Edgar Allan Poe: American Romantic Movement

Edgar Allan Poe was an American author in the American Romantic Movement. Poe is most famous for his grim short stories of mystery, which led him to be considered to be the inventor of detective-fiction genres. As a child, Poe has what some may call a sad life. Poe was the middle of three children. When Poe was young, his father abandoned the family and shortly after Poe’s mother died. He was then orphaned and taken in, but never officially adopted, by a family in Richmond, VA. As a child Poe had always had dreams of becoming a writer and had, in fact, by the young age of thirteen completed enough poetry to publish a book. His ‘headmaster’ advised against this, therefore Poe did not.
Poe’s publishing career then began at the ripe age of eighteen with an anonymous collection of poems that were credited not to his name, but to ‘a Bostonian’. He then worked for literary journals for several years and published his first well-known poem, ‘The Raven’, in January of 1845. This gave Poe enough popularity to begin to demand higher pay for his work and bring in large crowds to his lectures. Later this year he published two successful books and made an attempt to run his own magazine, which failed. After this, he moved away to a cottage with
A lot of Poe’s writings have similar themes in common: death, or the questions of it. Many of his works are considered dark and gloomy and this tends to define his style of writing. Poe’s style of writing is widely recognized and unmistakable as Edgar Allan Poe. Also, a popular theme of different versions of reality comes into play in a lot of his works as he takes us to identify versions of reality in ways that we can’t always admit to. Poe uses symbolism and imagery to represent these themes in his stories. The two Edgar Allan Poe works I’m focusing on today, both written in the early 1840s, are “The Masque of Red Death” and “The Tell Tale