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Materials > Readings > Thematic Index |
Thematic Index
| Theme |
Stories/Poems |
Early Poems
Poetry was Poe's first calling. Many of his best early poems were written before he was twenty-two. His early poems (1824-35) have varied themes but are best seen through the prism of youth: Byronic ambition, love, and alienation. |
Tamerlane, Alone, Al Aaraaf, Romance, Sonnet -- to Science, Fairy-Land, To Helen, Israfel, The Sleeper, The City in the Sea, To One in Paradise, The Coliseum, Politian |
Cosmology
Poe's complex cosmology is revealed mostly in his poetry, though one catches glimpses too in stories like Descent Into the Maelstrom. In brief, Poe's God is the force that set matter into motion; from a unity of being we were sent out into a whirling chaos that buffets and beats us, but we are, with the universe, ever collapsing back upon that singularity, a reunion with God, the small promise held out by death. |
Al Aaraaf, Ulalume, Eureka, Descent into the Maelstrom |
Revenant Women
Poe's relationship with his fictional women was quite complex. On the one hand, he wrote that the death of a beautiful woman was the most poetical topic in the world. On the other, the narrator of Black Cat buries an ax in his wife's head, for the sole reason that she had given no offense. Undoubtedly, his urge to murder and love them sprang from the same source. |
Berenice, Ligeia, Morella, Eleanora, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Black Cat |
Comic Satires and Grotesques
Like most satire, Poe's comic tales are difficult to understand outside their context. Nevertheless, Poe's jabs at the fashion, politics, and popular culture of his time remind us that any understanding of him as a writer must take account of his wit, whimsy, and playfulness -- as well as his more infamous morbidity. |
Mystification, A Predicament, The Man That Was Used Up, Never Bet the Devil Your Head, Three Sundays in a Week, Diddling, The Spectacles, The Literary Life of Thingum Bob, Esq., The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether, The Thousand-and-second Tale of Scheherazade, Some Words with a Mummy |
Tales of Detection
Poe is credited with pioneering detective fiction in his so-called tales of ratiocination. Poe's C. Auguste Dupin and William Legrand are "sedentary masterminds whose very lack of physical exertion emphasizes the mastery of mind over the material world." |
The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Mystery of Marie Roget, The Gold-Bug, Thou Art the Man, The Purloined Letter |
Tales of Crime and Punishment
Different from, but related to, Poe's "detective" stories are his confessional tales told by criminal madmen. The detective tales and the confessional tales illustrate different sides of the solitary self coping with forces of dissolution. |
The Pit and the Pendulum, The Tell-Tale Heart, The Black Cat, The Imp of the Perverse, The Cask of Anontillado, Hop-Frog |
Science Fiction Sketches
Poe was a pioneer of science fiction as well. Though he did not create fictionally complete worlds distinct from our own, Poe sent voyagers into realms of the unknown in speculations and dreamlike visions of the "spirit's outer world." |
Hans Pfaall, The Balloon Hoax, Mellonta Tauta, Von Kempelen and His Discovery, A Tale of the Ragged Mountains, The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar |
Landscape Sketches
In these sketches, Poe created fictional landscapes that approximated his view of the ordered and supernal Beauty of the hereafter. |
The Island of the Fay, Morning on the Wissahiccon, The Landscape Garden, The Domain of Arnheim, Landor's Cottage |
Criticism and Theory
In his essays and reviews, Poe worked out a set of literary and aesthetic theories almost unrivaled in the antebellum period for their ambition and originality. |
The Philosophy of Composition, The Rationale of Verse, The Poetic Principle, Marginalia |
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