Analysis of Poes Successes and Failures in Poetry and...

An Analysis of Poes Successes and Failures in Poetry and Fiction Edgar Allan Poes career may have been a failure considering what he set out to do, but he did achieve some success and notoriety in his own lifetime. His most successful poem was, of course, The Raven, a piece he composed to satisfy popular taste. But some of his short fiction was popular as well. As an editor and publisher, however, Poe did not quite achieve the greatness he sought. His legacy grew only after his death, thanks to his literary executor R. W. Griswold, who won more permanent attention for him after his death by exaggerating his neurotic debility and inherited dipsomania to make him an almost Satanic figure (Bradbury 206). This paper will examine Poes poetic and short story successes and failures, and show how he was not quite the Satanic figure that the reading public preferred to imagine him to be. Poes own life is as full of melancholy and darkness as his many tales and poems. Perhaps the greatest example of his failure as a literary man, however, is found in his inability to achieve any form of stable income through his work with literature. This, of course, is no indication of his literary merit. Neither Herman Melville nor Nathaniel Hawthorne, contemporaries of Poe, had much financial success as novelists but their places in the canon of American Literature is firmly secured; and so too is Poes. Born in Boston, Poes life kept mainly to the Eastern Coast (he died inShow MoreRelatedCommon Themes of Edgar Allan Poe3152 Words   |  13 PagesAn Analysis of the Common Themes Found in selected works of Edgar Allan Poe A Research Presented to The faculty of the English Department In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in English IV By March 2010 Acknowledgement The researcher would like to thank the following people who help and give guidance to make this project To the Project adviser and the home room adviser of the researchers, who gave his outmost patience and time to check the drafts and format of eachRead MoreCommon Themes of Edgar Allan Poe3166 Words   |  13 PagesAn Analysis of the Common Themes Found in selected works of Edgar Allan Poe A Research Presented to The faculty of the English Department In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements in English IV By March 2010 Acknowledgement The researcher would like to thank the following people who help and give guidance to make this project To the Project adviser and the home room adviser of the researchers, who gave his outmost patience and time to check the drafts and format of each part of this very