1809 65438+1October 19, Poe was born in the family of a touring actor in Boston. He was orphaned at the age of three and adopted by John Allen, a wealthy businessman in Richmond, Virginia. At the age of six, his family moved to England. Poe was intelligent by nature and studied in a private school in London, which laid a solid foundation for classical literature. Five years later, he returned to Richmond with his family and entered the University of Virginia as 1826. But a year later, he was forced to drop out of school because of gambling debts, and his engagement with his first love ended because of the opposition of both families. The rift between Poe and his actual adoptive father grew bigger and bigger until it finally broke. 1827, Poe published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston, with the signature "A Bostonian". This thin collection of poems is almost ignored. Later, Poe joined the army and was stationed in South Carolina and Virginia. 1829 In February, her adoptive mother died. She asked for leave to go home to attend the funeral and then retired from the army. At the end of the year, she published her second collection of poems, Al Aaaaf, Tamerlane and Poems in Minor. 1930, he entered the west point military academy after reaching a temporary settlement with his adoptive father, but he couldn't stand the life in the military academy. Six months later, he was expelled from school for intentional foul. During his short stay in new york, he published the poems of Edgar A Poe (183 1). In the following five years, he lived in a widowed aunt's house in Baltimore and began to publish novels. 1833, he won the Saturday Tourist with a manuscript in a bottle. 1836 In May, he married his cousin Virginia, who was under 14 years old, and published his first collection of short stories, The Story of Weird Man and Arabia, in 1840. After winning the prize of Manuscript in a Bottle, Poe began his professional editing career. From 1835 to the mid-1940s, he moved to Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and new york, and worked as an editor in Southern Literature Courier, Gentleman Magazine, Graham Magazine, Der Spiegel Evening News and Broadway Magazine. His commentary is sharp and sharp. During the period of 10, he wrote a lot of comments and essays, and created the best short stories and poems in his life, such as Lydia (1838), The Collapse of Usher House (1839) and Murder in Moge Street (/kloc-0 Poe is a talented writer and an excellent editor. However, his life is always difficult. He was often fired for drinking, and he made many enemies in the literary circle because he wrote many critical articles by name. His wife Virginia suffered from tuberculosis in her early years and stayed in bed all the year round. 1847, her 24-year-old wife died of poverty and illness. The death of his wife made Poe sink deeper and deeper, and the subsequent feelings seemed to be unsatisfactory. 1849, 10 years 10 On October 3rd, Poe got drunk in the streets of Baltimore. After four days of struggle, he ended his bumpy life on the morning of the 7th.
Poe has made great achievements in poetry, short stories and literary criticism. Poe is a conscious artist, and his literary theory is often based on his own creation. Two papers, Philosophy of Composition (1846) and Principles of Poetics (1850), focus on his poetic theory. In the Principles of Creation, he said, "Beauty is the only proper field of poetry", "No matter what form of beauty develops to the extreme, it will make sensitive hearts cry without exception. Therefore, melancholy is the most appropriate tone of poetry. " The saddest thing in the world is death. Then, the most poetic and close to the theme is Death of a Beauty. Beautiful death constitutes Poe's classic theme, which links beauty with death and creates a sad and charming style, which makes the poet lose his soul, indulge in life, sing the dead young lovers repeatedly and remember the love that never existed. Poe also pays attention to the musical beauty of poetry, defines real poetry as an activity of "creating beauty rhythmically", and advocates the unity of poetic effect, that is, a poem should receive the overall effect. Poe also thinks that poetry must be short, and the length of a poem should be controlled at about 100 lines. His classic novel The Crow is a perfect example of his poetic theory. The artistic conception of Poe's poems is a highly unified world of hearing and vision, rhythm and rhythm, imagination and emotion, and it is a pure and beautiful world. He opposed preaching and advocated "art for art's sake" and pure poetry. His poetic theory profoundly influenced French symbolist poets represented by Baudelaire, Malamey and Valerie.
Poe's greatest achievement is his creation of short stories. He not only left many excellent short stories for American and even world literature, but also directly enriched and perfected this literary genre, so he is known as the "father of modern short stories". His short stories can be roughly divided into two categories: horror stories and mystery stories. Sometimes, there is no strict boundary between them. For example, Murder on Mog Street has both elements of horror and reasoning. Two kinds of stories, such as Day and Night, perfectly show the unique genius of Poe. The writer seems to be at ease between dream and reality, rationality and fanaticism, and freely shuttles between excellent imagination and meticulous reasoning.
Like his poems, Poe's horror stories often describe the deaths of sick women and beautiful women. So, terror is strangely accompanied by beauty, disease and death. Poe is good at depicting terrible death scenes with delicate brushstrokes, such as bloody murder scenes, painful death processes, the horrible situation of twisted corpses, and the horrible situation of rigid and rotting corpses. Sometimes, horror is mixed with exotic customs and exaggerated aesthetic tastes, which strongly exaggerates the strong contrast between color and light and shadow, creating a visual impression with great sensory impact. For example, the mask of red death arranges death in a palace with gorgeous decoration and strange style. The story is about a raging "red death disease". In order to avoid the plague, the prince led his entourage to retreat to a castle-like monastery and indulge in carnival. However, at the grotesque costume party, death appears in the form of a red death demon zombie, and darkness, decay and "red death demon" immediately rule everything.
Poe emphasized the "unified effect" in his poems and novels. The overall effect pursued by poetry is beauty and sadness, while the unified effect he designed for horror stories is fear. He said, "In the literary form of short stories, every event, every detail of description and even every sentence should receive some unified effect, some expected effect or some impression effect." In a word, all elements of the story, from plot design, characterization, scene description to wording and sentence making, should serve the overall effect and arouse the readers' inner fears. The collapse of Usher House perfectly demonstrated Poe's theory of "unified effect". This story has a strong Gothic novel color. The story takes place in a desolate and dilapidated castle. Roderick Arthur, the hero, is the last relic of an ancient family. He and his twin sister both suffer from some mysterious disease. My brother has a highly sensitive mental temperament, and his feelings are extremely keen. My sister Madeleine was seriously ill for a long time and suffered from some kind of rigidity. My brother buried my dying sister alive, and on a stormy night, my sister came out of the coffin wrapped in a shroud. Finally, my brothers and sisters died, and Ashe's old house collapsed. The story is told in the first person, and the narrator "I" is Roderick's childhood friend. I was invited to visit and witnessed the terrible process of the gradual collapse and destruction of this ancient family as an outsider. The whole story is seamless, from scene description, characterization to atmosphere creation and plot development, all around the overall effect, vividly laying out the eerie effect, which makes readers feel great horror. The writer described the desolation and decline of the ancient house with delicate brushstrokes, implied the bad luck of the family with the decline of the ancient house, and tried his best to render the mysterious relationship between them. The lyrics played by the protagonist, the title of the book he read, the stormy night and other details all reflect the writer's ingenuity, until the sister who was buried alive appeared at the door blown open by the strong wind and fell in the arms of her brother and died. At this point, the horror atmosphere of the story reached its climax. At the end, a red full moon sank into the west, and Ashe's ancient house collapsed and was submerged in the lake, leaving readers with a very visual horror picture.
Poe's horror novels strongly challenge the boundaries of rationality, advance into the unknown and irrational black fog, and explore the obscure boundaries between life and death, dream and reality, sobriety and madness. Edgar Allan Poe has been troubled by irrational forces at the level of human consciousness. He was keenly aware of the subtle distance between reason and madness, and devoted himself to exploring mental diseases such as paranoia, obsession, schizophrenia and madness. Therefore, critics believe that Poe pioneered modern psychological description and was the pioneer of psychoanalysis represented by Freud in the 20th century. The characters in Poe's works often show a strange spiritual temperament, hovering on the edge of rationality and irrationality, which is difficult to define. For example, the protagonist in Black Cat, driven by unprovoked hatred, deliberately tortured the black cat he once loved deeply, and finally killed his wife by mistake. In order to get rid of the police search, he carefully calculated and laid the body in the brick wall of the cellar with great sobriety. In fact, the horror in Edgar Allan Poe's novels is often closely combined with the hero's mental illness, and the horror comes from the process of losing his mind, going to crime, madness or collapse. On the other hand, William Wilson seems to be a psychological anatomy of human self. It tells the story of a bad boy, William Wilson, who has many unfair behaviors. Every time he does something bad, someone with the same name intervenes. He was so angry that he finally killed another William Wilson in cold blood, only to be surprised to find that he also killed himself. At the end of the story, Wilson said to the hero, "How thoroughly you killed yourself", which gave people profound enlightenment. Poe quoted Chamberlain's poem at the beginning of the story: "What am I talking about? What can I say to the cold conscience, the ghost on my road? " The moral of this story, as implied in this poem, is that man is a combination of good and evil, and he is a double self. When our conscience dies, we will die with him. It can be said that Edgar Allan Poe is full of psychological insight, and he is also one of the earliest writers who take people suffering from mental illness as the leading role.
Poe is a well-deserved "originator of detective stories". From 184 1 to 1845, he wrote a series of mystery novels: Murder in Moge Street (184 1) and The Mystery of Mary Roger (1842). This story is full of suspense. The case happened in a room with closed doors and windows. How the murderer got in and out of the secret room was puzzling, but there was a big accident. The perpetrator was actually an orangutan. The Mystery of Mary Roger reveals the means of the perpetrators through reasoning. "Scarab" is to find huge wealth by deciphering codes. "It's You" reveals the mystery with the psychological tactics of the dead talking. The stolen letter reveals the most obvious thing, the psychological blind spot that people are most likely to ignore. These novels provide five modes for future detective novels, namely, killing in a secret room, pure reasoning detective in an easy chair, cracking passwords, using psychological tactics and solving crimes in people's blind spots. The image of Augst Dobbin, an amateur detective, which he created in Murder in Moge Street, The Mystery of Mary Roger and The Stolen Letter, can be said to be the predecessor of Sherlock Holmes written by Conan Doyle. In particular, the model of amateur detective as the protagonist, reasoning as the main line, and friends with less ability as the foil and narrator was widely imitated by later detective novels. Sherlock Holmes and Doctor Watson written by Conan Doyle and Poirot and Captain Hastings written by Agatha Christie (1890- 1976) all follow this writing. Even Wilkie Collins (1824- 1889), the English writer known as the father of detective stories, wrote the famous work The Moon Stone (1868), which also reflected the shadow of Poe.
Genius is rich and complex, and it is difficult to simply define or generalize it. Suffering life and unique aesthetic perception have made Poe's immortal art. His art contains seemingly incompatible opposites and contradictions; He brings readers gorgeous sadness, crazy sobriety and poetic fear. His works are well integrated with popular elements, so they are deeply loved by readers from generation to generation.
Shangxiaojin
Edgar allan poe (1809-1849), an American poet, short story writer and literary critic, is also recognized as a pioneer of symbolism, the originator of modern detective novels, and has also made important contributions to the creation of science fiction and horror novels, influencing many writers including jules verne and Conan Doyle. He is a genius full of paradoxes, with a bumpy life and far-reaching influence. He is not only excellent in imagination, but also good at meticulous logical reasoning. He worships beauty and regards beauty as the highest purpose of poetry. However, he loves to stare at terror and death. His works are magnificent, mysterious and dreamy, belonging to black romanticism.
1809 65438+1October 19, Poe was born in the family of a touring actor in Boston. He was orphaned at the age of three and adopted by John Allen, a wealthy businessman in Richmond, Virginia. At the age of six, his family moved to England. Poe was intelligent by nature and studied in a private school in London, which laid a solid foundation for classical literature. Five years later, he returned to Richmond with his family and entered the University of Virginia as 1826. But a year later, he was forced to drop out of school because of gambling debts, and his engagement with his first love ended because of the opposition of both families. The rift between Poe and his actual adoptive father grew bigger and bigger until it finally broke. 1827, Poe published his first book of poems, Tamerlane and Other Poems, in Boston, with the signature "A Bostonian". This thin collection of poems is almost ignored. Later, Poe joined the army and was stationed in South Carolina and Virginia. 1829 In February, her adoptive mother died, and she asked for leave to go home to attend the funeral, and then retired from the army. At the end of the year, she published her second collection of poems, Al Aaaaf, Tamerlane and Poems in Minor. 1930, he entered the west point military academy after reaching a temporary settlement with his adoptive father, but he couldn't stand the life in the military academy. Six months later, he was expelled from school for intentional foul. During his short stay in new york, he published a poem by Edgar A Poe (183 1), and he lived under Bayer's skirt for the next five years. ⒖? ⒈∷? 1833 won the first prize of "Baltimore Saturday Visitors" for his "Manuscript in a Bottle" and officially embarked on the road of creation. 1836 In May, he married his cousin Virginia, who was under 14 years old, and published his first collection of short stories, The Story of Weird Man and Arabia, in 1840. After winning the prize of Manuscript in a Bottle, Poe began his professional editing career. From 1835 to the mid-1940s, he moved to Baltimore, Richmond, Philadelphia and new york, and worked as an editor in Southern Literature Courier, Gentleman Magazine, Graham Magazine, Der Spiegel Evening News and Broadway Magazine. His commentary is sharp and sharp. During the period of 10, he wrote a lot of comments and essays, and created the best short stories and poems in his life, such as Lydia (1838), The Collapse of Usher House (1839) and Murder in Moge Street (/kloc-0 Poe is a talented writer and an excellent editor. However, his life is always difficult. He was often fired for drinking, and he made many enemies in the literary circle because he wrote many critical articles by name. His wife Virginia suffered from tuberculosis in her early years and stayed in bed all the year round. 1847, her 24-year-old wife died of poverty and illness. The death of his wife made Poe sink deeper and deeper, and the subsequent feelings seemed to be unsatisfactory. 1849, 10 years 10 On October 3rd, Poe got drunk in the streets of Baltimore. After four days of struggle, he ended his bumpy life on the morning of the 7th.