Literature Final

Annabel Lee stands as i of the most famous remainder mensurable compositions of the nineteenth century, although its stature is certainly matched by Walt Whitmans When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloomd, a poem which uses a number of similar poetic devices, exclusively rests upon an entirely different arrive at.Like Poes most famous poem The Raven, his other famous poem Annabel Lee is steeped in musical language and meter, with a view toward creating a lyric tension between the sweetness and musicality of the poems meter and shape and the more profound and perhaps less reckon potency of the poems themes which is human mortality. By combining technical precision with a theme of magnitude, Poe pursued his policy and prescription for poetic constitution as f every(prenominal) outlined in his essays The Poetic Principle and the Rational of Verse The Philosophy of Composition the notions of his minimal Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle. Its resources seem devi ces.Every effect seems due to an expedient. The repetend and the refrain argon reliances with him not instrumental, and thematic. At least they constitute rather than create the effect which has therefore something otiose and perfunctory most it (Foerster 239).The opening lines It was many and many a year ago/ In a Kingdom by the sea signal the intention not only to create a musical pattern with haggle as by the deliberate redundancy of many and many but also to posit and idealized world over against that of grim reality. The repetition of many reveals that the ideal time of a Kingdom by the Sea has passed and this generates an immediate thematic tension.Similarly, Whitmans poem begins with an evocation of time past When lilacs last in the dooryard acmed,/And the great start early droppd in the western sky in the night. In twopoems, the hearkening back toward an idealized time first glimpsed at the poems beginning will recur throughout the body of the poem in two imagery and diction in Poes poem, as an obvious refrain, in Whitmans as a series of extended modulations of the original theme with the free-verse poem flowing through many permutations of the original lilac-nostalgia imagery.It is worth noting that the formality of Poes stanza forms with carefully placed frost andenjambment contrasts not only techni chaty, but thematically, with Whitmans sprawling free-verse form. The former carefully predicts the poems ending in the meter, the inevitable sway toward a definite conclusion, like fate. The latters form, loosed from metrical and rhyme constraints seems to grow rather than follow its inevitable virtually mathematically destined end.The technical consequences are obvious Poes poem will impress itself upon memory much more good than Whitmans and thus be received more organically whereas Whitmans (according to Poes doctrines) is apt to fascinate by virtue of individual images and lines.The thematic consequence is a different matter. Poes succi nct and mathematical form serves to enhance the poems grave themes of personal loss and morning, sparking within the poem an indelible timelessness, an timeless melancholy, which is precisely the theme of the poem. One arouse imagine the poems meter and rhyme scheme quite easily projected into a musical melody without words which would result in much the same means of bright misery.On the other hand, the free-verse form of Whitmans poem, were it projected as a musical number, dexterity be more aptly described as an improvisational melody with a pop arrangement. The impact of the form on the theme of mortality, is to set in motion, the imaginations perception that death contains within it motion, growing, an growing of living and rebirth. I mournd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. This line with its conspicuous use of the wordever-returning rather than everyindicates the poems death-rebirth cyclical theme.Poes poem, by contrast, closes in a monochromatic, monoto nic one might say paralytic submission to death. Though there is a hint of release in the poems narrator rejoining his departed lovers corpse, there is no indication of rebirth or of growth beyond this mutual oblivion. In the sepulchre there by the sea,/In her grave by the sounding sea. This close issimultaneously an urge toward and away from death but that ambiguity is trumped by the over-r distributivelying reality of the sea which, in terms of the poem, indicates oblivion.At the close of Whitmans poem, nature is viewed as merciful and in harony wiht the mourning of the observer a cleansing and cathartic picture is implied. For the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands and/this for his dear sake,/Lilac and star and bird twined with the chant of my soul,/There in the fragrant pines and cedars dusk and dim. rather than oblivion, nature offers brotherhood and renewal, as implied by the continuous symbol of the lilacs.Poes poem acknowledges and imparts the sense of life a nd death being in continuous friction The angels not so happy in Heaven,?Went envying her and me sequence Whitman vies death in life in continuous balance and integration Come lovely and soothe death,/Undulate around the world. Serenely arriving, arriving,/In the day, in the night, to all, to each,/sooner or later balmy death. cypher could illustrate the contrast between the two poems and poets more than Whitmans phrase delicate death. In Annabel Lee, the delicate ones are the people, the humans who must succumb to death for Whitman humanity is stronger than death and death is viewed as a part of the universal extension of human experience it is delicate, not oppressive.This essential difference in the poems is reflected in their form and expression. The morecontrolled and fatalistic intonations of Poe and the organic reflective and lyrically introspective tribute by Whitman. In each case, the poet confronts the death of a beloved and reaches through their deep identification wi th the departed to a total of the nature of death for Poe is it everlasting oblivion, an for Whitman it is cyclical renewal. For both poets, the subject of human mortality provided fertile primer to create lasting poems that resonate across time.SECTION 2 Using a story each by Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving, describe how the Romantic writer used the preternatural to engage the readers imagination and then explain why Romantics were drawn to the supernaturalThough many Gothic writers halt earned a deserved reputation for a preoccupation with the supernatural, it is frequently the case that this same fascination, unilateral toward the rational or guy of commonly held superstitions and idea about supernatural forces, has been overlooked. Two good examples of this magnetic dip are Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, both of whom are well-revered as writers of ghost stories or scary stories which deal with the fantastic. However, both Poe and Irving posit a rational, ant i-superstitious motif in their well-known stories as a cases in range we may review The Legend of Sleepy Hollow by Irving and The Sphinx by Edgar Allen Poe.The Legend of Sleepy Hollow, rather than celebrating supernatural forces or positing them as actual forces at work in the real world, uses the idea or ambidextrous belief in supernatural forces to drive the storys plot and them Irvings denial of the fantastic begins with The survey Book, and, although his strategy changes, the goal remains the same in all four works.John Clendenning has noted the poke fun of the Gothic tradition in the three famous inserted stories of The Sketch Book Rip Van scud, The Spectre Bridegroom, and The Legend of SleepyHollow (Brodwin 53). The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is based in the uncanny, a literary genre which allows the reader to decide that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an explanation of the phenomena described. In this case, we know that it is sincerely Brom Bones, not the G alloping Hessian, who has pursued Ichabod Crane(Brodwin 54).This is seemingly an anti-romanticist idea de-emphasizing imaginary or delusional aspects for those drawn out of pure rationality. Similarly, Poe in The Sphinxposits opposite minded characters, confronted with an uncanny experience, one which disavows the supernatural, the other, the narrator who claims A favorite yield with me was the popular belief in omens a belief which, at this epoch in my life, I was almost seriously disposed to defend. This is opposite the attitude of Ichabod Crane who expresses a disbelief in supernatural forces, but harbors a secret fear of them.Because there is already a legend about the Hessian, Ichabods disappearance can be explained by recourse to the supernatural, although the schoolmasters rivalry with Brom Bones over Katrina van Tassel is the obvious cause. Once again the possibility of the fantastic is raised for the sole purpose of being denied in this way, Irving emphasizes the role of r ationality in a disordered world. Such a strategy indicates that Irving was not just duperying the excesses of contemporary Gothic and romantic fiction, which can be commended he was also attempting to magnify the scope of fiction as both philosophically and morally instructive (Brodwin 54)Poes The Sphinx also posits the possibility of a grand supernaturalevent, only forthe purposes of debunking it through rational faculties. Poe was also a born humorist equally inspired by parody and self-mockery. In an anti-romantic vein so common among the popular humorists of his time, he enjoyed applying his acumen to deride the outpourings of emotions too often surging from mediocre fiction and poetry (Royot 57).If The Sphinx can be profitably viewed as Poes motion toward self-humor and also as a gesture toward the supremacy of rational thought over superstition it is no surprise. Other tales deal in this fashion with the same themes most notably the Dupin stories Murders in the Rue Morgue, T he Purloined Letter, and The mystery story of Marie Roget. But Poe also dealt with ratiocination in other celebrated stories such as The Gold seed and Maelzels Chessplayer.For Poe, it was possible for supernatural forces to exist, as well as for misapprehension of known forces for those of supernatural origin. However, as a plot device in fiction, Poe was notably against the sue of supernatural forces without organic causeObjecting to dumbfounding or improbable elements in the narrative, Poe claims that unraveling a plot by awkwardly appealing to the supernatural constitutes an displease to artistic standards.This censure of Birds idiosyncratic characters and extraordinary plot devices may seem like an early call for realism in fiction, but the review calls for more than minute attention to credible detail (Ljungquist 9)In fact The Sphinx hardly reconciles its dichotomy of the known and unknown,the real and imagined as a case in point we view his explanation for the apparition i n the story, of the so-called Sphinx, which turns out to be nothing more than a beetle However, the beetle in question posited as a scientific explanation for irrational experience is, in itself, a fancy of Poes Indeed, this synthetic bug is probably, through the story, the best known of all beetles, even if, like the sea coast of Bohemia, it never existed. Poe at times had almost an impish enjoyment in the inaccuracy of unessentials. (Quinn 131)The appeal of the supernatural to Gothic and Romantic writers was both genuine and also as a sub-genre within to create cautionary tales regarding the integrity of human rationality in the face of what appear to be illogical, or supernatural occurrences.ReferencesBrodwin, S. (Ed.). (1986). The Old and New World Romanticism of Washington Irving. New York Greenwood Press.Foerster, N. (Ed.). (1930). American sarcastic Essays, XIXth and XXth Centuries. London H. Milford, Oxford University Press.Ljungquist, K. P. (2002). 1 The Poet as Critic. I n The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Hayes, K. J. (Ed.) (pp. 7-19). Cambridge, England Cambridge University Press.Quinn, A. H. (1941). Edgar Allan Poe A Critical Biography. New York Appleton-Century-Crofts.Royot, D. (2002). 4 Poes Humor. In The Cambridge Companion to Edgar Allan Poe, Hayes, K. J. (Ed.) (pp. 57-70). Cambridge, England Cambridge University Press.