Edgar Allan Poe is known as the writer of ghost stories. And while it's certainly true that many of his tales have the requisite elements of ghost stories - ghoulies and ghosties and things that go bump in the night - they are much more than simply attempt to scare the reader silly. They are also - and this too of course is the reason that they are so effectively scary - profoundly intelligent investigations into the human psyche (Bate, 1997, p. 28). This paper examines the personal and historical context of Poe's work.
We see examples of Poe's ability to understand and explore human nature in his three short stories "The Cask of Amontillado" (1846) "The Tale-Tell Heart" and "The Black Cat" (1845) in all three of which a character is defined by his reaction to being shut off from the rest of humanity in either a literal or metaphorical way. This same motif arises in his most famous poem, "The Raven" (1845)
Poe's stories - and this includes not simply these three examined here but other stories of his such as "The Fall of the House of Usher" - are all tales of enforced solitude, of the way in which the greatest tragedies that befall us as humans are the ones that separate us, that wall us up as surely as if we were being buried forever in a wine cellar.
While some Gothic literature actually scarcely merits the name "literature" at all, some of the stories and books written within this genre are compelling either for the beauty of their language or the keen understanding of human nature that the authors bring to their subject. Poe demonstrates this elegance of language and ability to make his readers shudder through a chillingly insightful view of human motivation.
As Silverman (1992) relates in his biography of Poe, during this period of time he was serving as an editor at the "New York Mirror" - one in a series of editorships that he held. The publication in 1845 of "The Raven" brought the then-36-year-old writer national f...