Unique Tales of Edgar Allan Poe - Essay Example

Poe’s style is likely also to have been influenced by drugs as “Poe, mourning the death of his beloved Virginia, undertakes a set of increasingly frantic and hallucinatory peregrinations, revisiting the locales of his luckless career. Leaving New York one last time, he sets out for Richmond. Along the way, he becomes convinced that he is being pursued by shadowy assassins” (Beidler, 252-253). Though these may certainly have influenced his later writings, it is evident that his style had a contagion that influenced other writers who adapted his approaches into their style. “Some mention of what might be called the antidemocratic myopathy in Poe's satires—comparable to that found, for instance, in such acerbic fables of egalitarian excess as Irving's Legend of Sleepy Hollow or Hawthorne's My Kinsman, Major Molineux” (Beidler, 254). However, there is still speculation as to what styles influenced Poe himself and how he developed this unique style.

Edgar Allan Poe’s philosophical leanings, while hardly systematic and shifting throughout his career, reflect a context of epistemological doubt of the sort that Descartes set as the starting point of his inquiry. Poe followed Descartes in pursuing a basis of certainty in the face of this condition of doubt, and he sought that certainty in the same place: in the clarity and conviction of the human mind (Folks, 57).

In other words, it seems as though Poe was most interested in the workings of the human mind and it would seem that as he tried to understand and define human reason, it always led him to dark, criminal, and selfish revelations about the human condition.

Poe’s work ‘The Tell-Tale Heart” exemplified this bleak outlook on the human condition. He determined that men are typically selfish and look to satisfy their ego and in the case of this work “the hero becomes a divided subject that can see what's wrong, or understand the concepts of universal right and wrong through the eyes of the other, and yet he remains blind to his sins” (Wing-chi Ki, 25). In this story, the narrator claims to be sane even after murdering an old man. This sanity is proven by the calculated precision that goes into dismembering the body and carefully hiding it under the floorboards. The interesting theme in the story is that the narrator is never concerned with proving innocence, but only with proving sanity. “In Poe's stories, Ego-Evil stands out because his hero's frame of mind is utterly corrupt at its root: the villain can recognize his deviance through the other; however, his self-perception is adamantly immune to the notion of right or wrong” (Wing-chi Ki, 26). It is even more noteworthy that Poe is not attempting to find solutions or logic to this side of human nature. He accepts its existence. “The Tell-Tale Heart offers no solution to terminate Ego-Evil” Wing-chi Ki, 36). It is this pessimistic reality that permeates most of Poe’s literary works.

Faivre also argues that Poe’s stylistic tendencies are borrowed from other forms as well. “The four tales in which Poe resorted most clearly to the literature and practices of mesmerism, animal magnetism, and/or galvanism, were written only six or seven years after the craze for these “new sciences” had begun to spread in the United States” (22). These beliefs centered on the search for human spirituality and the idea that humans could think on a higher spiritual level of reality that was independent of any theological components. This concept can somewhat be seen in Poe in that he does not offer any concept of morality or judgment in his writing but only focuses on what he views as reality. Many of his stories appear to mimic or contain aspects of these styles of writing which Poe openly admired. “Poe’s mesmeric tales attest to a familiarity with the mesmeric literature. Townshend’s Facts on Mesmerism, which went through no less than five editions from 1840 to 1844, is probably the book that most influenced him. In April 1845, Poe praised it very highly, albeit briefly” (Faivre, 28).

Poe’s styles have had a long-lasting influence. His style is believed to have been used in later literary forms such as detective literature and science fiction and even during his own time was praised even though he tended to be more popular in Europe than in the United States. His success can be measured in the number of imitators some of whom claim to be channeling Poe’s spirit when writing. However, Poe’s dark and sometimes vulgar approach also gains criticism from others and may prevent him from earning the respect his writings and influences warrant.