Some writer has had the power to cause you chills?

Your name is

He is one of the most prolific writers, known as one of the universal masters of short story. Author of some horror stories more frightening, detective stories and science fiction.

Un fragmento de uno de sus poemas ...

The Raven

  

Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary, 

over many a quaint and curious colume of forgotten lore, -

while I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping, 

as of some one gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.

"It is some visitor", - I muttered, taping at my chamber door; 

Only this and nothing more".

Ah, distinctly I remember it was in the bleak december

and each separate dying ember wrought its ghost upon the floor.

Eagerly i wished the morrow; -vainly I had sought to borrow

from my books surcease of sorrow - sorrow for the lost Lenore

for the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels vame Lenore:

Nameless here for evermore.

And the silken sad uncertain rustling of each purple curtain
Thrilled me-filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before; 

so that now, to still the beating of my heart, I stood repeating

"It is some visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door,

some late visitor entreating entrance at my chamber door:
This is and nothing more".

...
Complet poem
 Read version of the whole poem

BIOGRAPHY

On January 19, 1809, Edgar Allan Poe was born in Boston, Mssachusetts. Poe's father and mother were professional actors, who were members of a repertory company in Boston. Before Poe was three years old both of his parents died.

John and Frances Allan raised him as a foster child in Richmond, Virginia. John Allan sent Poe to the best boarding schools and later to the University of Virginia, where Poe excelled academically. After Allan refused to pay the  gambling debts of Poe.

His financial problems ere temporarily alleviated when he accepted and editorship and the Southern Literary Messenger in Richmond. Bringing with him his aunt and his twelve-year-old cousin Virginia, whom he married in 1836. She died in 1847, his death at age 24, would mean Poe's psychological collapse, which resulted in some of his best and darkest works while being abandoned to alcohol and drugs. On October 3, 1849, he was found in a state of semi-consciousness. Poe died four days later of “acute congestion of the brain.” Evidence by medical practitioners who reopened the case has shown that Poe may have been suffering from rabies.

Work's Poe

Poe practiced several genres throughout his literary career, treating in an almost obsessive way subjects such as death, burial in life or mourning. In this sense are well-known stories like The well and the pendulum, the mask of the red death, The heart delator or Berenice, among many others.

There is a psycological intensiti that is characteristic of Poe's writings, especially the tales of horror that comprise his best and best-known works. These stories —which include “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart”—are often told by a first-person narrator, and through this voice Poe probes the workings of a character’s psyche. This technique foreshadows the psychological explorations of Fyodor Dostoyevsky and the school of psychological realism. 

Poe´s theory of literaty creation is noted for two central points: first, a work must create a unity of effect on the reader to be considered sucessful; second, the production of this single effect should not be left to the hazards of accident or inspiration, but should to the minutest of style and subject be the result of rational deliberation on the part of the autor. In poetry, this single effect must arouse the reader's sense of beauty, an ideal that Poe closely associated with sadness, atrangenes, and loss; in prose, the effect should be one revelatory of some truth, as in "tales of ratiocination" or works evoking "terror, or passion, or horror".

The influence of Poe's tales may be seen in the work of later writers, including Ambrose Bierce and H.P Lovecraft, who belong to a distinct tradition of horror literature initiated by Poe. 

Marshall McLuhan:   he explored the heart of darkness.

Charles Baudelaire:  noted in his introduction to the French edition of “The Raven”: “It is indeed the poem of the sleeplessness of despair

To Helen

Helen, thy beauty is to meLike those Nicean barks of yoreThat gently, o'er a perfum'd seathe weary-worn wanderer boreto his own native shore

On desperate seas long wont to roam
thy hyacinth, thy classic face
thy Naiad airs have brough me home
to the beauty of fair Greece
And the grandeur of oll Rome

Lo! In that little window-niche
how statue-like I see thee stand!
The folded scroll wirtin thy hand]
A pdyche from the regions which
Are holy land


(Is said to be one of the most beautiful poems written in engilsh)

Activity

Dear student:

* After reading and observing part of the life and work of this author, you are going to write an opinion in Google Slides about what most caught your attention in this blog and why. Each opinion is places on a presentation sheet. Follow the instructions of the teacher.

*Consult and write information about the life and work of the author (or character) that you will choose form some of the book we have read in class. The next class you will create your own blog with hthis character from the instructions of the teacher.

Att: Teacher Carolina

*****

Next class: This is a Tim Burton’s short film, in which we can see the influence of Poe also in this author. 
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BIS04fIoUGA