what are Poe's theme?

Question

If you read Edgar Allan Poe 's stories

what do you learn from the story?

Answer 1

-Obsessed with killing
-Insane
-Dark
-"Another parallel universe"
-Views of a serial killer

However, the most important out of Poe's stories are the SAT words that are contained in his writings.

Answer 2

Edgar Allen Poe was a man who invented the detective story. He grew up with all his loved ones dying from the horrible disease called the "red death." First is mother died, then his wife, then his step father, continued. He was a strange man. By reading most of his stories I would say that his theme would most likely be horror, mystery, obsession about women, murder, violence, and alcoholism. Usually, (because he lost all the women in his life) Poe would usually have the heroin or victim be a woman. Also, there was usually someone in his story that was drunk. I just watched today the movie "The Murders in the Rue Morgue". Our class did a whole lesson on him.

Answer 3

Poe's epic poems are are typical Gothic theme...usually dark and the Hero or Heroine dies or looses at the end. that time period saw a lot of death....along with Poe...he was a carrier of TB and single handedly killed his mother, wife and children w/o even knowing it. So everyone he ever loved and came into direct contact with died.....see why his poems are so dark....he thought it was him and it really was him...they just didn't know you could be a carrier for the disease back then.

He died as lonely, impoverished alcoholic in the gutter. You learn that everything dies and life is one big long disappointing venture.

Answer 4

You learn that Poe has somewhat of an obsession with the mental condition of individuals, and the deterioration of the mind.

Answer 5

The most prominent theme would be death. Almost all of Poe's literary work has to do something with death or macabre.

Answer 6

If we look first at Poe’s horror stories as a group, we shall see that certain themes are very strong and frequently recur, in varying forms. One theme is death and dying, given an elaborate, ceremonial treatment. This is new in horror fiction: the early English writers of Gothic fiction may have dealt in terrible goings-on, but they did not linger over death and showed little interest in its rituals. A second theme is the mistaking of life for death: Poe was obsessed with the catatonic condition in which life imitated death—a condition dealt with in morbid seriousness in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’, and given the joke-in-the-tail treatment in ‘The Premature Burial’. A third theme is that of the continuing dialogue between the living and the dead. The most famous example of this is ‘The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar’, and the theme receives comic treatment in ‘Some Words with a Mummy’. These recurring themes suggest to me that, besides drawing (whether consciously or unconsciously) on his own inner psychological tensions, Poe was deftly handling some of the leading ideas of his generation, and exploiting them to create some of the most exciting and dramatic horror writing of the nineteenth century. This, in my view, makes Poe a great American writer: unlike the European masters of horror writing, he belonged to a society of comparatively recent origin, with little of a past to which he could have recourse. A Southerner, too, so far as the cast of his mind was concerned, he was ot drawn to exploit the Puritan past of New England, as Hawthorne did. One of the unifying qualities of European Gothic was the exploitation of the Gothic/medieval past. Poe frequently attempts to associate his horror stories with the ‘Gothic’ past through copious references to Joseph Glanvill (author of Lux Orientalis, 1662, and Saducismus Triumphatus, 1667), Sir Thomas Browne (author of Hydriotaphia, Urne-Burial, 1658) and other older authorities, but in fact his most brilliant effects are achieved in his exploitation of contemporary themes, concepts, obsessions, and ideas.

Answer 7

Some Words With a Mummy is a super quick and very fun read

Answer 8

Depression and what most refer to lunacy. He was incredibly depressed and I know because I am too. I'm too much of a chicken **** to kill myself so I suppose I will suffer the rest of my life...:(

Answer 9

That 'abnormal human behavior' is behavior we can each relate to, and not some foreign experience that happens to the other person.

Answer 10

Dark.