Born in Boston, Massachusetts, in January 1809, and died in Baltimore, Maryland, in October
1849, Edgar Allan Poe lived only forty years in this world, but his name brings to mind images of
murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. His
works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as “The Tell-Tale Heart” ,
“The Raven”, and “The Fall of the House of Usher”. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short
stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book
reviews. He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator
in the science fiction genre, and he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and
theoretician. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting
lyric poetry.
Poe’s short stories are abounded with bloody violence, murder and even supernatural events.
And the places where the stories occur are usually dreary and gloomy castles, bleak cellars or
churches, and thrilling grave yards. All these are the recurrent and indispensable elements in
establishing Poe’s prevalent terror,which is strong enough to shake readers’interior feelings.
Among these stories, Poe can not stop interpreting his “death wish”. “Death” has become one of his
constant themes, especially the death of a beautiful woman, and he made assertions in his famous
article “The Philosophy of Composition” that this is “the most poetical topic in theworld”. Such
stories as “Ligeia”“Morella” and “Berenice” are good examples. And personal tragedy was another
recurring theme throughout Poe’s life.In his early childhood, his father deserted the family and
later his beloved mother died. He was adopted by a wealthy tobacco family but seldom had a good
time with them. It is his miserable life experience and his pessimistic temperament that led Poe to
be obsessed with his “death fantasia” and dark romanticism. It is not difficult to find that Poe has an
astonishingly strong and meanwhile twisted and weird power of imagination which is quite
bewildering, and this is one of the reasons that he isdrawn much attention.
Allan Poe himself is also one of the most controversial figures in the American literary
history. Although his contributions to the literature have been widely acknowledged at present, he
was misunderstood at his time because of his wired character. For example, his literary exe
cutor
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黑猫与牛奶Rufus Griswold spared no pains, after Allan Poe’s death, to sully his reputation—he painted Poe as
a Bohemian, depraved, and demonic, a villain with no virtue at all. Professor Chang also mentioned
that Poe’s own work did at times seem to corroborate the view of Griswold’s and many others that
his was an evil genius and thus the legend steadily building up about Poe placed the man in a very
unfavorable light; therefore Emerson dismissed him in three words “the jingle man”and Mark
Twain declared his prose to be unreadable. Henry James made the ruthless statement that “an
enthusiasm for Poe is the mark of a decidedly primitive stage of reflection”. And Whitman, who
was the only famous literary figure presented at Poe Memorial Ceremony in Baltimore in 1875,had
a mixed feeling about Poe: he did admit Poe’s genius, but it was“its narrow range and unhealthy
lurid quality”that most impressed him.
However, needless to say, the majority of critics today, in America as well as in the world,
have recognized the real, unique importance of Poe as a great writer of fiction, a poet of the first
rank, and a critic of acumen and insight. His works are read the world over with appreciation and
understanding.
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Edgar Allan Poe’s works didn’t bring him fame and fortunate before he died. Since the 20
century, with the irrationalism philosophy and Fraud’s psychoanalysis rising and developing, Allan
Poe and his works have been wildly accepted.
Freud proposed that the human psyche could be divided into three parts: Id, ego, and
super-ego. Id represents human being’s basic desire, impulse and vitality for living. It is the
subconsciousness part of human being’s spiritual activities. The super-ego is the moral component
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