Anti Transcendentalism in the Literary Works of Edgar Allan Poe 1 Essay

Anti- abstruseism in the take a crap of Edgar Allan Poe Life and oddment are imaginations that are widely known by men and women of solely cultures. Many flips of books are written rough these topics since they are easily known barely non e rattlingone understands the meaning of backup and demise. demise seems to be the tougher of these two concepts to be discussed. This is most likely due to the fact that once a mortal dies they are gone forever. While soldieryy individuals apprise say that they stomach experienced life to the fullest, non many, or any at all, can say that they have experienced expiration and lived to talk about that experience.As a result, literary authors use metaphors and personification to bring their readers closer to intelligence finis and life. Transcendentalism became a philosophical ingrainment in the 1820s and 1830s that suggested a printing that sacredity was greater than a basic human experience, such(prenominal) as living life without the need for materialistic items, therefore experiencing the full form of what life has to offer.While many authors and poets grasped this philosophy, such as henry David Thoreau, other literary figures disliked the other human beingsly movement and wrote their work against its viewpoint. Edgar Allan Poe is well known for horrifying the topic of death in most of his literary kit and caboodle. Poe had a history of using the fear of death 1 Patel and relating it to the action it had on the human soul. He used the experiences in his life as a precursor to his niggling stories and poems. Edgar Allen Poes experience with illness and death, denotative in his literary work, contri anded to his stance as an anti- transcendentalist. Edgar Allan Poe was born to two set up actors, David Poe Jr. and Elizabeth Arnold Poe, on January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts.Even in his early life, Poe face a difficult life. After his father abandoned him, and his aim end shortly by a nd by, a rich merchant by the name of butt Allan, and his wife, adopted Poe. With his new adoptive parents, he left the States lived in Scotland and capital of the United Kingdom for five years. Poe attended private schools as a child where he was gifted in lit. This was the first step to his writing poetry. Even though he strived academically, he isolated himself from his peers. Poe then continued his studied at the University of Virginia, where he studied classical and modern language.However, to his inability to cover his price of living, which his adoptive father refused to pay for, Poe resorted to gambling for his source of money, causing him to incur massive amounts of debt and withdrawing from the university. As a stepping-stone to change his life, Poe enlisted in the army, where he publish his first book of poetry. Poe began to write more and more works of literature finished his young adult years. However, even though his poems and short stories were decent well known , Poe had a difficult time earning a living through being a writer.This lack of 2 Patel financial assistance caused him to move in with his aunt, and niece, Virginia Clemm, who he soon afterwards married. Through the years of 1837 and 1845, Edgar Allan Poe became a well renowned author and poet, publishing countless poems and short stories. However, after the death of his wife, Virginia, in 1847, due to tuberculosis, Poes health also became to devalue from his constant use of alcohol. Soon after, Poe died a mysterious death, which many contrive to be because of his excessive alcohol abuse.(Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), An Introduction to, 220-221) As seen through his life, Edgar Allan Poe set about a difficult life, which put acrossly reflects in his short stories and poems. As mentioned earlier, Poe was against the transcendental movement that swept through the early Unites States. The movement mainly flourished in the mid-1830s. The transcendentalist movement was first recogni zed and founded by Harvard-education ministers, in their attempt to go against Unitarianism. The philosophy and belief transcendentalists follow is to be in reflection of divinity (American Transcendentalism, An Introduction to, 1). There were many figures of the transcendentalist movement that were influenced by its concept. ane of the most important figures of American Transcendentalism was Ralph Waldo Emerson. His bear witnesss were directly related to the philosophy it follows. Many other authorial figures were influences by transcendentalism, including Henry David Thoreau, Walt Whitman, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Emily Dickinson, and Edgar Allan Poe. An author support the 3 Patel transcendentalist movement claims, They believed that the man is not perfect and what they emphasized was the unworthy subject in the world and temper. What they wrote illustrated the idea that human beings are not al slipway moving toward truth and righteousness, beauty, and justice (Manzari 1800).tho ugh the transcendentalist movement was outstanding to Poe, it influenced him in a negative way, where he was predisposed to write against the movement, sort of than favor it in his literary work. Just like Emerson, Thoreau wrote a spiritual autobiography called Walden or, Life in the Woods (2). The autobiography explained how Thoreau lives secluded in the woods from the materialistic world he lived in, becoming one with natures beauty and all it had to offer. In An Introduction to American Transcendentalism, the article states, Moreover, that influence has been traced by numerous critics from the nineteenth century to the present day in such characteristics of American Literature as its emphases on nature, innocence, and individualism. The following quote from the article suggests that the transcendentalist movement influenced literature as its seen today. This statement is indeed correct since the movement influenced most of the pieces written by Edgar Allan Poe. Through his horr ific childhood, Poe was well experienced in writing about death since most of his work revolves or so it. Poe remains firm on his stance as an anti- transcendentalist.One of his most famous works is a poem called The feed. The ballad is about a young man who is torn by the death of the woman he loved, and mourns for her dearly. The poem shows a direct and clear mother wit of negativity and sorrow in its 4 Patel tone (Magistrale 29). It seems as though Poe is openly mocking transcendentalism in his poem. The narrator of the poem suggests super pictorial forces and a hostile natural world. fit to transcendentalism, there is nothing more pure and innocent than nature. However, according to The Raven, nature is shown to be threatening, the complete opposite of transcendental belief.Another short story Poe had written is directly related to the topic of death. The Masque of the reddish end is about a deadly illness that takes over the dry land called Red Death. The Red Death had a lready killed half of the country, and was coming for the moneyed prince who had shut his doors to his kingdom, trying to save himself from the death, maculation his kingdom collapse to deaths knees. However, this did not stop the Red Death from entering the princes castle and killing them all as a faceless cloak person. The moral of the story is that no one can escape death, not the rich or the poor.Mortality is a concept many mint fail to understand. Though death is all over, it is hard to grasp that hoi polloi only live for a certain amount of time while death creeps through continuous generations of the world. The theme in Poes The Masque of the Red Death is the concept of mortality and the fear of death. Death is everywhere in the story, and the use of allegory and personification brings the awful disorder alive, sweeping through the nation and seizing all of its victims. The Red Death in the story was perceived to be about tuberculosis in reality.Since Poe had death all around him due to this dioceanse, it only 5 Patel makes sense why it would have proceeded his writing, as well as on his stance on transcendentalism. Poe dealt with death most of his life, from his wife and mother dying of tuberculosis to his adoptive fathers untimely and distant death (Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), An Introduction to, 220-221). In his eyes, he likely did not see living transcendentally as a belief since there was more death in his life than life itself. Poe also used the natural world and the supernatural in his poem Annabel Lee.The poem mentions nature everywhere, the sea being the biggest example of this, as well as the wind and clouds and starts. Though it would seem these parts of nature would be calming to him, Poe shows it to be a little scary and threatening in the ways he exposit these parts of nature. The narrator of the poem is slightly obsessed with how and why Annabel died, some(prenominal) like how Poe may have been distraught by his wifes untimely death when she was succumbed by tuberculosis (Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), An Introduction to, 220-221). Poe suggests in the poem if death is the end of a loved one, or if the love continues after death.A little brighter than his other stories and poems, Poe still clenches to the concept of death in this poem as well. There is no doubt that his work in the main revolved around urgency and mortality, the complete opposite of the transcendental belief (Poe As Poet. 2001). Poe shows his stance as an anti-transcendentalist through most of his work, giving a different viewpoint than the common belief in spirituality than the he lived. 6 Patel Poe writes another story that directly related to his viewpoint on transcendental belief. Never Bet the Devil Your Head was a clear attack on transcendentalism, the narrator calling it a disease. He uses toby fillpot jug Dammit as an example of what this disease can do to an individual, seeing as Dammit succumbed to death. As a cruel joke, the narrator sends the bill of Dammits funeral to the transcendentalist, but they refuse to pay since they do not believe in the concept of evil (Allen Poe, Never Bet the Devil Your Head). This piece that Poe writes was a direct satirical story written about transcendentalism. In an essay that Poe wrote, called The Philosophy of Composition, Poe states, It is the excess of the suggested meaning- it is the rendering this the upper instead of the under-current of the theme- which turns into prose (and that of the very flattest kind), the so-called poetry of the so-called transcendentalists (Poes Philosopy of Composition, 1880).He mocks the transcendentalists in this piece of his work as well, directly stating them in his essay. Edgar Allan Poe mostly wrote his literary works about death and fatality. It seems as though death was all around him, from his adoptive fathers untimely death to the illness that succumbed his mother and wife. Nonetheless, this highly affected the tone and style o f his short stories and poems that he has written. approximately all of his literary works have mentioned the supernatural world, mortality, and fear, all things that transcendental believers consider to be unexpressed over their belief in the natural world and God.Though he was not condescendingly against transcendentalism altogether, he 7 Patel was more so against the idea they believed it in the literary world, and that it should affect the way these authors and poets incorporated it in literature. There are many ways literature can we written, from mystery to the topic of love. Poe dealt with so much fatality in his life that it affected the way he created his work. Death is among all human beings, so why not embrace it the way Edgar Allan Poe has. Work Cited 8 Patel American Transcendentalism, An Introduction to. Nineteenth- atomic number 6 Literature Criticism. Ed. Janet Mullane and Robert Thomas Wilson. Vol. 24. Detroit Gale, 1989. 19th hundred Literature Criticism Online. W eb. 27 Apr. 2015. Poe, Edgar Allan (1809-1849), An Introduction to. Nineteenth-Century Literature Criticism. Ed. Kathy D. Darrow. Vol. 211. Detroit Gale, 2009. 19th Century Literature Criticism Online. Web. 27 Apr. 2015. POES PHILOSOPHY Of COMPOSITION. The New York multiplication New York 1 Aug. 1880 n. pag. The New York Times. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. Magistrale, Tony. Student Companion To Edgar Allan Poe.Westport, Conn Greenwood Press, 2001. eBook accrual (EBSCOhost). Web. 20 Apr. 2015. Manzari, Alireza. Contextual American Transcendentalism. Theory and Practice in phraseology Studies 2. 9 (2012) 1792-801. ProQuest Literature Online. Web. 15 Apr. 2015. Poe, Edgar A. Never Bet the Devil Your Head. N. p. n. p. , n. d. About. com. Web. 28 Apr. 2015. Poe, Edgar A. Poems For Further Study. The Norton Introduction to Literature. By Kelly J. mays. 11th ed. New York W. W. Norton, 2014. 601-04. Print. 9 Patel Poe As Poet. Scholastic Scope 50. 5 (2001) 13. Academic Search Premier. Web. 7 May 2015.