that website or in your library. You might see Poe as attempting a plainer, simpler, shorter, more symbolic and unified form of art for its own sake as opposed to mere storytelling, sentiment or fancy. His forms too are freer, less confined yet more rigorous in their attempts to wed all the sensual elements into a singular effect. He is less accepting and not admiring royalty, simplistic spirituality, the churning out of lengthy works, didacticism(message value)and constrictive forms. Though he wrote sonnets it is telling that one is critical of Science and another is a comedy. On the other hand he does not constrain himself to an American setting and successfully stakes out a unique place in the Eurpoean mainstream.

-- Anonymous, December 03, 2001