What influenced Poe during his writing times? and why?

-- Anonymous, November 09, 2003

Answers

Poe was influencend by the europen romantisism. To this time the grotsque and the makabre became part of literature. But the most influence on his work was his life itself. His works are a mirror of his life. The inspiration for his writing he get by his own feelings and life experience. For example, in his short story "The Tell-Tale heart" it his said that the old man in his story who is killed by the protagonist symbolize his foster father John Allan. His relationship to his father was not very good altough his father did not threat him in a bad way. But in this story the anger and the wish to murder his foster father can be seen. The death of his mother, foster mother and wife whom he really loved gave him new inspiration for his poems and short storys. The brillant poem "The Raven" is a tribut to the death of his wife.

-- Anonymous, November 10, 2003

Some say what is said above, yes, but there is more to that. He suffered from Autism ((a desease where the wetch has seizures a lot)) and most of them don't fall to the ground twitching. Some patients see things or hear things, like one woman would see Tweety Bird and that is how she would know she was have a seizure. When he would have an attack, he would see dark things, the things that inspired him. A.K.A. The Pit and the Pendulum. He saw those things when he suffered a seizure in the bar.

-- Anonymous, November 10, 2003

Poe a a youngster was exposed to British education at a time when Coleridge was established and Byron and Shelley, Thomas Moore and others well underway. Many of his youthful poems, themes and theories derived from those Romantics, themselves influenced by the German philosophers, Rousseau and Chateaubriand. Poe similarly was influenced by contemporaries in part(Elizabeth Barrett, Longfellow) and minor or unknown poets when something struck his fancy. In all things Poe was an original, neither slavish to the political extremes and moral libertarianism of the Europpeans or to purely American content.

For example, while he may have borrowed a lot from "Caleb Williams" of William Godwin, the socialist content in context of Revolutionary America was quite different. Poe had no need to express himself against monarchical and aristocratic oppression, nor was he a monor aristocrat like Byron or Shelley. In social mores Poe was quite conventional and deferential to the ladies. Yet Poe was thus free to rebel against the conventional mindset in its bourgeois forms in the literary world especially and on the comsic scale of the meaning of life and death ("Eureka"). Compare the scientific speculations of "Eureka"(albeit mystical and intuitive) with the allegorical statements of Bryon or Shelley. Poe was expressing the Romantic sentiment more at the heart of the rational progress that was changing the world.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2003

Poe's "The Raven" was influenced by none other than Charles Dickens. When Dickens was visiting America, Poe decured a private meeting with him. Dickens was telling Poe about how his pet died because it ingested paint when it was left in the garage when the Dickens' went on vacation. Dickens said its name was Grip. When Poe inquired about what Grip was, Dickens told him Grip was a raven.

-- Anonymous, November 11, 2003