Essay. First Loves. By Brett Fletcher Lauer & Lynn Melnick. A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds. Read More. More Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Annabel Lee. By Edgar Allan Poe. A Dream. By Edgar Allan Poe. For Annie. By Edgar Allan Poe. To Helen. By Edgar Allan Poe. To -- -- Ulalume: A Ballad. By Edgar Allan Poe. See All Poems by this [F ROM advance sheets of the new volume by Mr. Poe, in the press of Mr. Redfield, we present the following admirable essay embodying the critic’s theory of poetry. It appropriately introduces his discussions of the individual merit of many of our prominent authors. This concluding volume of Poe’s works, making some six hundred pages, is entitled “The Literati,” and will be published in 1 Stephen King, creator of such stories as Carrie and Pet Sematary, stated that the Edgar Allan Poe stories he read as a child gave him the inspiration and instruction he needed to become the writer that he is. 2 Poe, as does Stephen King, fills the reader's imagination with the images that he wishes the reader to see, hear, and feel. 3 His use of vivid, concrete visual imagery to present both
Poe’s Poetry “The Raven” Summary and Analysis | GradeSaver
The Poetics of Poe essay B. is a much-disdained book. He reduces the drama to its language, people say, and the language itself to its least poetic element, poe essay story, and then he encourages insensitive readers like himself to subject stories to crudely moralistic readings, that reduce tragedies to the childish proportions of Aesop-fables. Strangely, though, the Poetics itself is rarely read with the kind of sensitivity its critics claim to possess, and the thing criticized is not the book Aristotle wrote but a caricature of it.
Aristotle himself respected Homer so much that he personally corrected a copy of the Iliad for his student Alexander, poe essay, who carried it all over the world, poe essay. Poe essay his Rhetoric III, xvi, 9Aristotle criticizes orators who write exclusively from the poe essay, rather than from the heart, in the way Sophocles makes Antigone speak. Aristotle is often thought of as a logician, but he regularly uses the adverb logikôspoe essay, logically, as a term of reproach contrasted with phusikôsnaturally or appropriately, to describe arguments made by others, or preliminary and inadequate arguments of his own.
Those who take the trouble to look at the Poetics closely will find, I think, a book that treats its topic appropriately and naturally, and contains the reflections of a good reader and characteristically powerful thinker. The first scandal in the Poetics is the initial poe essay out of dramatic poetry as a form of imitation, poe essay.
We call the poet a poe essay, and are offended at the suggestion that he might be merely some sort of recording device. But Aristotle has no intention to diminish the poet, and in fact says the same thing I just said, in making the point that poetry is more philosophic than history.
By imitation, Aristotle does not mean the sort of mimicry by which Aristophanes, say, finds syllables that approximate the sound of frogs. He is speaking of the imitation of action, and by action he does not mean mere happenings. Aristotle speaks extensively of praxis in the Nicomachean Ethics.
It is not a word he uses loosely, and in fact his use of it in the definition of tragedy recalls the discussion in the Ethics. Action, as Aristotle uses the word, refers only to what is deliberately chosen, and capable of finding completion in the achievement of some purpose. Animals and young children do not act in this sense, and action is not the whole of the life of any of us.
The poet must have poe essay eye for the emergence of action in human life, and a sense for the actions that are worth paying attention to. They are not present in the world in such a way that a video camera could detect them. An intelligent, poe essay, feeling, shaping human soul must find them.
By the same token, poe essay, the action of the drama itself is not on the stage. It takes form and has its poe essay in the imagination of the spectator.
The actors speak and move and gesture, but it is the poet who speaks through them, from imagination to imagination, to present to us the thing that he has made. Because that thing he makes has the form of an action, it has to be seen and held together just as actively and attentively by us as by him.
The imitation is the thing that is re-produced, in us and for us, by poe essay art. This is a powerful kind of human communication, poe essay, and the thing imitated is what defines the human realm. If no one had the power to imitate action, life might just wash over poe essay without leaving any trace. How do I know that Aristotle intends the imitation of action to be understood poe essay this way? In De Animapoe essay, he distinguishes three kinds of perception II, 6; III, 3.
There is the perception of proper sensibles-colors, sounds, tastes and so on; these poe essay on the surfaces of things and can be mimicked directly for sense perception. But there is also perception poe essay common sensibles, available to more than one of our senses, as shape is grasped by both sight and touch, or number by all five senses; these are distinguished by imagination, the power in us that is shared by the five senses, and in which the circular shape, for instance, is not dependent on sight or touch alone.
These common sensibles can be mimicked in various ways, as when I draw a messy, meandering ridge of chalk on a blackboard, and your imagination grasps a circle. Finally, there is the perception of that of which the sensible qualities are attributes, poe essay, the thing—the son of Poe essay, for example; it is this that we ordinarily mean by perception, and while its object always has an image in the imagination, poe essay, it can only be distinguished by intellect, no°s III,4.
Skilled mimics can imitate people we know, by voice, gesture, and so on, and here already we must engage intelligence and imagination together. The dramatist imitates things more remote from the eye and ear than familiar people. So the mere phrase imitation of an poe essay is packed with meaning, available to us as soon as we ask what an action is, and how the image of such a thing might be perceived.
In each of these developments there is a vast array of possible intermediate stages, but just as philosophy is the ultimate form of the innate desire to know, tragedy is considered by Aristotle the ultimate form of our innate delight in imitation.
His beloved Homer saw and poe essay the most important possibilities of the imitation of human action, but it was the tragedians who, refined and intensified the form of that imitation, and discovered its perfection. A work is a tragedy, Aristotle tells us, only if it arouses pity and fear. Why does he single out these two passions? Some interpreters think he means them only as examples—pity and fear and other passions like that—but I am not among those loose constructionists, poe essay.
Aristotle does use a word that means passions of that sort toioutabut I think he does so only to indicate that pity and fear are not themselves things subject to identification with pin-point precision, but that each refers to a range of feeling. It is just the feelings in those two ranges, however, that belong to tragedy. He does not try to prove that there is such a thing as nature, or such a thing as motion, though some people deny both.
Likewise, he understands the recognition of a special and powerful form of drama built around pity and fear as the beginning of an inquiry, and spends not one word justifying that restriction. We, poe essay, however, can see better why he poe essay there by trying out a few simple alternatives.
Suppose a drama aroused pity in a powerful way, but aroused no fear at all. This is an easily recognizable dramatic form, called a tear-jerker. The name is meant to disparage this sort of drama, but why? Imagine poe essay well written, well made play or movie that depicts the losing struggle of a likable central character.
We are moved to have a good cry, poe essay, and are afforded either the relief of a happy ending, or the realistic desolation of a sad poe essay. In the one case the tension built up along the way is released within the experience of the work itself; in the other it passes off as we leave the theater, and readjust our feelings to the fact that it was, after all, only poe essay. What is wrong with that?
There is always pleasure in strong emotion, and the theater is a harmless place to indulge it, poe essay. We may even come out feeling good about being so compassionate. But Dostoyevski depicts a character who loves to cry in the theater, not noticing that while she wallows in her warm feelings her coach-driver is shivering outside.
She has day-dreams about relieving suffering humanity, but does nothing to put that vague desire to work. Poe essay she is typical, then the tear-jerker is a dishonest form of drama, not even a harmless diversion but an encouragement to lie to oneself.
This is again a readily recognizable dramatic form, called the horror story, or in a recent fashion, the mad-slasher movie.
The thrill of fear is the primary object of such amusements, poe essay, and the story alternates between the build-up of apprehension and the shock of violence, poe essay. And while the tearjerker gives us an illusion of compassionate delicacy, the unrestrained shock-drama obviously has the effect of coarsening feeling. Genuine human pity could not co-exist with the so-called graphic effects these films use to keep scaring us. The attraction of this kind of amusement is again the thrill of strong feeling, and again the price of indulging the desire for that thrill may be high.
Let us consider a milder form of the drama built on arousing fear. There are stories in which fearsome things are threatened or done by characters who are in the end defeated by means similar to, or in some way equivalent to, what they dealt out, poe essay. The fear is relieved in vengeance, poe essay, and we feel a satisfaction that we might be inclined to call justice. To work on the level of feeling, though, justice must be understood as the exact inverse of the crime—doing to the offender the sort of thing he did or meant to do to others.
The imagination of evil then becomes the measure of good, poe essay, or at least of the restoration of order. The satisfaction we feel in the vicarious infliction of pain or death is nothing but a thin veil over the very feelings we mean to be punishing. This poe essay a successful dramatic formula, arousing in us destructive desires that are fun to feel, along with the self-righteous illusion that we are really superior to the character who displays them.
The playwright who makes us feel that way will probably be popular, but he is a menace. We have looked at three kinds of non-tragedy that arouse passions in a destructive way, and we could add others. There are potentially as many kinds as there are passions and combinations of passions. That suggests that the theater is just an arena for the manipulation of passions in ways that are pleasant in the short run and at least reckless to pursue repeatedly.
Poe essay worst, the drama could be seen as dealing in a kind of addiction, which it both produces and holds the only remedy for, poe essay. But we have not yet tried to talk about the combination of passions characteristic of tragedy.
When we turn from the sort of examples I have given, to the acknowledged examples of tragedy, we find ourselves in a different world. The tragedians I have in mind are five: Aeschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides; Shakespeare, who differs from them only in time; and Homer, who differs from them somewhat more, in the form in which he composed, poe essay, but shares with them the things that matter most.
I could poe essay other authors, such as Dostoyevski, who wrote stories of the tragic kind in much looser literary forms, but I want to keep the focus on a small number of clear paradigms. When we look at a tragedy we find the chorus in Antigone telling us what a strange thing a human being is, that passes beyond all boundaries lines ff. I could add more examples of this poe essay by the dozen, and your memories will supply others. Tragedy seems always to involve testing or finding the limits of what is human, poe essay.
This is no mere orgy of strong feeling, but a highly focussed way of bringing our powers to bear on the image of what is human as such. I suggest that Aristotle is right in saying that the powers which first of all poe essay this human image to sight for us are pity and fear.
It is obvious that the authors in our examples are not just putting things in front of us to make us cry or shiver or gasp, poe essay. The feelings they arouse are subordinated to another poe essay. Aristotle begins by saying that tragedy arouses pity and fear in such a way as to culminate in a cleansing of those passions, the famous catharsis, poe essay.
The word is used by Aristotle only the once, in his preliminary definition of tragedy. I think this is because its role is taken over later in the Poetics by another, more positive, word, but the idea of catharsis is important in itself, and we should consider what it might mean.
First of all, the tragic catharsis might be a purgation. Fear can obviously be an insidious thing that undermines life and poisons it with anxiety. It would be good to flush this feeling from our systems, bring it into the open, and clear the air. This may explain the appeal of horror movies, poe essay, that they redirect our fears toward something external, grotesque, and finally ridiculous, in order to puncture them.
On the other hand, fear might have a secret allure, so that what we need to purge is the desire for the thrill that comes with fear. The horror movie also provides a safe way to indulge and satisfy the longing to feel afraid, poe essay, and go home afterward satisfied; the desire is purged, temporarily, poe essay being fed. Our souls are so many-headed that opposite satisfactions may be felt at the poe essay time, poe essay, but I think these two really are opposite.
In the first sense of purgation, the horror movie is a kind of medicine that does its work and leaves the soul healthier, while in the second sense it poe essay a potentially addictive drug.
Either explanation may account for the popularity of these movies among teenagers, poe essay, since fear is so much a poe essay of that time of life. For those of us who are older, the tear-jerker may have more appeal, offering a way to purge the regrets of our lives in a sentimental outpouring of poe essay.
Poe’s essay explanation
, time: 6:439 Mournful Facts About Edgar Allan Poe’s "The Raven" | Mental Floss
Essay. First Loves. By Brett Fletcher Lauer & Lynn Melnick. A formative moment, fixed in poets’ minds. Read More. More Poems by Edgar Allan Poe. Annabel Lee. By Edgar Allan Poe. A Dream. By Edgar Allan Poe. For Annie. By Edgar Allan Poe. To Helen. By Edgar Allan Poe. To -- -- Ulalume: A Ballad. By Edgar Allan Poe. See All Poems by this A summary of Part X (Section9) in Edgar Allan Poe's Poe’s Short Stories. Learn exactly what happened in this chapter, scene, or section of Poe’s Short Stories and what it means. Perfect for acing essays, tests, and quizzes, as well as for writing lesson plans Jul 02, · Poe loved to expose scientific hoaxes, while simultaneously perpetrating them himself. And his self-proclaimed magnum opus, a largely unsuccessful venture, was a nonfiction essay about the nature of the universe, called “Eureka.” Author John Tresch joins Ira to discuss Poe
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