Romanticism and Poe

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I need examples of how poe is a romantic. Please help me, i have to do a 12 page research paper.

-- Anonymous, April 28, 2003

Answers

If you don't have a foundation for understanding Romanticism in general try www.historyguide.org/intellect/romanticism.html and its links.

Poe tied himself into the comtemporary Roamtnic literarure, the poets(Byron, Shelley, Moore, Barrett,etc.) from an early age. he wrote Gothic stories and studied the German philosophers and others expanding on the liberation of man's intellect by further revolution toward the emotional, toward progress. Finding melancholy solace in solitary corners of wild or gloomy landscapes was a genuine source of personal inspiration("Alone" "The Lake")although the landscape is subordinate to the inner feeling much more in Poe. He preferred vague dream landscapes and restricted dark settings to purify this experience("The Valley of Unrest"). His articles on science were eclectic, searching for the exciting, for intuitive powerful knowledge, for new lands and theories(like phrenology, his interest in Polar expeditions and the West). His chief spokespersons and narrator carried this same reason by emotion, or intuitive excitement in dark things into their experience and combat with the world. His detective, DuPin, is the synthesis of the Enlightenment Man with the poetic intuition looking into the darkest mysteries.

Poe himself was by nature faithful to this vision that it was the absolute center of his life and artistic work. Neither religous hope nor sentimental memory, neither success or love mattered so much as this center. Few Romantic poets were that genuine though in Poe's case his own life drove him to this isolation- perhaps.

-- Anonymous, April 28, 2003


Poe used romanticism in his works by bringing his readers into a world that was totally different from our own. He took you into a world of death, destruction, love; a world where there is a respect for the natural (death,ect.), and into the world of a dream. In all of his works, Poe's fascination with the unreal and paranormal is often set in the state of a dream.

-- Anonymous, April 29, 2003

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