Edgar Allan Poe And The Masque Of The Red Death

Edgar Allan Poe is considered to be one of the darkest Romantic writers of his generation. He made several notable mystery tales and was the creator of the crime detective genre. He did not get his inspiration from other literature nor his surroundings. He used his own personal experiences that were known to be horrible and miserable such as the loss the loved ones. Poe expressed his personal feelings and thoughts into his own work. Some of his writings were short stories and poems such as ”Sonnet-To Science”, “The Masque of the Red Death”, and “The Black Cat.” In “Sonnet-To Science”, Poe was against the advances and how science during the Industrial Revolution in early 1800s. He expressed his opinion through the use of analogies with Roman and Greek influences (Poe 633). In “The Masque of the Red Death”, it tells the tale of how a disease known as Red Death spreads quickly and leaves its victims dead within thirty minutes. This was inspired by the fact that Poe lost his wife Virginia to tuberculosis in 1847 (Levine - Krupat 631). Another was “The Black Cat” where an unreliable narrator harms his cat Pluto while under some mood swings. This tale was influenced by Poe’s drunk habit in his later years. Poe really did preferred to use his …show more content…
The pathogen was personified as a masked ghoulish guest at Prospero’s masquerade ball (Poe 687). The prince would seal off his palace from the outside keeping out the infection for several months. It is how this tale shown that nobody can escape death in the cycle of life. There were room with different colors that symbolize the passage of life and the black room with red windows represented death. Also, the name Prospero might mean prosperity, but only to those who are wealthy or in power. In the ending, the poem quoted “And Darkness and Decay and the Red Death held illimitable dominion over all.” (Poe