Great Books: The Tales of Edgar Allan Poe

Edgar Allan Poe dug into his own assault to write about the horror of the touches each and every one of us. He created a Bible of fear. Fear is the great black cup of coffee to human existence. If you have fear than you're aware that you are vulnerable, you can do something about it, perhaps. If you don't have fear, you're going to walk out in front of the saber tooth Tiger in front of the map truck and not be around for very long. Edgar Allan Poe's most psychological writer that ever lived. There is nothing of his that he wrote that doesn't have a court in you somewhere. He has a tuning fork and he hits it and your whole soul vibrates. Edgar Allan Poe's tales of terror were born out of the life filled with tragedy. And he used his suffering to create some of the most potent horror stories ever written. One of the most powerful tales is the pit and the pendulum. It is poles greatest portrait of model terror. 

A political prisoner of the inquisition lies alone in the dungeon. He is wretched and confused. His death is certain. How he will die. Remains a mystery. I dreaded the first glance at objects around me. It was not that I feared to look upon things horrible. But did I grow a guest? Lest there should be nothing to see. The intensity of the darkness seemed to oppress and stifle me. The terror in the pit of the pendulum is, as he says, not that there might be something to see, but that there is nothing to see. And I think that the pendulum is so awful and such a great representation of utter terror because it is a portrayal of what would happen if you had no stimulation. Nothing. Then your mind would take over and the mind would create monsters far more gruesome than anything that the inquisition could possibly invent. 

The victim feels his way through the darkness. And stumbles. A fathomless pit filled with unimaginable lies before you. He barely avoids the stress. The victim drinks from a picture of water. And falls into a drought stupor. When he awakens, his bow had to turn. How you about him? Swings attention. It's mark of razor sharp steel. With each sweep, it slowly descends. Explained coming ever closer to his heart. You have this overwhelming force coming towards the body. A blade. Blades are so frequently used in horror films because they are specifically about opening that little thin case of the human body. It is also a vast or huge symbol of a clock itself. So it's like your own death moving towards you, which is something we all are aware of. I counted the Russian vibrations of the steel. In my inch, lying by lying down and still down it came. You were practically mad and struggled to force myself upward against the sweep of the fearful scimitar. And then I fell suddenly calm and lay smiling at the glittering death. As a child, at some rare mono. With the blade inches from his chest, the victim sees a ray of hope. It appears in the form of a rat. 

He grabs morsels of food on the ropes that bind him. The rats begin to mold. They rise upon my throat. Their cold lips sought my own. The rats chew through the rooms. He is free. But before he can catch his breath, his soul assumes a castle glow. The walls and ceilings on fire. Forcing him toward the dreaded pit. That's when all hope is lost. The fire rewards back. The prison is liberated. His jailers are overthrown. So you can imagine that maybe he was sleeping and he's awakening from a dream. But the worst horror would be that he's actually gone mad. And that he is lost. Forever. Because the awakening could be, really. The fall into the abyss. This story expresses in the most graphic and direct ways. The most profound human anxieties about all of those forces that threaten us that could possibly lead to our annihilation. It's a cornucopia of frightening images. In some ways, it's a sort of tour de force. 

It seems as if Poe in this one story wants to pull out all the stops to see if he can invent or bring into play as many frightening devices as he can possibly imagine. It's a psychic overload. How's tales of terror have been read by millions? While his fears, we were very much his own. Edgar Poe was born in 1809 to David and Elizabeth, traveling actors. His mother was one of the best known actors on the American state. But the family lived in poverty. When Edgar was two, his alcoholic father banned the family. His mother, Eliza. Was left with nothing but the two children. Poverty took its toll. Young Eliza came down with tuberculosis. And after a lengthy disease, she died. Eliza Poe was just 24. Edgar was three years old. In Poe's case, both his parents died early and his father was an alcoholic and a failure. Setting up a kind of pattern that Poe deliberately or unintentionally would follow throughout his life. 

Young Edgar is taken in by wealthy Scotsman in Richmond, Virginia. John Allen. It's a new life. Full of luxury. The childlessness Francis Allen takes the boy on as a very young. The Allen's never formally adopted Poe and he resented that. He always wanted to take over the Allen name. He never felt comfortable with it. We could only midground co, but he only went so far as to call himself Edgar a Poe. I mean, suggesting that he both wanted the name, but really the felt that it didn't belong to him. It was only after Poe's death that he began to be called Edgar Allan Poe. Poe's relationship to his foster mother, Francis was close but short lived. When Edgar was 20, she died of TB. Ho began to see himself as a kind of cursed figure. Someone who actually brought misfortune on, especially women, he loved. And all of this produces impose work, a kind of birding awareness of mortality. From the beginning, death haunted Pope. His life primed him to understand our most basic emotions. And his writing forces us to face them head on. At the age of 27, left by his father, bereft by the deaths of his mother and foster mother, Edgar Allan Poe creates his own family. 

While staying with these end in Baltimore, he falls in love with her daughter, Virginia. His first cousin. When they marry, she is 13 years old. Poe worked as a critic and editor to support his new family. But he scathing reviews and erratic behavior created crisis after Christ's. Poe destroyed his own chances again and again for literary opportunities through bad luck through poor judgment through unfortunate timing. Again and again in post life, there are moments when posting just on the verge of becoming a truly successful writer in an American sense. And the bottom falls out. Poe uses the last of his savings to buy a piano for his beloved wife, Virginia. One day, as she performs for her husband and mother, she begins to cough. It's the first sign of the disease that plagued poem throughout his life. And infected all those he loved. Virginia. As TV. For the next 5 years, Virginia would waste away from the dreaded disease. The only ray of light was a poem wrote while Virginia, my desperately. The Raven. It's a poem about a man's obsession for love, loved to death. It was an immediate success. 

The Raven was the first really big hit. It was something like, you know, The Beatles for a song or something. There's enormously catchy. People apparently love the way it sounded in a way, the way it tripped along and started imitating it all over the place. Today, Paul's very name has become salaams with the river. But even Poe's greatest sass couldn't rescue him from poverty. He struggled with poverty throughout his adult life. It's amazing how many of Poe's letters actually include requests for money. He did this again and again to friends. I'm needing $25. Can you possibly spare me some money? On January 30th, 1847, Edgar Allan Poe's wife. Virginia died of tuberculosis. She was 24 years old. She died, same age. And of the same disease as Poe's mother. 

One of Poe's most famous stories, the tell tale heart, raids like his nightmarish, hallucinations. The tale opens, but the young caretaker of an elderly man is obsessed with the old man's eye. True. Nervous. Very, very dreadfully nervous. I had been in ten. But why will you say that I am mad? It is impossible to say how first the idea ended my brain. But once conceived, it haunted me day and night. Object there was none. Passion. There was none. I loved the old man. He had never wronged me. I think it was his eye. And it was this. One of his eyes resembled that of a vulture. Whenever it fell upon me, my blood ran cold. And so by degrees, very gradually, I made up my mind to take the life of the old man. 

But I think what sex the telltale heart apart and makes it particularly chilling is the way that stages the story from the perspective of the killer and allows us to see that there's an absolute disconnect here between the narrator's intelligence, his intellect, his ability to organize a crime, and any human sentiment that might accompany the action. There is none. I, after night, he enters the old man's room. But his eyes closed. And so it was impossible to do the work. For it was not the old man who vexed me. But his evil eye. One night. As he opens the door, a noise awakens the old man. I kept quite still and said nothing. For a whole hour I did not move on muscle. Presently, I heard a slight groan. And I knew it was the groan of mortal terror. He can hear the being of the old man's heart. He can hear his terror. I dragged him to the floor and pulled the heavy bed over him. The old man was dead. Yes. He was stoned, stoned, dead. His eye would trouble me no more. 

The young man cuts up the corpse and buries the body parts of the old man beneath his bedroom floor. He washes all traces of blood from his head. Then from his close. In the middle of the night, police officers knock at the door. The scream has been hurt. The police are investigated. The young man lights them in for tea. And sits them off the floor where his buried the body, the old man. I smiled for what had I to fear. I bid the gentleman welcome. The shriek I said was my own. In a dream, the officers were satisfied. My manner had convinced them, I was singularly at ease. It's a fascinating moment at the end of the telltale heart when the narrator is inviting the police inside and proceeds to sit down with them and very calmly discuss the situation. He feels as if he has nothing to lose. And in fact, there's a kind of quiet triumph that he enjoys there. He believes he's committed the perfect crime, and he flaunts it. By behaving in this completely casual way with the police. 

But before long, his head begins to ache. He hears him bringing in his ears. It was a low, dull, quick sound, much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton, and yet the officers heard it not. Why would they not be gone? The heart is one of the few things about our body that announces that it's there. Mostly we're not really aware too much of what our interior is up to. The heart, you can hear, you can feel it. It's like a clock. Was impossible. They heard not. Now they hear. They suspected. They knew. There's this perverse quality again and again, in Poe's tales. It's no good to create a perfect crime if someone doesn't know about it. There's something within that has to get out. I felt that I must scream or die. Feeling ty shrieked. I had been the terror of the fight here. It is the leading of his opinions on. And I think that's the terror that posed tales also leave us with. That no matter what you do, once you have seen our thought, something horrible, there will always be ways for it to return. 

Things never die in Poe. Keep watching, discussion topics and activity and resources or great books. Tales of Edgar Allan Poe are up next on assignment discovery. Now that you've seen great books, tales of Edgar Allan Poe talk about this. According to the program, death haunted Poe and he saw himself as cursed. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Using the events of his life as evidence support your argument. How did the events of his life affect his writing? Now, try this, choose an author of horror stories, writing today, like Ariel Stein, or Stephen King. Make a Venn diagram to compare this author's use of symbolism with pose. For videos, CD roms, lesson plans and teacher resources on this topic and more, log on to discovery school dot com. To learn more, assignment discoveries suggests Edgar Allan Poe by Raphael tilton.