Edgar Allan Poe Themes

Edgar Allen Poe was a dark man who wrote many horror stories. They were full of mystery and death. Poe lived a life of loss, poverty, and sadness. There were many themes present in his writing like revenge, alcohol abuse, and paranoia/ madness.

To begin with a theme that was present in Poe’s writing was revenge. In The Tell Tale Heart the anonymous narrator feels he needs to get revenge on an “evil eye”. So he kills the old man and buries him under the floorboards. Also in The Cask of Amontillado the narrator leads a man who has done “a thousand bad deeds” through the catacombs before he chains him up and bricks him into the wall. Many people think the revenge in Poe’s works are directed towards his once foster father James Allen who disowned