Introduction to the concept of Gothic genre and Edgar Allan Poe [610655]

Chapter I
Introduction to the concept of Gothic genre and Edgar Allan Poe

When dealing with a genre of novels designated 'Gothic', it seems appropriate to first try
to define the meaning of that word, of Gothic . In her thesis on Ann Radcliffe and Gothic fiction,
Linda R. Koenig examines the word Gothic, and arrives at the conclusion that it has a somewhat
complicated history. The word is believed to originate from a Germanic tribe which once
invaded England. Thi s tribe was actually the Jutes, but was mistakenly identified with the Goths
by 17th century antiquarians, and ultimately, in the 18th century, Gothic came to mean essentially
everything that was of Germanic origin. Gothic was often associated with things that were
barbaric, uncouth and rude but, interestingly enough, it Additionally became associated with
parliamentary rights, as ancient records seemed to point at the Goths as the ones who introduced
what later developed into the tradition of British liber ty and democracy. This positive
connotation later extended to include aesthetic matters, especially at the architectural scene, in
which the Gothic buildings were believed to display a soaring freedom from the strict
neo-classical ideals. As put by Fred Bo tting in his study of the Gothic genre: "Manifestations of
the Gothic past – buildings, ruins, songs and romances – were treated as products of uncultivated
if not childish minds. But characteristics like extravagance, superstition, fancy and wildness
whic h were initially considered in negative terms became associated, in the course of the 18th
century, with a more expansive and imaginative potential for aesthetic production."
Botting Additionally argues that Gothic could be seen as a reaction to the Enlig htenment.
This age of reason had brought in its wake an air of confusion. Rationalism had even displaced
religion as the means through which to explain the universe, the social world and supernatural
phenomena. Gothic works, with their disturbing ambivalen ce, therefore lend themselves as
instruments which could be used in an attempt to explain and debate that which the
Enlightenment had left unexplained.
Horace Walpole, who is usually considered as the father of the Gothic Novel, or Gothic
fiction, did not use the term Gothic himself, when he introduced his novel The Castle of Otranto
(henceforth Otranto ) in 1764. This should, perhaps, not come as any surprise, as the term a
Gothic Story had presumably not yet been invented. But it is quite interesting to n ote, then, how,

in a review of Walpole's novel in the Monthly Review from February 1765, a critic speaks of the
absurdities of Gothic fiction , which must indicate that the term was already in use at the time
when the first edition of Otranto was released. On the facsimile of the original title page of the
first edition of Otranto , one can see that it is only titled a Story . When the second edition was
released, however, this had been changed to a Gothic Story. It would be quite tempting to
presume that Walp ole 'borrowed' the expression from the critics, as he does apparently not try to
claim the right to the term of a Gothic Story , though he in his second preface readily enough
proclaims himself inventor of a new genre. He does, in fact, not mention the word Gothic.
Instead, he reveals in the second preface to his novel, the often quoted lines that his intention was
to write a novel that "[…] was an attempt to blend two kinds of romance, the ancient and the
modern. In the former all was imagination and impr obability; in the latter, content is always
intended to be, and sometimes has been, copied with success."
After two World Wars, an economic Great Depression, and the abstemiousness involving
everyday life in Great Britain helped to explain the proper way in which English literature
involved in the twentieth literature. All the proper values of Western civilization, when the
Victorians had only “discovered”, were in the middle of some debates developed by new writers,
in order to keep the society around the m from breaking down.
Proper literary forms were questioned, while new ones were in full development with a
remarkable rapidity, whereas writers found other means of delivering what it was taken by them
to be new ways of proficiency or proficiency seen i n new conditions.
Victorian literature was mainly written for the people succeeding in presenting the
pressing social problems and philosophies of an era filled with peace, intellectual and material
development. The Victorian Age was dominantly an aspect of social restraints and withheld a
reminder in this respect of the Puritan period. The artists, no matter what was the domain in
which they activate were didactic, respectful with principals and goals, even though these
qualities would exclude those invol ved with the Pre Raphaelite brotherhood.
Almost all spectators of the Victorian Age were driven by the reactions towards the
conventions imposed by society; later, for a man to smoke in public or a woman to ride a bicycle
seemed to be indecent.
On a ne w level the new moral values were just another way of protest against wilderness
of the earlier Regency, while the Victorian Court was on its side. Meanwhile, in literature it is

widely reverberated.
Many writers protested against the deadening protests o f the conventions; at a certain
point, all literary writings became inevitably impressed by all the new concepts in other domains
such as science, religion and politics.
Education was defined by novels, and the writers reacted with volition. Their works were
of high standard, in a manner in which notable critics had vouched that the nineteenth century
represents the richest artists in the entire history of the world.
Throughout the nineteenth century, the interrelations between American and European
writers were new and powerful.
The topic of these interrelations, especially the Italians represented an amenable concept
for prose and poetry – when Italian freedom was obtained the rejoicing was unique.
Even though with all the huge achievements, no supr eme writer was revealed. However,
the general literary level was high with spacious intellectual frontiers, high expectations, and
morals. After all these, the content of innovative measures was anything but great and their
improvements were questioned.
For the Victorians, Italy was what the Orient thought of the Europeans of the twentieth
century, a combination of allure and repugnance: allure for Italy’s history and contemporary
battle in order to end a period of political and economic subjugation and, a t the same time,
repugnance to its misery in society. The English were employed to analyze other societies versus
their own standards of modernity and were not able in finding any flaw. Still, a number of
Victorian writers fought against such stereotypes a nd, by acting as such, it challenged
contemporary attitudes against Europe, revealing assumptions about England’s social and
cultural prevalence.
Ahead of analyzing the same features between Jane Eyre and Rebecca , it is vital to
understand the basic features forming the literary genre of Gothic romance.
Although The Castle of Otranto by Horace Walpole (considered to be the first release of
the genre) has no connection to the Gothic era of history, Gothic fiction did focus upon the
evolution of Gothic architecture at the same moment. Some argued this fact had to do with the
title “Gothic fiction,” even if The Castle of Otranto was set in Gothic periods and may have
Additionally given the genre its name.
Known as a mix form of prose fiction, the Gothic genre tends to add the narrative,

dramatic, and lyric styles of writing into a powerful tale of dark themes, sometimes supernatural
elements, and social repression. Basic features of the Gothic novel include: a setti ng in a castle or
mansion, supernatural or inexplicable events, overwrought emotions, one or more women in
distress, and a metonymy of gloom and horror. Sometimes called the “literature of nightmare”,
Gothic fiction includes dream landscapes, figures of th e subconscious imagination, and the fears
common to all mankind in one powerfully told story, riddled with suspense and drama.
The worthy Gothic novel maintained its popularity through to the early nineteenth
century, even hough a small but consistent dem and for this form combining romantic fantasy
with a mystery and an apparent upsurge of supernatural evil continued well into the twentieth.
This mixture, known as Gothic romance, changed in time.
In a typical work of this nature, readers will find elemen ts of the Gothic interwoven with
those of Romance, particularly a focus on the relationship developed between the two main
characters. Plus, the main feature revealed in a Gothic romance is a feeling of dread, instead of
the terror associated with pure Go thic fiction. This negative feeling can be either physical,
psychological, or metaphysical involving the body, mind, or spirit, but the Gothic romance must
develop an atmosphere that blends suspense and fear with mystery.
While the most successful aspect of the Gothic romance may well have been its
insistence on the reality of the irrational, nonetheless it is disturbing that the social reality
Maturin and Godwin were presenting in their Gothic novel -romances (or, in Brontë’s case, a
novel -romance that ma de use of the Gothic) somehow vanishes in these final summings up of the
writers’ achievements, just as, conversely, the ghostly nun is all too shadowy a presence in
Eagleton’s very “social” reading of Villette. Maturin’s lectures on “fiscal responsibility ” may be
ineptly funny, but it is important to acknowledge that poverty, in all its brutal reality, is a central
subject of his Gothic tale.
The conjunction of sordid financial detail with metaphysics reveals that the psychological
realism of these write rs, achieved through symbol and dream, is inextricably woven into a soeial
context and that the social content is set in the context of private nightmare. Both contexts are
interrelated and inseparable parts of a whole.
Poe was born on January 19th, 1809 in Boston, Massachusetts. It is therefore the second
centenary of his birth, a fact that should not have more importance, but any excuse is good to
remember a figure as relevant as this very special author.

He served as poet, critic and editor. He is one of the greatest universal masters of the
short story, father of psychological terror, precursor of the detective story and of science fiction.
It also contributed to renew the Gothic novel, whose ways adapted to the American reality to
approach it to its public. It exerted an enormous influence in the literature of its time and in all
the later, influence that would cross borders arriving at the Victorian England. Numerous authors
such as Kafka, Lovecraft and the French symbolists, among many others, are d ebtors of his work
and admirers of his.
His parents were two modest actors of the east coast: David Poe and Elisabeth Arnold. At
an early age his brief life begins to suffer the hard coats that would make him an unhappy being.
He was abandoned by his fath er in 1810, when he was only nine months old. The misfortunes
did not end there, for he would lose a mother at two years of age. Throughout his life the
obsession of the image of his dead mother, in such a way that tormented this idea and came to
form in t he belief that all beauty and goodness was destined to an early disappearance.
Upon his return to the United States he entered the University of Virginia, where he
excelled in the study of several languages. According to some biographers such as Hervey Allen,
his temperament played the first bad thing, because he led a dissipated life and had to leave the
studies to have problems with alcohol and laudanum, as well as for the accumulation of
gambling debts. According to other biographers the seque nce was just reversed: his stepfather
stopped helping him economically so that he could not maintain his position in the University.
The crossing of accusations between the two letters was fierce: a young and rebellious
Poe left the University and wander ed for a few years, living with different jobs. His personal
situation deteriorated more and more until he decided in 1827 to join the army. Although he tried
to rebuild his relations with his stepfather, he not only refused, but also hid the serious illne ss of
his French stepmother, whom he was very fond of. Poe would never see her alive again, and the
day after his funeral, the pain caused him to faint, sinking into melancholy. Perhaps it was the
grief so deep that John Allan noticed in him that he did he lp him to graduate and to enter the
Military Academy of West Point, where he would be little time, enough to break again the
relations with his stepfather after the new Marriage of this, that definitively withdraws its
support, and to be licensed to the sh ort time, apparently by insubordination.
Meanwhile he had spent some time in Boston, where he entered literary circles and
published his first work, Tamerlane and other poems (1827), which was ascribed to the romantic

movement and showed its pro -European vocation in poetry, Especially byroniana. This was not
going to be good for him, because in his native country he was received with some disdain, as a
stranger. He would be followed by a second job after leaving the army .
In the mid -thirties he settled in the city of Baltimore, where he began to practice as a
journalist. He would also begin his interest in short stories, a genre in which Poe would soon
become the undisputed master. After passing away his stepfather without leaving him an
inheritance, he ma rried his cousin Virgina, aged thirteen , in 1836. During this fertile period he
directed several literary magazines and wrote in abundance, creating some of his best works,
exercising criticism and journalism. In spite of this apparent calm, his fondness f or alcohol and
debts created continuous problems: the income he obtained from his work and his sometimes
large works could not prevent his disordered life from making him and his woman. On the other
hand his obsessions and existential problems were aggrava ted over the years.
In 1840 he managed to publish an anthology of stories, although they had already
appeared previously in the newspapers: Tales of the grotesque and arabesque , 1839) contained
some of his best works, such as The fall of the House of Ushe r (1839) . Due to this publication
and to win several prizes, especially with the famous poem The Raven , 1845) reached the fame
and could realize a tour by the country reciting its poems.
In 1845 he would publish his own magazine, the Broadway Journal, although for a short
time: misfortune came to him again when he broke his publication in 1847 and died of
tuberculosis his wife, whom he loved madly. These events aggravated his psychological
problems and plunged him into depression, alcohol and drugs.
On October 3rd, 1849, Dr. James E. Snodgrass found him in a state of mental alienation in
front of a tavern in Baltimore, and dressed in clothes that were not his own. He was rushed to the
hosp ital, where he suffered from hallucinations that alternated with sporadic moments of lucidity
– it has often been said that he suffered a delirium tremens, but it is not known for sure. He died
after a few days, on October 7th. The causes of his death are not known exactly, but the
symptoms of his illness, described by Dr. Snodgrass, were compatible with rabies, which could
have inadvertently infected a cat or a dog. In any case it is known that he had suffered malaria a
year earlier, which left him in a pr ecarious state of health, and that he was weak of the heart. His
last words were ''May God help my poor soul ''.
In his poetic work, which begins with Tamerlane and other poems in 1827, but is

definitively consolidated with The crow and other poems in 1845 , Poe succeeds in consecrating
himself as one of the greatest and most influential American poets. Until the arrival of Whitman
are the bases that he feels those that set the standard in the United States. In his work Poe
combines the lyrical elements with a narrative discourse in which he shapes the intensity of his
psychological vision, within a broad thematic record in which the supernatural elements are not
lacking. This multiplicity allows the reader to establish a very personal relationship with Poe's
work, choosing what interpretation he prefers to stay with: from the literal to the allegorical, the
supernatural or the symbolic. In his poems, Poe is an advance of the symbolism that a few years
later appears in France – not in vain is in this country w here the intensity and drama of his poetic
and proseist work is better understood. He is therefore a romantic poet, but begins to close the
stage of romanticism and open the way to new movements.
Despite the consistency of his work, and probably due to th e rupture he draws with the
above, he gets a cold welcome from the Anglo -Saxon critics. It will not be until many years after
his disappearance when, in distant France, authors such as Baudelaire and Valéry claim the
greatness of his work. It will become n ot only a model, but also a perfect example of the damn
romantic poet.
Grotesque and arabesque were the terms with which Poe designated his own works,
especially the most gruesome and supernatural. They are a continuous exploration of human
psychology, as well as a continual descent into the depths of horror. One of his most important
works is Tales of the grotesque and arabesque (1840) in which he compiled the materials that
appeared previously in various periodicals. It contains works suh as Ligeia , The tale-tale heart or
The Fall of the House of Usher , that is to say, some of the best stories ever written in English
language. Children heirs stories of the themes of the black novel, which is possible a
disadvantage, because for its readers, and for critic ism, writer of the era of Poe too
Europeanized, that is, away from the tastes of his country.
In these stories the defects of the old Gothic novels have disappeared: the long and funky
novel has acquired the structure of a modern space, the dawn of a gre ater psychological depth
and a virtuosity rarely seen in the device of elements, both linguistic and symbolic , the same
architectural setting is adapted by Poe to the liking of its readers, taking from the old European
castle to the spaces of the American continent.
In this story the narrator is invited by an old and eccentric friend, Roderick Usher, who

had not seen for a long time his house Roderick lives with his twin sister Madeline, victim of a
mysterious cataleptic disease . Roderick himself, accordin g to the narrator, suffers from some
kind of nervous illness, to which the charged and terrible environment of the old house does not
contribute and which affects him to the extreme : ''Not without difficulty I was able to admit the
identity of the languid being before me with that of my childhood companion. Yet the character
of his face had always been extraordinary. The cadaverous complexion, the eyes large, liquid
and luminous beyond any comparison; The lips a little thin and very pale, but with an imposs ibly
beautiful curvature … And now, in the mere exaggeration of the predominant character of these
factions and of the expression they habitually communicated, there was such a great change that
I doubted the Person with whom he spoke. And then the ghast ly pallor of the skin and the
miraculous brightness of the eyes, above all else, astonished me and even infused me with
reverent awe''.
When the sister dies she is buried in a crypt in the basement of the mansion, while the
brother already skirts the madn ess. Soon a terrible storm begins, in the middle of which appears
Madeline, who by mistake had been buried in life. Both brothers die victims of horror and the
narrator flees, terrified, as the mansion sinks behind him. An ending that is one of the most
terrible and famous scenes of fantastic literature: ''I fled in horror from that chamber, from that
mansion. The storm was still raging as I found myself crossing its old causeway. Suddenly a
strange light ran down the path and I turned to see from where cou ld come such an incredible
brightness, for the huge house and its shadows were left alone behind me. The glow came from
the full moon that was red as blood, and shone brightly through the crack, barely perceptible, as
I have described it, which extended in zig-zag from the roof of the house to its base . As he
watched the fissure widen, opening rapidly (…)''.
The work is baroque, distressing and interpretatively complex. It admits different
readings, some more supernatural than others. It is an account h eir of the environments of the
English Gothic novel, but with a plot of greater psychological load and greater symbolic content.
Some of Poe's fantastic stories, which we might call grotesque -always according to the author's
sense of this term -are neverthe less more than the others. Some have called them metaphysical
accounts. The name is not unfortunate: they transcend the merely physical, but do not focus on a
supernatural subject or the use in Poe – read phantom or premature burial. They are stories where
one perceives a fascination for the mysterious that reaches the highest summits of the numinous.

The unleashed force of nature, the mysteries of the cosmos, give rise to visions that alone
transmit the full force of the Mysterium Tremendum.
A good exampl e of these stories would be one of the best stories of Poe – and one of the
best in all of universal literature – A Descent into the Maelstr öm (1841). The protagonist is a man
with the appearance of a crippled old man, but when he begins his story we know that he is not
as old as he looks; It was the terrible experience he lived that left him in this state. Trapped off
the coast of Norway in a ter rible sea swirl, the Maelström, the narrator tells of his experience, his
feelings of being faced with such a portent of nature, and how he managed to survive by tying
himself to an empty barrel, but at the cost of throwing himself with he to the crazed se a, while
his ship was sinking in an unfathomable abyss.
The European influence, especially of the Gothic novel, becomes visible in these stories
more than in the rest of the production of Poe. Recall for example The Pit and the Pendulum
(1842) typically G othic story, whose action runs entirely in the most lugubrious dungeon during
the Toledo inquisition.
Poe is the master of the short story, but he has also written a novel , The Narrative of
Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket , published by deliveries in the Southern Literary Messenger
in the year 1837. Although part of the base of A story of adventure , with an expedition in search
of the South Pole, the real motive of the work is to put into practice his theory of gratuitous art,
that is, the subordination of any other literary element. Literature is not in itself, there is no
means to achieve anything else. Poe 's visions are the service of language, and the plot is a
symbolic, almost surrealistic element whose sole purpose is to strengthen the semantic
constr uction. It is not surprising that many readers have believed that the work was incomplete,
or missing something in this novel, when they judged its argument. It is not the argument that
matters the language, the symbols and the way in which everything is p ut into operation to create
an atmosphere of mystery and an aesthetic feeling.
The symbolism of the work is shown when towards the end produces an earthquake, and
on the surface of the earth open simas that reproduce the letters of the alphabet. The last lines of
the work seem a final truncated, and have been the reason for many interpretations : ''And then we
rushed into the arms of the waterfall, where an abyss opened to receive us. But here is a human
figure shrouded in our path, of much greater proporti ons than those of any inhabitant of the
earth. And the tint of the skin of the figure had the perfect whiteness of the snow ''.

In any case, the apparent nonsense of the end of the novel, or the fact of not knowing the
destiny of the protagonist, rather th an an inconvenience seems to have been a spur to other great
authors to rewrite the same story. So it is with Jules Verne, who wrote The Sphinx of the Ice
Fields taking as starting point the novel of Poe. So much would Howard Philips Lovecraft do
with At the Mountains of Madness and Other Tales of Terror .
Although what has been said so far would already be enough to include Edgar Allan Poe
among the great writers of all time, it is by no means all that he was able to carry out. There are
some stories that are far from what we have been talking about: they do not have the symbolist
character, nor their justification is art for art. They are The Murders in the Rue Morgue (1841) ,
The Mystery of Marie Roget (1842) , The Purloined Letter (1844) , and also The Gold Bug (1843) .
These are stories that sometimes have something grotesque, but they do not give the supernatural
circumstances of the other works of the author, but an elegant and complex psychological game.
In this game the intellect, through the inductive m ethod, is used to solve some mysterious cases,
but at the same time the intellectual game is also an art form. Poe had invented the police genre
and with him the first great detective of this genre, Auguste Dupin, present in the first three
stories mention ed above.
In Dupin 's narrative, the narrator is also the friend of the investigator, a friend not very
skilled in these games of wit, so that the detective must explain all the steps of his work, until
arriving at the inevitable conclusion. It is a clear precursor of the figure, companion and
confidant at the same time, Dr. Watson, who gives the protagonist to show off and at the same
time facilitates the identification of the reader. Today the importance of Dupin may have
declined a bit, for the great suc cess of later characters. However, he was the first and for a long
time the prestige of this character and his stories would serve as a beacon for other writers. Other
key features of the genre, such as the independent investigator, the crime in a closed p lace, the
multiplicity of suspects, are also the work of Poe, and although the subject is very interesting, it
escapes the purposes of this article, so we do not We will stop in your analysis.
As a collaborator and editor of numerous magazines devoted to literature, Poe had the
opportunity to make his views known, both on literature and on criticism. In these subjects, his
work was also important, and although we will not stop to study it, it is necessary to mention
how the critical criterion of analyzing the works was imposed, only by the merits of these. Until
then it was common for critics to take much more into account the biography of the author, and

even the criteria of the critics, so that the appraisal of the work was often more influenced by the
tastes and preferences of the critic than by the literary value of the story. In addition to this
greater objectivity, Poe was also a declared enemy of the idea of inspiration. On the contrary, he
believed in the work, the preparation and the refined use o f all literary and semantic resources,
with the aim of achieving a predetermined end.
If the former was an attack on the supremacy of the critics of the time, the latter was
against the romantic myth of inspiration and the idle genius of artists. His theories regarding
these themes are found in many of his writings, the most important of wh ich is undoubtedly The
Philosophy of Composition , 1845, where he details not only his thoughts, but also the method
that the he continued to compose his works, for this must not be forgotten, the genius of Poe 's
work is the result of planning and hard work , not of inspiration.
Poe's work did not enjoy editorial success during the life of its author. As an anecdote,
consider his first publication, Tamerlane and other poems (1827) Poe himself had to pay the
expenses of editing, and only 50 copies were seen, which were damaged. Of these, only 12 have
reached our days, and their present value is enormous. But the posthumous recognition little
consolation offers an author, especially if he suffered hardships of all kinds, as the case that
occupies us.
However, there is a book, and only one, signed by Poe that was reprinted in the life of the
author. The title of his greatest selling success will astonish most admirers of his work: The
conchologist's first book: a system of testaceous malacology, arranged express ly for the use of
schools, in which the animals, according to Cuvier, are given with the shells, a great number of
new species added, and the whole brought up, as accurately as possible, to the present condition
of the science – 1st edition, 1839, 2nd editi on, 1840, 3rd edition, 1845 .
This is a cheap manual on shells, the genesis of which is due in large part to a friend of
Poe, Thomas Wyatt. He had published in 1838 an excellent book on shells, in full color, but sold
very little because of its high price . He thought of writing a cheaper black -and-white version, but
the publisher, of course, would have opposed it, since then the luxury edition would become
unsaleable. That's why he sought a subterfuge, obviously illegal, to get his way. For $50, in
return he put his name on the cover, drafted the preface and introduction, and translated the
mollusk descriptions of the great French naturalist Cuvier. He then shot much of the text of
Wyatt's luxury work, as well as another book on mollusk, The conchological writings of Captain

Thomas Brown. Today, this would be considered a brazen plagiarism, and even in his time Poe
was accused of this crime by some newspaper of Philadelphia.
However, according to the prestigious biologist and scientific disseminator Stephen Jay
Gould, Poe contributed considerable improvements in both his linguistic ability and his
approach, based on the criteria of the best French naturalists. Poe was not a pr ovincial, but knew
the main streams of European knowledge. He succeeded in lending a manual that was largely
plagiarized and destined to be distributed among the most humble classes in North America -yes,
there was a market for such books: people modest but eager to acquire scientific knowledge .
The existence of a romantic movement in North America has been widely discussed.
Within the differences that present the literature in the United States of the time of the
watercolor, we must also emphasize many ele ments a favor of the consideration that there was a
romantic movement. English Romanticism tended to fantasy and recovery, idealized, elements of
the feudal age. French, on the other hand, had a clear intellectual vocation, with certain
revolutionary eleme nts. The Germans devote themselves with passion to the recovery of their
folklore and the creation, through culture, of a national reality. Romanticism in the United States
had everything that a series of problems: the legends own of its land were those of the Indians,
whom they were fighting. Their culture of origin was that of the colonial powers against which
they fought, but it is this struggle, along with the declaration of independence, that builds
nationalism in the United States, the nationalism tha t is typical of the romantic movement.
The romantic tradition had therefore that all the above are distinguished, typical of a land
of settlers who in the place of recovering an idealized past preferred to focus on those who build
their future. This will provoke the first tension, that of those who are more of American roots and
who, on the contrary, have received a greater European influence. It is not surprising that among
the latter we find Irving, who traveled extensively throughout Europe; Or a James, who would
have an entire stage of his literature dedicated to the subject of the cultural relationship between
the old and the new continent. Poe, for his part, is undoubtedly received many European
influences, but at the same time he was able to find a w ay of his own.
The European elements that can be found in the work of Poe, especially the gothic
element, have been perfectly assimilated and reelaborated. At the same time Poe was very
critical, sometimes contemptuous, with the submission of American le tters to European ones,
there is no such disgusting spectacle under the sun as our submission to British criticism. From

this desire for cultural independence regarding Europe arose partly because of its originality and
the reworking of all the influences it had received.
It would be the genre of the Gothic novel first to arrive at America and it made of the
hand of Charles Brocken Brown (1771 -1810) that during the little time that dedicated to the
writing of works such as Wieland, or the Transformation .
The next, at least chronologically, would be Washington Irving (1783 -1859) who in the
exercise of diplomacy spent less than decades in Europe – is known for his stay in Spain, which
inspired his famous Tales of the Hammer (1832) And make him the first Hi spanist in his
country. After him Nathaniel Hawthorne (1804 -1864) also a cultivator of the black novel, and
one of those who best adapted to the new territory the themes of that one. It was Hawthorne who
transformed the spaces of the European castle, its d ark corridors and wet dungeons, into the old
wooden colonial house, a picture of the past in New England.
In short, Edgar Poe 's initial poetic vocation was somewhat frustrated. His works have not
had great fortune and are remembered by very few of them. T his contributed to his overly
mechanistic approach, which makes his poetry more finely tuned watch pieces than the
spontaneous expression of feelings. In the words of Eduardo Iáñez: Poe surpasses the romantic
conceptions and advances the lyric of the twent ieth century by substituting intuition and emotion
for a rationality that is expressed literally through the symbol; nevertheless, unable to bring his
own ideas to the poetic realm, Poe is now reduced to a thinker, a great theoretical precursor of
contempo rary lyricism. The problem of the poor survival of his poetry lies precisely in his
excessive theoretical burden: his obsessive themes – especially that of the symbiosis between
death and beauty – do not find in his lyrics a convincing expression, although an adequate
technique
Instead, as a narrator is an advance to his time, while a creator of novel literary materials
that will become new genres. He develops a great psychological insight that will be fundamental
to his appreciation by later readers, at the same time his analysis of terrifying situations is so
thorough, so deep, that he reaches the level of the symbol. In a way it is a spiritual literature, in
the sense of the search for the transcendent. What happens is that his spirituality does not see k
answers in religion but in pain, death, decay and beyond , ultimately in the supernatural. Poe is a
mystic who does not resort to divine revelation. He prefers to work as an explorer: he delves into
the human soul and from what he finds there traces poeti c and narrative maps. His findings are

often terrible, but they are always poetic, especially in his narrative: he is more a poet in his
stories than in his poetry, because his stories of mystery and imagination make us feel the eternal
wilt of a world whe re everything is perishable. However, he is not an allegorical author; never
tries to moralize or teach the reader . Known were his pronouncements on the supremacy of the
imagination, his explicit condemnation of moral intention in the work of art and moral allegory ,
and so on and so forth, transferred social and moral conflict to the domain of aesthetics.