Edgar Allan Poe

         Edgar Allan Poe is an author that I believe every high school student should be introduced to.  Poe’s works are incredible literary works of art that are fundamental to a scholarly education in English Language Arts.  Poe’s genre boarders on the grotesque and Poe himself has been noted to be one of the first American authors to introduce horror as a genre.  From his short stories to his poems, Edgar Allan Poe is truly one of my favourite authors that I feel privileged to be able to teach someday.

The Haunted Palace is shockingly one of the few poems that I was not familiar with.  Poe paints a vivid picture of a castle with golden-yellow banners, green grass, and beautiful empty windows.  Upon further inspection of the appearance of the palace, I found that the image I was looking at resembled the image of the women that Poe is famous for using as subjects in his poems and short stories.

The Black Cat, although horrible in terms of how anyone could wall in a cat with a corpse, details poetic justice being delivered onto a murderer.  An obsession over a cat and its incessant meowing occupies the psyche of the story’s narrator.  An act of rage compels the narrator to kill his wife and wall her dead body in the basement along with the cat that has invaded his every thought.  The aforementioned justice takes place as police investigate a strange odor that neighbors say is like horrid rotting meat.  Just before the police leave, the cat meows and cries out for help.  The police break the wall open to find the cat still alive and the wife’s body.  How quickly we forget that animals are sometimes more determined to live than we humans.

Poe really shows off how much he loves the idea of walling someone in to die.  In The Cask of Amontillado, Poe’s story details a man walling in Fortunado after Fortunado had “wronged” him in some unknown way.  Perhaps by denying his invitation to drink with him.  Either way, the narrator, Montresor, gets Fortunado drunk and places him in the wall of a basement and begins sealing him in.  Half-way through, Fortunado wakes up and screams in horror.  Montresor joins Fortunado in screaming; however, it is not out of fear.  Montresor is proving a point to Fortunado.  No matter how much either of them screams, no one will be able to hear them.  This point leaves Fortunado speechless and he is doomed to his fate.

Fall of The House of Usher is probably one of my absolute favourite stories that Poe has written.  The narrator visits the home of his friend and his sister: the Ushers.  Cut to the sister “dying” and once again, Poe chooses to have his character bury her in a room of the house.  Essentially walling her in.  Just like the cat and the wife in The Black Cat and Fortunado in The Cask of Amontillado.  The climax comes as the brother becomes nervous and the more time they both spend in the house the more unnerved he becomes.  Finally, his sister bursts through the door covered in her own blood.  Unbeknownst to the narrator (however, possibly not to the brother), they buried her alive.  She throws herself on her brother and they both collapse.  As the narrator storms out of the house in fear, the house collapses on itself.  In the end, The Fall of The House of Usher was both literal and symbolic as the brother and sister were also the last of their family and they died with no heirs to give their name to.