I'm doing a six page research report on Edgar Allan Poe. I was wondering if Poe's poems and short stories had a deeper meaning. I was also wondering if you could help me find some examples.

Please write back ASAP becuase its due Monday!!!=)

-- Anonymous, January 24, 2004

Answers

You don't mention which ones. Poe preferred vague suggestibility and rarely used allegory, once in humorous fashion(KIng Pest), had a little fun with names. People generally did not know when he was joking or get the deeper themes of his "scary stuff" even if a philosphical theme and quotes were provided. That was partly all right since Poe's main goal was for the entire work to have a single effect on the reader, not that the reader should learn or discover hidden meanings. In fact it often seems the obligatory ideas and themes leading the events of the story are there mostly for effect, or at least as organically bound to the horror and awe as they are in "The Fall of the House of Usher". Narrators are deceptive and self-deceiving, as they often must be to heighten the ordinary into some extraordinary experience(they often misinterpret and exaggerate). His poems, as short as many are, do have a lot more profound and complex thought than the ordinary Romantic poem, especially the long excessive epics. "The Lake" for example might have been easier had their been more description? Yet he ignores quite a bit of the scenery that creates his mood. he neglects the ghost legend connected to the lake. Instead, as with most of his works he concentrates with a single mind upon the actual inner experience at its apogee, which itself is worhth more than anything else, love, money, fame or his own self destruction.

-- Anonymous, January 26, 2004