Many romanticists focused on the contemplation of the natural world, but few dared to journey down the road of the unexplainable into the supernatural realms. Only one man, Edgar Allen Poe, crossed the threshold between the real world and the dark and dreary habitat of his mind. Unlike the masses, Poe disregarded the French revolutionary philosophy, humanitarianism, reform, the new interpretation of nature, and exploration of the past.He worked on exploiting the purely imaginative faculty of his mind and focused on the realm of mystery and horror (Blankenship, 216). He treaded the rich and sometimes dank soil of the Gothic and grotesque. His tales littered with distraught narrators, deranged heroes, and doomed heroines caused the atmosphere of his work to fall somewhere between a nightmare and hallucination (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). All of his fictions contain an evident irritation with the commonplace and a penchant for intellectual and emotional extremes (Conn, 133). Poe distinguished himself from many of his contemporaries and successors with his feverish search of perfection. To Poe literature was a serious vocation expressing the beauty and poignancy of life and to be effective required flawlessness. One of his few weaknesses however was his intellectual detachment from his time and environment (Blankenship, 216). Poe is most noted for his incredible short stories of the bizarre and insane (Edgar Allan Poe, 260). Poe does not invent the short story, but he is one of the first to distinguish between a story that is short and a short story by defining one. Poe simply states that a short story should emphasize unity or the totality of the impression and brevity because the unity of the story is lost in a mass of details. Also, the writer must chose the desired effect and then create incidents to assist in the creation of that effect (Blankenship, 260). In addition to the unexplainable, supernatural realms and the consequences of allo...
