OK, I have a research paper on the gothic elements of Edgar Allan Poe's Lit. and what caused him to use gothic elements, such as alcoholism, family problems. Please, this is due on tuesday oct. 15 so please give me places to find information.Thanx

-- Anonymous, October 14, 2002

Answers

he used that because of his life style you know like a journal it was all in his head and he would dream aboput some of the stuff or read it some where and turn it into something else!

-- Anonymous, October 15, 2002

Popular genre of the day, Poe knew a thing or too about the European tales of better quality. German philosophy was the untuitive key to exploring the dark world of myth obliterated by Enlightenment rationalism and progress. The german stories and thought as then introduced into English literature such as the famous Gothic contest of the Shelleys, Byron and Polidori spawned vampire and Frankenstien tales. Sheeley's wife was also the daughter of Godwin whose own hunter and the hunted reversal novels(Caleb Williams) served as a structural model along with the German Golem story and the inhumanity of modern science. Poe reviewed "Caleb Williams" and the Romantic Brisitsh writers. In his first hit "Ms. Found in Bottle" Poe concentrates on the deeper rationale and poetic melancholic character experiencing the supernatural voyage to doom, thus restoring the horror tale to its more artistic and thoughtful roots.

But you are talking about a personal predisposition and surely as a youth, a sensitive orphan with a poetic and melancholic vbent of his own, Poe's formative muse was found in the dark shock of nature, the shadow boundary of dreams and longing for an immortal female ideal that is somehow lost to him, afeeling which may go back to his mother and followed by the death of other mother substitutes such as Mrs. Allan and Mrs. Stanard. The sense of aloneness and apartness and being exposed thus to dread might have made him like the hero in the story I mentioned, seek out wilder and more distant melancholic experiences of this other reality. His novel "The Narrative of A. Gordon Pym" is a longer journey along the same lines, a catastrophic epiphany drawing a curtain over the final boundary.

Now take "The Premature Burial" a series of titillating vignetts or anecdotes about that dread subject, which Poe teases the reader and self caricaturing mocks and scares himself at the end. A taste for but not a belief in the thrill of the giothic, yet a much deeper poetic affinity for philosophical explorations about life, the afterlife, memory and time and perception and the unities of mind and nature intimately connected with the entertainment. Not just ideas but real issues for Poe confronting but never exorcising his own demons and lost loves, confronting the elusive and brutally dark intangibles that time blocks or rips away. In this area of personal feeling his poems portray the Gothic touch even more strongly, though in a world apart where perhaps mystery can satisfy what this world no longer provides.

His view of the afterlife, a passionate wish for hope, is just as doubtful and dark as the Gothic atmosphere. Poe, the consummate realist allows the passions to seek where the the mind surveys the dubious fantasies. The conjunction is an awe bordering always on horror, the pivotal barrier of death without death.

-- Anonymous, October 15, 2002