I want to know if "The Cask of Amontillado" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" are two short stories that reflect part of Allan Poe's personal problems. For example, I think that in "The Cask of Amontillado", his problems with drinking are reflected. Could it be possible that in "The Tell-Tale Heart", he refers to his heart and how it can, sometimes drive someone crazy? Well, thank you very much!

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2004

Answers

He certainly was mining his own emotions and mild phobias. Certain health problems and their effects on consciousness had to do with the destructive effects of drinking added to hypersensitivity(which was a prized gateway to creativity among the Romantics), At www.eapoe.org he has a poetic fragment about his own bout of intermittent heart beats.

Of course, as with Stephen King and any other writer of Gothic horror these are mere spingboards for wild exagerration. The principle of using dysfunctions and the abnormal open new heights of experience and revelation was an artistic movement and the pop genre of Gothic horror demanded such to titillate his readers as Poe openly does with satire or coyness in other stories.

Yet I know where you are coming from. The endlessly repeated theme of teachers trying point out how the artiifices of Poe reflected his life. The problem is that the surface points(phobias, life events, health symptoms, obsessions) are much much less important(and certainly not 100% equivalent or Poe would have been imprisoned or committed)than the deeper underlying psychic imprint that relentlessly unifies almost all of Poe's works around his personal poetic Muse.

-- Anonymous, March 12, 2004