How did Edgar Allan Poe die?

Can you send me an excerpt from one of Edgar Allan Poe's books on his style of writting?

Any important or interesting information.

thanks lindsay

-- Anonymous, January 03, 2004

Answers

Poe's own essays can be found at www.eapoe.org. For all his original writings on literature and the creative process, Poe does not laboriously catalogue his own techniques. For that you would need more than one outside resource and the aforementioned website is a good place to start. Also separating Poe from his contemporaries means you should have a sampling of what other writers were doing. In "Hw to Write a Blackwood Article" Poe is lampooning the pulp formula he had to use but poking some fun at his own efforts in the field of Gothic as well.

The style flows from his fundamental sources of inspiration and theory in the Romantic Age: namely to focus on a personal and powerful emotional effect beyond the ordinary and supra rational and ingeniously craft all the elements to organically bring it about. Hence the spare descriptions, sometimes one-dimensional(though intimately psychological) characterization, short forms, deliberate vagueness and suggestivity and the abstract directly emotional qualities of music. Then there is the peculiar Muse of Poe that determines a melancholy ideal, a source of quiet, light or repose in the midst of violent struggles. This too determines his choices and is the living heart of their authenticity even within Gothic fiction, humor, poetry and essays.

-- Anonymous, January 05, 2004