Edgar Allan Poe :: English Literature Essays

Edgar Allan Poe When picking a topic for my research paper. I thought of many different ideas. I started to think about my interests is course session literature, and I decided to write about my favorite author Edgar Allan Poe. This paper is going to look at Poe from a mental perspective. There seems to be few attempts to look at the psychological causes of humor in Poes work, and how his personal life may thrust had an impact on his writings. Many of Poes tales argon distinguished by the authors unique grotesque ideas in addition to his superb plots. In an article tit guide Poes humor A Psychological Analysis, by Paul Lewis, he states Appropriately it seems to me, that to see Poe only as an elitist whose frivolitys could not be grasped by a general audience is to dish out him short. He does not deny this elitist side of Poe but he holds for a broader, more universal less intellectual humor that screams out from the center of Poes work. (532) This article provides important insi ght to understanding the nature of the humor and its relationship to the overwhelming horror in some of Poes work. Lewis believes that humor and fear have a special relationship in Poes tales. Humor, taken to its limits, leads the reader to fear. He says, Over and over, when humor fails, we are left with images of fear the ravens shadow, the howling cat, the putrescence corpse, or the fallen house. (535) According to Lewis, in The Black Cat and Ligeia, he argues that are first impressions of the narrators are half comic. We are led gradually away from this humor into an expanding horror of men driven to acts of obscene pitilessness. The combination with humor and horror occurs differently in Hop Frog where cruelty and joking co-mingle. (537) To agree with Lewis, I feel what happens in this tale is not just that cruel jokers are destroyed by a cruel joke but that joking itself gives good way to horror, as the cruelty of joke destroys its ability to function as a joke. The appeal of L ewis article about psychological insight of Poe rings true. I agree that fear and humor are linked together in Poes tales. I have seen it in hospitals, and at funerals, or even when humor helps pass the time during a threat of a destructive storm or when a flood threatens us.