The Man of Exceptional Art

Edgar Allan Poe

1809-1849 , Boston , MA

      He was a personality of great impact on American and international literature. Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Massachusetts on January 19, 1809, a son of professional actors. His father and mother both died before the poet was three years old, which is the reason why he was raised as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia by John and Frances Allan, a prosperous tobacco exporter.

       Poe was sent to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. However, after less than one year of school, he was forced to leave the university when Allan refused to pay Poe’s gambling debts. He returned briefly to Richmond, but his relationship with Allan deteriorated.

       Poe moved to Boston and enlisted in the United States Army in 1827. His first collection of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, was published in the same year. Two years after, he published a second collection entitled Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems. Neither volume received has gained the attention of the public.  

Following his Army service, Poe was admitted to the United States Military Academy, but again due to the lack of financial support, he was forced to leave. He then moved into the home of his aunt Maria Clemm and her daughter Virginia in Baltimore, Maryland.

Around those times, Poe began to sell short stories to magazines and later on in 1835, he became the editor of the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond, where he moved with his aunt and cousin. The next year, he married Virginia, who was fourteen years old at the time.

For over ten years, Poe would edit a number of literary journals including the Burton’s Gentleman’s Magazine and Graham’s Magazine in Philadelphia and the Broadway Journal in New York City. It was during these years that he established himself as a poet, a short story writer, and an editor. He published some of his best-known stories and poems, including “The Fall of the House of Usher," “The Tell-Tale Heart," “The Murders in the Rue Morgue," and “The Raven.”

In 1847, Virginia died from tuberculosis and the bane worsened Poe’s lifelong struggle with great depression and alcoholism. He returned briefly to Richmond in 1849 and then set out for an editing job in Philadelphia. For unknown reasons, he stopped in Baltimore.

On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness and after four days he died because of “acute congestion of the brain.” Medical practitioners studied the case of Poe and found out evidences that he may have been suffering from rabies.

Poe’s stories mark him as one of the originators of both horror and detective fiction. Many anthologies credit him as the “architect” of the modern short story. He was one of the extraordinary critics who focused primarily on the effect of style and structure in a literary work. He has been seen as a forerunner to the “art for art’s sake” movement.

French symbolists such as Mallarmé and Rimbaud claimed him as a literary precursor. For nearly fourteen years, Baudelaire translated his works into French. Today, Poe is known and remembered as one of the first American writers to become a major figure in the world of literature. 

Source: https://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poet/edgar-allan-poe

      

The Cask of Amontillado

Review
       

          “I would make him pay, yes; but I would act only with the greatest care.”

Source: https://americanenglish.state.gov

          Edgar Allan Poe's The Cask of Amontillado must have been the real story behind Selena Gomez's Kill ‘Em with Kindness. That story has given me so much to remember – the splendid lesson of sweet revenge, the presence of unusual events, and the wonderful way of writing which brought me beyond the limits of my imagination.

          The story was based on the perception of the narrator which is the murderer himself. It started with stating his insights about Fortunato, whom he believed had hurt him a thousand times and made him suffer quietly, and his plan of making a sweet revenge. The text is in a sequence structure base on the order of happenings on that day of murder.

          Deception at its finest – that describes the whole story of The Cask of Amontillado. The darkness of the fictional prose was presented with the use of so many ironies. The literal meaning of the dialogues, the actions, and even the name used in the story seem to contrast heavily with Poe's actual message.

          Montresor shows a still kindness in which Fortunato interprets that it is all because he is fond of him. Well, the truth is everything is just a trick. Poe has given the victim the name of Fortunato that means fortunate however what happened to him in the story was a complete contrast.  Moreover, the text doesn't only feature a verbal irony but also presents a dramatic one. The whole setting of the story is ironic.

          As I read through the text, some of the strategies I used were making predictions, visualizing and understanding the sequence of events, asking questions, and drawing conclusions on the mysteries of the story. I kept on drawing conclusions on what would be Montresor's plan of revenge and kept on asking that could it really be possible to make Fortunato suffer out of his kindness.

Source: https://americanenglish.state.gov

          My imagination in the story was even more alive on the part where they went to the resting place of the dead of the Montresor family. I visualized everything and felt every emotion of the words presented in the text.

          “I took down from their places on the wall two brightly burning lights. I gave one of these to Fortunato and led him to a wide doorway.  There we could see the stone steps going down into the darkness. Asking him to be careful as he followed, I went down before him, down under the ground, deep under the old walls of my palace. We came finally to the bottom of the steps and stood there a moment together. The earth which formed the floor was cold and hard. We were entering the last resting place of the dead of the Montresor family. Here too we kept our finest wines, here in the cool, dark, still air under the ground.”

          Well, I’ve went through the depth of text and shook my head upside down, and I end up wondering on and on about the horrific murder – was being insulted enough to commit murder? Or there are just some other reasons why Montresor did it? 

          The story was indeed excellently strange. Like what the others have said, it is as if a starless night sky, placid and dark. It has something I have never seen in other typical stories. The Cask of Amontillado marks another treasure in literature, an extraordinary work out of Edgar Allan Poe's ingenuity.