I am doing a research paper on poe and i was trying to understan his writing style I would greatly appreciate it ifyou could help me out. I was also wondering if he only wrote one way or many. For example he has a gothic/romantic way about his writing but how would you describe his style more indepth?

-- Anonymous, March 09, 2003

Answers

Poe started out as a poet and eventually discovered the British Romantics. His early poetry is similar to Byron even Shelley. The difference tells all and the honest force of his true self, notimitation or convention. Poe changed things, shortned, structured, simplified and kept it very tightly focussed and somehow personal without being autobiographical. That could hardly be said of the lengthy, flowery and more varied excursions of the romantics as they listen to the voice of nature or embody great dramas without so closely identifying the self.

Check Poe's early poems then later versions of same and then mature poems. Remarkable consistency of theme, emotion and dedication to a single Muse. THEN look at his stories, more as a career to become known, perhaps from a lack of confidence in his daringly short poetry. Humor, Gothic- a range of currently popular genres, usually all stamped with his Muse, themes and original genius. Lined up side by side with his contemporaries it often is a difference of that unique and powerful stamp more than innovation in the established genres with the incredible exception of the modern detective story he forged in making the Byronic Hero a master of crime analysis in Gothic atmospheres and plots. www.eapoe.org.

Always the poet, always preferring brevity, metaphor over simile, suggestiveness and the climactic rhythm of melancholy and wildly accelerating music. Even his prose sentences prefer the iambic pentameter and rhythms of poetry. Conversely, his poems are often story narrations with the narrator another person("The Raven").

And being a poetic genius of the first order with a tight opus of short nearly too musical popular works of strange emotion, it is not easy to pigeonhole or pin down.

-- Anonymous, March 09, 2003