Symbolism And Charm How Poe Accomplished His Peculiarity

Strangeness and Charm: How Poe Accomplished his Peculiarity Though Poe s fame rests primarily on his brilliant short stories, he is also a primary figure in the field of literary criticism. His story-bound ingenuity is met by his theoretic advances, which not only supplied a reasoning for his creation of the genres of science fiction and the detective story, but also endeavored to form a tradition of uniquely American literary criticism that would free the American literary world from its colonial dependence on England. In 1846, Poe wrote an essay titled ‘ The Philosophy of Composition, ’ which was printed in a publication of Graham’s Magazine. Traditionally, Poe was a man of limited words; he tried to write as concisely as possible. This proved accurate in this critical essay, as it is not very lengthy. It does, however, correctly depicts Poe s message; he wanted to explain to fellow writers his theory of how it is that acclaimed writers compose well. According t o Poe, there are four essential theories regarding the writing of literature: single effect, a melancholy tone, dark settings, and mentally unstable and/or unreliable narrators and characters. Edgar Allan Poe s central dictum of the short story is that it must contain a singleness derived from pattern and design throughout the narrative, an arabesque, as it is labeled, that follows what one critic calls the principle of redundancy and repetition. Furthermore, since the speakers of many of his stories are