I need help on explication of the TALE TELL HEART, THE BLACK CAT, THE PURLOINED LETTER, ALONE, A DREAM WITHIN A DREAM, THE RAVEN, DREAMS, HAPPIEST DAY HAPPIEST HOUR. Or if you can help me in findin a good essay exlaining EAP'S life and how it compared to his poems...thank it woould be alot of help...

-- Anonymous, April 15, 2003

Answers

In most of his stories and poems, they reflected off of what was happening in his life at that time, and the things he thinks about alot, like his fear of death, and not acepting Virginia's illness on how serious it was.

-- Anonymous, April 16, 2003

Try www.eapoe.org and your local library, besides books, might connect you to online services like the Gale Group, EPSCO where articles(some printable) are also available. Your selection is quite disparate but seems to be hinting at some relationship with his inner life and some biographical details.

It is the former that is most important. Genrally his life was full of setbacks, self-defeats, losses of women, alcoholism etc. But his inner Muse is where he not only found spiritual life but a happines often quite separate from his real life. Reconciling THAT artistic happiness with reality was the most difficult and Poe did not settle for easy answers in this life or the next. His poetic life could be haunted by the ghosts of the real, something that could both inspire and repel him within a refuge that at times was a shrinking trap. It was hard for any Romantic, faithful to such strong inner experiences to sustain this elusive grip on the wild Ideal in its existential now when life itself could be so bitter.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2003