Edgar Allen Poe's Style

by Courtney Deppe

         Edgar Allen Poe was one of the world’s most famous and infamous American writers. He came from a troubled past and emerged to become one of the most eccentric, dark, and innovative writers of his time. He was not just an object of fascination, but also criticism, either way he used everything that came his was as inspiration for his writing. Since Poe’s writing is as unique as he was, it is often hard to understand what or how someone could have written these influential tales. In order to get a better grasp on the works of Poe, one should observe his techniques for writing over all. After all, Poe did manage to develop his own writing style and theories to go along with his out of the ordinary tales.

            One of Poe’s main forms of writing was through short stories or tales. While he is typically more well known for his poems, his most ground breaking literary style is seen in his short stories. Poe used many commonly known writing techniques known to give a story a certain style such as repetition, alliteration, and symbolism. However, one of the things that really set his works apart his “narrative method”(Gargano 178). Many, if not almost all of Poe’s short stories and even poems are narrated. The narrator also happens to typically be one of the main characters or the main character of the story. This is an important writing style because allows one to see things almost as if the reader is experiencing it or as if the reader is sitting down and having a dialogue with this character. This can add depth and fits into Poe’s idea of using prose to write a short story. His main use of the narrative method is typically described as “often having an aesthetic compatibility between his narrators’ hypertrophic language and their psychic derangement”(Gargano 178). This means that there is something almost eerie about how settling and enticing it is that his main narrators use a lot of colorful language and off the hand references and on top of it all may or may not, depending on a reader’s interpretation, be completely mad. His narrators not only tell the story but give the story a tone, a feeling, and in some cases even helped better establish the setting. The part that many readers and critics both like and dislike about this most is that these narrators can even be described as relatable. This conflicting opinion on Poe’s work could be seen in the article referenced above. The author of it, while not a fan of Poe’s, can still not seem to criticize this unique and rather bizarre technique. An example of this technique can be seen in one of Poe’s more well known short stories, “The Tell Tale Heart.” In this story, the narrator spends the entire story speaking directly to the reader and trying to convince one he is not mad even though he killed an old man that he on occasion claimed to have truly loved. He also tries to tell the reader how perfect of a crime he committed and that he truly should not have gotten caught, but in the end it is hard to say whether it is just guilt or if it is his madness that allowed him to be caught.

            The other aspect of Poe’s writing style that one must analyze before full understanding his works is Poe’s theory of beauty. Beauty is a dominant characteristic in most of Poe’s poems, but can also be seen a much less direct way in his short stories. Poe saw beauty everywhere and sometimes in the most horrific of places or settings. This is why his theory is so groundbreaking. It looks past a basic concept of beauty and devolves into what beauty truly is. A good analysis of Poe’s work is “The fundamental construct in Poe’s theory is his hypostatization of beauty as transempirical and ideal entity. Poe is not very clear about the metaphysical status of this entity but it would seem that he thought of it as a kind of universal with a being independent of things in which it manifested”(Kelly 521). This means that Poe views beauty as a type of being in and of itself. It may decided to almost posses certain things, creatures, and people; however, Poe saw it as its own spirit in a way. He did not see it as anyone thing that a person possessed but rather people and things being a host through which beauty could reveal itself to the world. This is how Poe was able to describe beautifully horrific things because if you follow this theory then beauty can place itself anywhere and in any form. An example of this can be seen through one of Poe’s short stories entitled “The Fall of the House of Usher.” In the beginning of this story, the narrator appears at an old mansion owned by his friend from childhood. He describes its outward appearance in great detail and although he says that there is something about how it looks that makes him feel rather uneasy, there is something beautiful in this description. This is Poe’s favorite way of placing beauty in something that should in theory scare, unsettle, or even repulse a reader. Once these concepts are fully understood then one can finally understand Poe as a writer.

Works Cited

Gargano, James W. “The Question of Poe’s Narrators.” College English 25.3 (1963):177-81. www.jstor.org. National Council of Teachers of English. Web. 11 Feb. 2012.

<http://www.jstor.org/stable/373684>.

Kelly, George. "Poe's Theory of Beauty." American Literature 27.4 (1956): 521-36. JSTOR. Web. 22 Feb. 2012. <http://www.jstor.org/stable/2922338>.