Literature Final

Annabel Lee stands as one of the to the highest degree famous stopping point poesys of the nineteenth century, although its stature is certainly matched by Walt Whitmans When lilac-coloreds snuff it in the Dooryard Bloomd, a verse which uses a number of equivalent poetic devices, but rests upon an entirely different spurt.Like Poes most famous poem The Raven, his other famous poem Annabel Lee is steeped in musical diction and measurement, with a soak up toward creating a lyric latent hostility between the sweetness and musicality of the poems meter and form and the more profound and perhaps less desirelized potency of the poems themes which is valet mortality. By combining technical precision with a theme of magnitude, Poe rent his policy and prescription for poetic com fastenion as outlined in his essays The Poetic Principle and the Rational of Verse The Philosophy of Composition the notions of his trifling Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle. Its resou rces seem devices.Every effect seems due to an expedient. The repetend and the refrain are reliances with him not instrumental, but thematic. At least they constitute quite a than create the effect which has at that placefore something otiose and perfunctory closely it (Foerster 239).The source lines It was many and many a year ago/ In a Kingdom by the Sea signal the intention not scarce to create a musical pattern with words as by the deliberate redundancy of many and many but also to posit and idealized world against that of grim stackdor. The repetition of many reveals that the ideal clock 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 skin rashd,/And the great start early droppd in the western jactitate in the night. In some(prenominal)poems, the hearkening back toward an idealized time beginning(a) glimpsed at the poems beginn ing provide recur doneout the body of the poem in both 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 set rhyme andenjambment contrasts not only techni conjurey, but thematically, with Whitmans lie free-verse form. The former carefully predicts the poems ending in the meter, the infallible sway toward a definite conclusion, like fate. The latters form, loosed from careful and rhyme constraints seems to grow rather than follow its inevitable almost mathematically destined end.The technical consequences are obvious Poes poem will impress itself upon memory much more easily than Whitmans and and so be received more organically whereas Whitmans (according to Poes doctrines) is minded(p) to fascinate by virtue of individual images and lines.The thematic consequence is a different matter. Poes succinct and mathematical form serves to enhance the poems grave themes of personal loss and morning, sparking within the poem an indelible timelessness, an eternal melancholy, which is precisely the theme of the poem. One can imagine the poems meter and rhyme scheme quite easily projected into a musical melody without words which would result in much the kindred agency of bright misery.On the other hand, the free-verse form of Whitmans poem, were it projected as a musical number, might be more aptly depict 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 terminal contains within it motion, growing, an evolution of life and transition. I sorrowd, and yet shall mourn with ever-returning spring. This line with its conspicuous use of the wordever-returning rather than everyindicates the poems devastation-rebir th cyclical theme.Poes poem, by contrast, closes in a monochromatic, monotonic one might say paralytic submission to death. Though in that location is a hint of release in the poems vote counter 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 tomb by the sounding sea. This close issimultaneously an urge toward and away from death but that ambiguity is trumped by the over-reaching reality of the sea which, in terms of the poem, indicates oblivion.At the close of Whitmans poem, constitution is viewed as sympathetic and in harony wiht the mourning of the observer a ablutionary and cathartic experience 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 twilight and dim. Rather than oblivion, nature offers brotherhood and renewal, as imp lied by the continuous symbolism of the lilacs.Poes poem acknowledges and imparts the sense of life and death being in continuous friction The angels not so happy in Heaven,?Went envying her and me dapple of land Whitman vies death in life in continuous balance and consolidation Come lovely and soothing death,/Undulate around the world. Serenely arriving, arriving,/In the day, in the night, to all, to each,/sooner or later minute death. Nothing could lucubrate 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 frequent 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 b y Whitman. In each case, the poet confronts the death of a beloved and reaches through their deep identification with the departed to a summing up 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 ground to create lasting poems that resonate across time.SECTION 2 Using a tale each by Edgar Allen Poe and Washington Irving, describe how the Romantic writer used the fey to engage the readers imagination and then explain why Romantics were pull to the spectralThough many Gothic writers have earned a deserved reputation for a preoccupation with the supernatural, it is often the case that this same fascination, slanted toward the coherent or debunking of commonly held superstitions and idea about supernatural forces, has been overlooked. Two good examples of this tendency are Washington Irving and Edgar Allen Poe, both of whom are head-revered as writers of ghost stories or scary stories which deal with the fantastic. However, both Poe and Irving posit a rational, anti-superstitious motif in their well-know stories as a cases in point we may review The figment of Sleepy kettle of fish 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 fallacious principle in supernatural forces to drive the storys plot and them Irvings denial of the fantastic begins with The sketch Book, and, although his strategy changes, the finishing remains the same in all four works.John Clendenning has remark the debunking of the Gothic tradition in the three famous inserted stories of The Sketch Book Rip Van Winkle, The Spectre Bridegroom, and The Legend of SleepyHollow (Brodwin 53). The Legend of Sleepy Hollow is based in the uncanny, a writing style which allows the reader to decide that the laws of reality remain intact and permit an comment of the phenomena described. In this case, we know that it is really Brom Bones, not the Galloping Hessian, who has pursued Ichabod Crane(Brodwin 54).This is on the face of it an anti-romantic idea de-emphasizing imaginary or delusional aspects for those drawn out of clear 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 topic with me was the popular belief in omens a belief which, at this epoch in my life, I was almost seriously given to defend. This is opposite the attitude of Ichabod Crane who expresses a disbelief in supernatural forces, but harbors a secret fear of them.Be exercise 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 adventure of the fantastic is raised for the sole purpose of being denied in this way, Irving emphasizes the role of rationality in a disordered world. Such a strategy indicates that Irving was not just parodying the excesses of contemporary Gothic and romantic prevarication, 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 gesture toward self-humor and also as a gesture toward the supremacy of rational image over superstition it is n o surprise. Other tales deal in this room with the same themes most notably the Dupin stories Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Purloined Letter, and The Mystery of Marie Roget. further Poe also dealt with ratiocination in other celebrated stories such as The Gold Bug and Maelzels Chessplayer.For Poe, it was possible for supernatural forces to exist, as well as for misapprehension of know 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 incredible or improbable elements in the narrative, Poe claims that unraveling a plot by awkwardly appealing to the supernatural constitutes an affront to artistic standards.This censure of Birds single characters and extraordinary plot devices may seem like an early call for realism in fiction, but the review calls for more than minute wariness to credible detail (Ljungquist 9)In fact The Sphinx hardly reconciles its dichotomy of t he known and unknown,the real and imagined as a case in point we view his explanation for the apparition in the story, of the so-called Sphinx, which turns out to be zero point 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 delight 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 vernal World Romanticism of Washington Irving. unseasoned York Greenwood Press.Foerster, N. (Ed.). (1930). American Critical Essays, X IXth and XXth Centuries. capital of the United Kingdom H. Milford, Oxford University Press.Ljungquist, K. P. (2002). 1 The Poet as Critic. In 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.