Edmund Burke The Raven Analysis

One of the major writers during Romanticism that significantly employs the element of the terrible in his writing is Edgar Allan Poe. Behind the impact that it has on readers’ minds Poe is utterly mindful about the phenomena present in the human mind. Accordingly, he concentrates on this fact rather that in the traditions of the Gothic practices of Romanticism’s times which allowed him a vast work on the genuine foundation of terror (Lovecraft, 1927). In this sense, Poe’s objective in doing so is to achieve strong emotional responses by following the premises of sublimity previously proposed by Edmund Burke in A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful. The aim of this work is to analyse Poe’s poem The Raven through his critical essays The Philosophy of Composition and The Poetic Principle to prove that Poe takes Burke’s ideas of what constitutes the sublime and applies them in the poem. However, a short synapsis of the poem is necessary so as to understand the foundations of the …show more content…
This sub-division of Romanticism reinforced inner darkness as heroes experienced diverse horrors like “perverse impulses, nightmarish terrors, obsessions” (Campbell, 2014) exposing a psychological turmoil within the human mind already collapsing between an irrational state and inevitable madness. In the same way, the emphasis was in causing terror upon the mind by portraying dark atmospheres, introducing supernatural elements, and the depiction of shadowy landscapes and sinister castles (Gottesman et al., 1979). In similar fashion, other characteristics included macabre events difficult for the protagonist to comprehend, with isolating settings in both space and time, and situations in which a supernatural manifestation seems to cause problems the protagonist because distrusts the evidence of that manifestation (Campbell,