negative capability2

nullnull Edgar Allan Poe Poe as a Revolutionary Voice in American Literature: when we look at French Symbolist poets who were the immediate precursors to modernist poets, we find that their source of inspiration in America was Allan Poe. Poe goes beyond reason and values intuition and imagination. He also adventures into the human mind. But that is where their similarities end. Nature, to Poe, is disorder, offering no security. Poe discerns an elusive beauty and with it, the shadow of death, destruction and disintegration. Poe embraces romantic irony. nullPoetic imagination becomes a means with which Poe ventures into the labyrinthine and haunted world of the human mind. This world of psychological complexity, familiar to us in the post-Freudian era, was quite foreign to people in the 19th century. Symbolist movement found it fascinating in Poe’s ability to imagine despondence, despair, decadence, decay and other conditions familiar in 19th century literature. null poetic imagination for Poe meant an honest exploration of the human psyche. But Poe’s understanding of the secrets of the human mind was not morally driven, as it is the case with Hawthorne. Poe was not obsessed with morality. In fact, he assaulted the union of the aesthetic and the moralistic, believing that such a union would obstruct the free enterprise of the imagination. He transgressed moral taboos and turned over polished stones to reveal undersides. For .nullthese reasons, there is a sharp critical disagreement on Poe’s legacy. Tennyson thought that Poe was the most original genius in American literature. But Henry James believed that favoring Poe was “the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection” Yeats saw Poe had made an unrivaled contribution to literary method in prose and in verse. The 20th century American writers in whom we see the influence of Poe include Frank Norris , William Faulkner, Flannery O’ Connor, to name just a few well-known figuresnullPoetic principles: Poe is a critic, poet and short story writer, and he is important in all three aspects. His contribution to French symbolist poetry was made not primarily through his poetry but his stories and criticism. His criticism is highly regarded because he judges and practices by a coherent set of aesthetics principles and technical standards. To Poe, poetic meaning is in the poem’s own composition and utterance, thus there is no exterior or transcendental truth in a poem. nullThis emphasis on the poem’s own integrity allows people to associate Poe with the school of “art for art’s sake" and to regard him as a precursor to the school of New Criticism in 20th century America .This is what wrote in the essay “The Poetic Principle”: null We have taken it into our heads that to write a poem simply for the poem’s sake, and to acknowledge such to have been our design, would be to confess ourselves radically wanting in the true Poetic dignity and force—but the simple fact is, that, would we but permit ourselves to look into our own souls, we should immediately there discover that under the sun there exists nor can exist any work more thoroughly dignified—more supremely noble than this very poem—this poem per se—this poem which is a poem and nothing more—this poem written solely for the poem’s sake. null But this view of a poem being absolutely independent is not really sustainable. Those writers who like Poe see in his writings different images related to different truths that are not explicable only in terms of compositional genius. Baudelaire saw in him the kind of aristocratic gentleman—the Dandy—displaced in the modern city, and argued that it was life in a specific historical moment that produced Poe the artist and his art. Many others, including nullD.H. Lawrence, see Poe as a master of exploring and employing psychological abnormality. In a sense, Poe was a 19th century Freud. However we look at it, Poe’s poetry and fiction show such an inwardly formulated and emotionally anguished landscape seems far apart from nature and society in any conventional form. That is true. But this landscape is still a de-familiarized version realities familiar to us. It is impossible that in giving an absolute value to poetry to unconsciously denying an existence that is too painful for him to bear. null Short Stories: Poe, together with Hawthorne and others, modernized American short stories. Poe’s stories are not just Gothic tales but show, through carefully crafted symbols, complex characters in deep psychological states. The symbols are rays of light that Poe casts on those hidden, deep recesses of the human mind. Often, the stories gain added complexity and sophistication because of Poe’s use of complex narrators. null“The Fall of the House of usher” is narrated by someone who is likely to be dreaming since he tries to shake "off what must have been a dream.” The narrator in “The cask of Amontillado" has committed a murder and is confessing the crime to someone he trusts, after 50 years. A narrator who is a self-righteous killer trying to relate and justify how and why he killed Fortunato half a century ago not only complicates his truth but makes wonder how his truth and his psyche are intertwined. Poe’s ability to manipulate narrative point of view was quite new in Poe’s time. null The force of Poe’s stories comes, in part, from his ability to place his characters in a special situation so that their psychological states can be detailed and sharply delineated. Also, many of his characters have an alter ago or a double, thus suggesting the incompleteness and the self-loathing part of an individual. Sometimes the characters try to escape from, or attempt to destroy of bury, the part of the self which is represented as the double. The annihilation of the double leads to the destruction of the other half, thus to self-destruction. null Poe’s Poem In poetry, Poe is a master of moods. He conveys a mood through internal and external rhyme, regular rhythm, carefully chosen onomatopoeia, and subtle suggestiveness. Poe’s poetry seems to illustrate this belief: if the end of poetry is the contemplation of the beautiful, then the best manifestation of beauty is associated with sadness. As Poe wrote in “The Philosophy of Composition”: Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all the poetic tones. A subject matter chosen for the expression of melancholy is the death of a beautiful woman. “ The Raven” captures the mourning of the narrator for the loss of his beloved when a raven monotonously repeats the word “Nevermore.” “Annabel Lee ”is another poem about the loss of a beautiful woman.