The Stylistic Development of Edgar Allan Poe

Fülszöveg

This study argues that Poe relied in his writings on "a sustained inspiratory thrust extensive enough for its momentum to carry him through successive stanzas", sentences, and paragraphs. "What Poe apparently needed for creation to proceed effortlessly was the evocative inspiratory suggestion which certain words offered him under certain conditions or in certain contexts", Prof. Fletcher believes. To use his own term to describe this process, when he wrote Poe depended heavily on the "hypnagogic" power of words. Believing that words and expressions having to do with etiolation and death convey connotations that will be responded to by every reader in the same way, and believing, too, that the main aim and purpose of the artist should be to produce definite "effects" (responses of an emotional kind) on his readers, Poe sought to create exactly that kind of vocabulary which would best encompass whatever given "effect" he had in mind. In so doing, Poe "limited his vocabulary to a small... Tovább

Fülszöveg

This study argues that Poe relied in his writings on "a sustained inspiratory thrust extensive enough for its momentum to carry him through successive stanzas", sentences, and paragraphs. "What Poe apparently needed for creation to proceed effortlessly was the evocative inspiratory suggestion which certain words offered him under certain conditions or in certain contexts", Prof. Fletcher believes. To use his own term to describe this process, when he wrote Poe depended heavily on the "hypnagogic" power of words. Believing that words and expressions having to do with etiolation and death convey connotations that will be responded to by every reader in the same way, and believing, too, that the main aim and purpose of the artist should be to produce definite "effects" (responses of an emotional kind) on his readers, Poe sought to create exactly that kind of vocabulary which would best encompass whatever given "effect" he had in mind. In so doing, Poe "limited his vocabulary to a small compass of oft-repeated onomatopoetic sounds, especially those concerned with the mournful and lugubrious", which consisted of three distinct sorts, the mechanical, the inspiratory, and allusions either literary or classical. What emerges, rather than a symbolist or an allegorist as Poe himself would have understood these terms, might better be called a "synonymist", an artist intent on employing a wealth of synonyms to evoke emotion and mood. Poe's restless experimentation and dissatisfaction with his works in print, reflected in his repeatedly effecting changes in punctuation, spelling and capitalization, rather than to content and style, remind us that he was obsessed with sound over sense, manner and mood of delivery over content and form. Thus from a philosophical/symbolic viewpoint, it is Prof. Fletcher's contention that "In Poe's writings meaning is forever subordinate to sound; and whenever sound produces effective meanings, the inference lies near at hand that the correspondence has occurred by accident more than by design, and that profundities in Poe's works should be appreciated as largely gratuitous". After analyzing various of Poe's poems and tales and examining his growing mastery of character development in his detective stories and other late works, Prof. Fletcher concludes by focusing on Poe's increasingly dextrous handling of the satirical, the statement that Vissza