How does Edgar Allan Poe's background influence his works

-- Anonymous, April 24, 2003

Answers

His character, his education, his lonely tragdeies. You have to study them for yourself. I hate to make unsupported statements but it would seem a major emotional inflkuence on someone like Egdar was thearly death of his mother and the tragic path through substitutes while keeping the lost, remote feminine ideal as an inner refuge. As for his style and genres, they were common to the time, especially the Gothic and the Romantic poets. Poe's real originality came in applying his peculiar genious to thses forms, making literary criticism with quality teeth, inventing the modern detective story, defending art for art's sake against the judgments of mainstream didactic value poetry.

-- Anonymous, April 25, 2003