Edgar Allan Poe's Silence, A Fable?

Murder. Misfortune. Mystery. Why do any of these random words matter? Edgar Allan Poe, the master of murder mysteries, has set up the outline for countless detective stories. His repetitive stories about tragedy is what he is known for, and is what has influenced several writers beyond his time, such as Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. Doyle himself wrote, “Where was the detective story before Poe breathed the breath of life into it?” (Poe Museum). In fact, Poe’s ideas derived from the extensive knowledge he has gained about tragedy during his lifetime. Edgar Allan Poe’s influences are based mostly around the deaths of his family members that he experienced throughout his lifetime, but his imagination and psychological studies also inspire his work. …show more content…
Although Poe did not have many outstanding moments in his life, it never stopped him from dreaming. In fact, quite a few poems he has written are about a dream. One in particular is called Silence – A Fable. Poe writes, “For many miles on either side of the river 's oozy bed is a pale desert of gigantic water-lilies. They sigh one unto the other in that solitude, and stretch towards the heaven their long and ghastly necks, and nod to and fro their everlasting heads,” (Poe). The story is very personified and the amount of sensory images that Poe creates puts the readers in a whole other world, like they’re in someone else’s dream. Actually, one of his major success stories is called The Balloon Hoax. The story was written as a newspaper article originally titled as: Astounding News! By Express via Norfolk: The Atlantic Crossed in Three Days! It is about a group of men who supposedly crossed the Atlantic Ocean in seventy-five hours in an extremely lightweight balloon carrier similar to a hot air balloon. Poe wrote the events in such great, realistic detail that no one questioned the story. He even had a detailed picture of the carrier. The whole story was so convincing that it drew a large crowd in front of the newspaper office because people wanted to buy it so desperately (Giordano). Poe eventually admitted that the story was fictitious; however, the fact that he was able to …show more content…
This can be best shown when Poe starts to blur the lines between the supernatural and the psychological, as seen in many of his tales of murder and suspense. One analyzer of Poe’s work, named Marilyn Robinson wrote, “For a writer so intrigued by the operations of the mind as Poe was, an interest in conscience leads to an interest in concealment and self-deception, things that are secretive and highly individual and at the same time so universal that they shape civilizations,” (Robinson). It is clearly evident that Poe’s interest and fascination with the psychological was not only from his mind, but mostly from the tragedies that happened in his life. These tragedies greatly affect, not only the psychological aspects of his stories, but also the theme and plot of the story. One of the best known examples of Poe’s psychological works is The Black Cat, where he explores the psychological aspects of guilt. The Black Cat is a confession from a man on death row who had killed his family, including his wife and his pets. During this time in Poe’s life, some people suspect that Poe was more similar than different to the main character in the story as he was credited as being in a drunken rage quite often ("The Psychological Perspective - Achieving Triangulation."). Poe may have had downsides in his lifetime, however, it has influenced his works immensely and, in