Justin M. - American Author Project on Edgar Allan Poe

Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

Welcome to the blog page for my American Author project on the great American author, poet, short story writer, and literary critic, Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849).

Reading Blog #8 - American Author Thesis Proposal (WA#8)

        The thesis statement for my American Author paper will be as follows: "In his short stories, Edgar Allan Poe uses elements of darkness and uncertainty to create horror; his characters tend to value reason, and through physical, mental, or supernatural forces, Poe deprives them of their reason, leaving them powerless to resist the decline into madness, which is symbolized by darkness. Conversely, to contrast reason and madness, Poe uses light to symbolize reason. This inevitable descent into darkness faced by his characters has the greater purpose of reflecting the nature of Poe's life: the addictions he couldn't resist, the tragedies that befell him that he couldn't prevent, and the extent to which he himself valued reason."
        While writing a paper around this thesis, I can either structure my arguments around different stories, or ideas. I think the latter would be more organized, so what I think I'm going to do is start by developing my idea that Poe uses uncertainty to create fear, and how this relates to darkness. Then I'll go on to demonstrate how darkness and uncertainty are symbols of madness. Then I'll discuss how Poe's characters all seem to value reason, and how it is symbolized by light in many of his stories. Then I'll illustrate how many of Poe's characters are forced into madness and how darkness is used to visualize this. I'll then talk about how the fact that the characters are unable to resist this decline is reflective of Poe's life. Then I'll talk about Poe's life, how he, too, valued reason, how he acquired addictions he couldn't resist, how tragedies befell him, and how all of this is relevant to the stories he writes. Then I'll tie everything together with a concluding paragraph, relating all my points to the pieces of literature associated with them, and restating their relevance, now with the context of my paper.
        A challenge I'll have to face while writing this paper is the fact that, to support my arguments, rather than three books, I'll be using many short stories of Poe's. I'll have to find a way to present evidence from all these works while maintaining organization and flow. It will be difficult to include references from so many works in a manner that seems logical.
        Two things that I was originally thinking about while trying to form a thesis were Poe's limited use of dialogue and his specific theme of guilt. Although I'm satisfied with how my thesis turned out, the downside to it is that I'm not sure if it will have room for these two topics. Perhaps, if necessary, I will find a way to incorporate them in at some point.

Reading Blog #7

For this blog, I read Poe's short story, Berenice.

This story is told in the first person, from the perspective of a man named Egaeus, who is reflecting on his past. He grew up in his family's mansion with his cousin, Berenice. He normally would reside in the gloomy library, studying texts and practicing deep analysis, while Bernice was carefree and beautiful, and preferred the sunshine and the outdoors. As the two grow up, they remain at the mansion, and each aquire illnesses. Berenice developes a physically deteriorating disease that makes her body degenerate and causes occasional seizures. The narrator developes a mental condition a bit like obsessive compulsive disorder, which causes him to fall into lapses of extreme and obsessive concentration, in which he would focus solely on one simple object and nothing else, for hours, even days on end. At some point, the narrator asks Berenice for her hand in marriage, she accepts, and plans are made for the wedding. At some point near the wedding, Egeaus is sitting in the library when he sees Benerice smile, and becomes dazzled by her white teeth. While the rest of her body is suffering from the disease, her teeth still apprear to be in good condition, and the narrator begins to obses over her teeth by the nature of his disease. Right after seeing them, he sits in his chair for a full day, completely unmoving, just thinking about the teeth. Then he hears a ruckus and is informed by servants that Berenice has died of a seizure. After her burial, Egeaus finds himself sitting in the library once again, with no clear recollection of what happened between that moment and the burial, but vaguely remembers something horrible. He is suddenly visited by a frantic servant who says Benerice's grave has been disturbed and that the body in it turned out to be alive. The narrator then notices a muddy spade and muddy and bloody clothes hanging from the wall in his room, and immediately smashes open a small box that he had noticed with an unexplainable discomfort on his desk. Out of the box fly various dental equipment and all of Berenice's teeth.

In this story, once again we see a narrator who does something terrible because of a mental sickness or madness, and isn't able to stop himself from doing it. Additionally, we see a strong emphasis on logic and rationality. The narrator traces the thought process of a normal person, stating that they would think about something, and then come to logical deductions based on it, whereas the narrator simply ponders the single object and makes no deductions. This sort of madness is what causes the narrator to commit an act that he himself hinds horrendous. This conflict between reason and madness, self-control and helplessness, seems to prevail throughout Poe's multiple stories. It seems that Poe uses ambiguity, or the unknown, or darkness/blackness to represent madness and horror, while logic is represented by light.

Viewing these themes of logic and madness, and reading about Poe's life, one possible thesis statement could be something like this:
Poe's characters value logic, which is partly how his work gave birth to the detective fiction genre. Additionally, his characters often encounter supernatural, physical, or mental obstacles that impede their logic, and that they are powerless to resist. This reflects the addictions and tragedies that occurred to Poe in his life, and how he was powerless to resist them.
Also, concerning the themes of darkness, madness, and guilt, I could formulate a thesis like this:
Using madness, the supernatural, and his characters' emotions, Poe uses unexplained mysteries rather than horrific realities to generate horror, and in doing so, separates his characters' perception from reality.

Reading Blog #6

For this post, I read Poe's short story, The Man of the Crowd.

This story is written in the first person, from the perspective of a man who is sitting leisurely in a coffee shop in London. The narrator starts off in an unusually good mood, which he claims sharpens his perception and intellectual prowess. After observing the inside of the cafe and losing interest, he begins to observe th crowded street outside throug ha window. He spends hours observing the throngs of people in the large, busy street as the evening progresses, and catagorizes the people he sees into many specific descriptions. As night falls, he notices an old man in the crowd who's facial expression greatly perplexes him, because it is unlike any the narrator has ever seen, and evokes numerous conflicting emotions from him. He is so interested that he begins to follow the man, and soon seems to notice a diamond and a dagger in the man's coat. This interests him even more and he becomes even more eager to follow the man, wherever he may go. For the entire night, and the entire day afterward, the narrator follows the man as he wanders aimlessly around London, always seeming to stick to a crowd. Eventually, the narrator is so exhausted that he suddenly stands in front of the old man and stops. The stranger doesn't even seem to notice him and walks past, continuing to wander. At this point, the narrator stops following him, as he realizes that the stranger is the man of the crowd, and doesn't do any activities other than what the narrator has seen. He narrator relates him to the nature of crime, stating that both refuse to be alone. The narrator ends the story with the statement that some of the deeper inner workings of the world are more terrible than the horrors written in books, and that it is fortunate that, unlike the books, they remain unobserved.

Like The Cask of Amontillado, this story's plot contains a strong element of mystery. Just as we don't know why the narrator of The Cask of Amontillado wants to get revenge on his friend, in this story we don't know why the old man continues to wander among crowds. The fact that these parts of the story are left out, I think, show us how Poe started the detective myster genre. He does the first step, which is to make a missing piece in the plot. The second step is to logically find the missing piece (in the same way that many of Poe's characters actively use logical deduction), but without a detective character driving such an investigation, the second step remains uncompleted in this story, so the reader is left to ponder. I also noticed the element of crime in the story, and think it could relate to Poe's common theme of guilt. It is implied, by the narrator at the end, and by the dagger and diamond the narrator thought he saw the man carrying, that the old man has comitted some sort of crime. Just as guilt controlled criminals of other stories of Poe's to do certain things, it seems that this man is somehow condemned to wander due to the crime he comitted. Perhaps in my paper I could write about crime and its relation to guilt portrayed in Poe's stories. Finally, I noticed that Poe's language in this story portrays very detailed observations, and the narrator, while he is observing the crowd, uses his visual observations to deduce things about individuals he is viewing. This brings the element of logic to the story that often takes place in Poe's writing. In addition, there is a sense of the supernatural around the old man, as he moves unusually fast at times for one so old and never seems to tire. This seems to merely reenforce the shroud of ambiguity surrounding the man that presents a mystery to the reader. Perhaps, for my paper, I could also write about Poe's inconsistent use of the supernatural to explore certain traits of human nature.

Reading Blog #5

For this thesis blog post, I read Poe's short story, The Cask of Amontillado.

The story is told from the perspective of a wealthy man who has come up with a plan to get revenge on his friend, Fortunato, who he says has insulted him (the exact nature of the insult is never specified). He lures his friend deep into his family's catacombs underneath his mansion by telling Fortunato that he just purchased a cask of Amontillado (rare, expensive, aged wine) and wants his friend's expert opinion to see if he got ripped off or not. Once the narrator leads a drunken Fortunato to the deepest and most isolated tomb, he tells him that the bottle is in a deep niche in the wall. Once Fortunato stumbles into the niche, the narrator quickly chains him to the wall and begins to wall up the niche with brick and mortar. Eventually he finishes the wall, trapping his friend alive in the tomb murdering him. After reflecting on the whole event, the narrator states that he has never been caught and that Fortunato's body has remained in the tomb undisturbed for 50 years.

This story is similar to The Black Cat and The Tell-Tale Heart because the narrators of all the stories are murderers who hide their victims' bodies behind walls or floorboards. It is different, however, in the fact that the narrator get's away with his crime. This may be due to the fact that the narrator methodically plans his murder scheme from start to finish, unlike the narrator of The Black Cat, and is not overtaken by guilt, like the narrator of The Tell-Tale Heart. Although the narrator does seem to feel a pang of guilt just as he finishes sealing the wall, when he states "My heart grew sick", even though he attributes it to the dampness of the tomb. I also noticed that, unlike many of Poe's other stories (such as The Black Cat and The Masque of the Red Death), this story lacks any supernatural elements. I think this is the reason that so much detail is invested in describing catacombs surrounding the characters. When horrors of the mind and the unexplained paranormal are absent, concrete descriptions of the ghastly physical settings of the story must be used to compensate. Finally, I noticed that Poe relies much more on dialogue to drive this story forward than with others. I think this, too, gives the story more of a "real" feel, bordering less on the brink of the bizarre and unexplained by portraying specific evidence of interactions between two characters, rather than just one (who might be barking mad). I also think that the greater use of dialogue makes the narrator seem less insane, because it gives the impression that he was paying enough attention to remember what other people were saying, not just the things rattling around inside his own mind.

Guilt seems to be a common theme that takes shape one way or another among many of Poe's stories (but perhaps not in The Pit and the Pendulum, as the narrator of that was, for the most part, a victim). Additionally, in most of his stories (all but this one, so far), the main characters get the opposite of what they want. Finally, I noticed that the narrators of Poe's first-person stories tend to be intelligent and reflective, even if they are mad, and seem to greatly value the act of logical reasoning. This even becomes apparant in the murderers who act illogically, as they themselves note the perverseness of their actions.

Reading Blog #4

For this entry, I read Poe's short story, The Masque of the Red Death.

The story is told from an omniscient third person perspective, and tells the tale of a horrific disease called the "Red Death" that sweeps accross a kingdom. The disease is extremely contagious and kills its victims in a bloody, agonizing manner within 30 minutes. The prince of the kingdom, Prince Prospero, invites a thousand nobles from the court to one of his secluded abbeys, where they barricade the structure with a great wall, and seal the wall, assuring that nobody can get in or out. Then, safe from the spread of the Red Death, they commence throwing an elegant and lively masquerade. The abbey consists of seven great rooms, all elaborately decorated, but the westernmost room has a creepy, dark atmosphere due to its color and lighting. That room also houses a great old grandfather clock, which let's off a tone every hour that is so loud, so clear, so pronounced, and so bizarre that every hour, the party (the music, dancing, and everything) stops dead in its tracks for a moment until the tone dies. The party goes on like this until midnight, at which point the clock strikes 12 and has to ring 12 times, during which time interval guests begin to notice for the first time a masked guest who is in a costume resembling a Red Death victim. Prince Prospero is outraged by this and orders the man seized. When everybody is too mystified to take action against the mysterious stranger, Prospero himself charges at the figure with a dagger, at which point the stranger turns around to face him, and moments later the Prince ends up dead on the floor, stabbed by his dagger. This enrages the rest of the guests enough to charge the stranger, but once they begin tearing at him they realize they are attacking an empty costume: merely rags and a mask. Then one by one, all the guests of the party die of the Red Death, and the abbey descends into a lifeless darkness.

This is the first story of Poe's I've read that isn't a first person narrative. Telling the story in an omnicient third person voice gives it more of a fairy tale feel, although it retains Poe's classic darkness. Speaking of which, I think I'm starting to see a reacurring theme of darkness/blackness in The Black Cat, The Pit and the Pendulum, and now this, seeing as the room that is decorated black is quickly and deliberately isolated and highlighted by Poe early on in the story, and also houses the mysterious grandfather clock. One notable feature of this story is the fact that the main characters of focus are all partying and celebrating while in the midst of a horrific epidemic that is brutally slaughtering over half the kingdom's population. I think then that this story may also have to do with Poe's vengeful supernatural justice that seems to show in multiple works of his. Like all of his works I've seen so far, the characters of this story get the opposite of what they want. They were trying to escape from the Red Death, and it destroyed them.

One possible symbol that I noticed in this story is the old grandfather clock. It interrupts the merrymaking of the masqueraders every hour with a moment of unease. For this reason, I think the clock symbolizes guilt, as it brings discomfort to people who are celebrating while everyone around them suffers. Additionally, it made them notice the mysterious guest when it struck twelve, who turns out to be the personification of the Red Death. So, in essence, the clock reminds the guests of the disease that they're avoiding while they celebrate, when scores of people accross the land suffer from it. It is much like guilt in this sense, and like the guilt sufferers of Poe's other stories, it eventually leads to their downfall.

Reading Blog #3

For this reading blog, I read Poe's short story, The Pit and the Pendulum.

This story follows the experience of a prisoner of the Spanish Inquisition who is sentenced to death. It is told from the perspective of the prisoner at a later date, reflecting on his thoughts and actions during the experience. After he is sentenced to death, the narrator faints and wakes up in a pitch black cell. While exploring the cell, he nearly falls into a deep pit in the center of the room. After nearly falling in, the narrator has the bottom of the pit revealed to him through a quick, fleeting flicker of light in the room, during which he views the most horrible death imaginable waiting for him in the pit (the actual contents of the pit are never revealed). After this, he crawls to a corner and goes back to sleep. Upon waking, he finds the room fully lit, himself securely strapped to a plank of wood, and a pendulum with a large razor attached to the end of it swinging back and forth from the ceiling, slowly decending todard his chest. He is barely able to escape the pendulum by getting rats to gnaw on his binds until he can break free. After escaping his second torture as such, the walls of the cell begin to compress, forcing him toward the center of the room, where the pit is. Just as he begins to fall into the pit, he is rescued by General Lasalle of the French Army, who grabs his arm at the last second. The narrator then realizes that the Spanish city of Toledo, where he is, has been overtaken by its enemies.

In this story, Poe seems to focus a lot on the narrator's perception of his surroundings. What he can see and what he can feel are vividly described as he slips into and out of phases of delerium. Uncertainty, fear, and despair are evoked from his surroundings. Uncertainty is linked to darkness, and appears to draw more fear from the narrator than actual witnessable horrors. The one object that seems to emit the most fear from the narrator, however, is the pit. The pendulum, on the other hand, seems to emit more despair from him, although throughout the whole story the narrator exhibits a complete lack of hope. In multiple instances, the author prays for death or contemplates suicide, but is eventually saved in the end because of his natural human survival instinct delaying his death. Unlike the other stories I've read, like The Tell-Tale Heart and The Black Cat, the narrator of The Pit and the Pundulum is condemned at the beginning of this story but ends up free, while the others have started out free but end up condemned. Also unlike the other stories, for this one, Poe seems to draw horror from the nature of the realities surrounding the author (which is why he pays so much attention to perception), instead of creepy, unexplained, supernatural phenomena that surrounded the other narrators. Finally, the narrators of the other stories end up wanting to get away with murder, while this narrator just wants to die quickly. As can be seen, none of them obtain their wishes. I think Poe may be doing this to make a statement about desire and about how reality often gives us the opposite of what we want. Because this narrator had no hope, the unthinkable happened and he was saved, whereas the others' desires to escape persecution are what lead to their downfalls. It also may have to do with guilt and justice, as this story shows no evidence that the narrator has done anything wrong, whereas the other narrators both commit murder. Either way, it may have to do with the fact that Poe lost everything he loved during his life, and the fact that he is cynnical toward fate.

Reading Blog #2

The reading that I did of Poe's work for this blog was his short story, The Black Cat.

The story is written in the first person, and is reflective in nature. The voice of the narrorator is a character who is in a prison cell and faces execution the next day, wishing to explain the series of events that led to his situation. Basically, the story is about a cat he once owned which he was very close to. Due to a drinking addiction he develops, one night he ends up carving the cat's eye out in a fit of rage. Over time, his guilt and frustration with what he had done becomes unbearable, and he hangs the cat by its neck from a tree. After the murder of the animal, his house mysteriously catches fire and burns to the ground. He notices the carved figure of his cat in the ruins, with a noose around its neck. After this, he and his wife begin living in various places, one of which is an inn where he mysteriously finds a cat one night that is almost identicle to his old one, except for a white patch on its chest. He later notices that it is even missing an eye. The cat is instantly fond of him, and feeling horrible guilt about what he had done to his old cat, he desires the cat to take its place. Upon attempting to purchase the cat from the innkeeper, the man claims never to have seen it. Although the wife becomes fond of the new cat, it never gives the narrorator a moment alone. The narrorator becomes maddened and sleep deprived by its incessant company, but feels too guilty about his old cat to do any physical harm to it. At one point he finally reaches his wit's end and goes after the cat with an axe. His wife interferes, attempting to stop him, and he ends up lodging the axe in her head. Upon doing this, his focus shifts, without a moment's notice, to hiding her body. He ends up taking down a portion of the brick wall in the cellar, placing her body in a hollow spot behind the wall (an old and unused fireplace) and meticulously repaving the bricks over the patch, careful to the point that the portion of the wall looks completely unaltered. Once he is done with that, his priority immediately becomes finding and killing the cat, which is nowhere to be seen. In the following days, he is able to sleep soundly again with the absence of the cat, by which he is much relieved. When some police officers arrive at the house to investigate the disappearence of his wife, he gladly lets them search every nook and cranny of the house. After their search is over and they are getting ready to leave, the narrorator, due to nervousness and a feeling of triumph, begins to talk to them about how sturdily the house is built. Upon doing so, in a demostration he hits the very spot on the wall behind which his wife's body was hidden with his cain. Immediately, a horrific scream reverberates through his head, which he describes as both terrified and triumphant, as if it was the scream of a tortured soul in hell harmonizing with the malicious houl of the demon doing the torturing. He staggers back from the wall, completely dazed, and the policemen turn around and begin taking down that portion of the wall. Once the wall is down and his wife's rotting corpse is revealed, the narrorator notices the cat sitting on top of her head, mouth red and eye burning, and realises that he sealed the beast up in the tomb.

I noticed that this story is extremely similar to one of Poe's other stories, The Tell-Tale Heart. In both of them, the narrorators are murderers who face their sentence. In both of them, the victims of the narrorators are people (or animals) that were completely innocent, and did nothing wrong to the narrorator. Additionally, both of the narrorators are well aware of this. In both of the stories, the narrorators took to hiding a body behind a wall or under floor boards, and, in a surge of overconfidence, casually singled out the spot where it was hidden right in front of inspectors. And both of their downfalls seem to come from some form of paranoia or undermining guilt about their victims. Most of The Black Cat  consists of descriptions of the mental struggles the narrorator went through that lead to his actions, much like The Tell-Tale Heart. Almost none of the text is dedicated to dialogue, and the only bits that are are coming from the narrorator himself. Additionally, none of the characters in the story are given a name, except for the original black cat, Pluto. The narrorator doesn't even mention his own name. I think this is to put special emphasis on the central object of the story: the black cat. The lack of attention to dialogue and people's names also seems to demostrate the degree to which the narrorator is unconcerned with the outside world. His descriptions of others' actions are quick, to-the-point, and unspecific. However, his reaction to their actions, how they affect him, and his mental ponderings over them, are all written with much passion and detail. I think this is done to emulate the thought process of a mad man, nonchalantly noticing his surroundings, but really caught up and intertwined within his own world in his own mind. Poe uses the exact same technique in The Tell-Tale Heart. I think these themes of madness and guilt are very powerful and prevalent in both the stories, and I'll have to see, as I read more of Poe's work, whether or not this pattern with them continues. Both the narrorators seemed to be very caught up in an internal struggle, noticing with torment the illogic and cruelness of their actions, but being powerless to stop or avoid them. I can't help but wonder if this theme comes from an internal struggle that Poe may have been experiencing himself.

The following passage from the story I find rather interesting. This is what the narrorator says after stating that he saw a detailed and accurate projection from a wall in his house's ruins that was precisely the shape of his murdered cat, noose and all.
"When I first beheld this apparition - for I could scarcely regard it as less - my wonder and my terror were extreme. But at length reflection came to my aid. The cat, I remembered, had been hung in a garden adjacent to the house. Upon the alarm of fire, this garden had been immediately filled by the crowd - by some one of whom the animal must have been cut from the tree and thrown, through an open window, into my chamber. This had probably been done with the view of arousing me from sleep. The falling of other walls had compressed the victim of my cruelty into the substance of the freshly-spread plaster; the lime of which, with the flames, and the ammonia from the carcass, had then accomplished the portraiture as I saw it."
I find the style of this passage to be rather desperate, and slightly comical because of it. The narrorator is obviously so horrified by his discovery that he instantly tries to cling on to the first logical explanation he can think of to rationalize it, and as a result, his explanation is so far-fetched that it seems, to the reader, ridiculous. In addition to this, the passage, while looked at singularly, seems to take on the classic tone of a detective mystery. I recall reading that Poe actually invented the murder mystery genre, so I think that the cool, investigative, deductive language used by Poe here may in fact be a first-hand look at how Poe's influence gave birth to a genre that is extremely popular in books, stories, and television shows today.

Reading Blog #1 - American Author Proposal (WA#6)

        The author that I am currently considering for the American Author Project is Edgar Allan Poe.  Poe is obviously a big name in literature, and although I had heard him mentioned plenty of times, I never really knew much about him before we started preparing for this project.  I had previously only read one of his short stories, The Tell-Tale Heart, so I did know that his writing tended to be dark and morbid.  I initially selected Poe simply for the purpose of my American author keynote presentation, because he is a very well-known American author and I wanted to learn more about him.  After researching him, I came to the conclusion that he is an author I would genuinely be interested in analyzing for my final project.  In the process of researching Poe and his work, I read his poem The Raven for the first time, which I really liked.  I also read a brief description of his one novel, The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, which sounded interesting to me, and looked like a good book to read for the project.  Also, Poe's style interests me.  I think his disturbing, morose stories will not only be enjoyable to read, but complex enough to write an analytical paper on.
        Edgar Allan Poe is clearly a viable candidate for a project requiring an important, influential American author.  Born in Boston, raised in Virginia, and living in the United States for the vast majority of his life, Poe was undebatably American.  His major work involved his fictional short stories, along with his poetry, literary essays, and one novel, making him primarily a prose writer.  His body of work will provide me with enough material to cover in my project, as he has written a novel, along with plenty of stories and poems.  Finally, Poe is a highly important figure in the world of literature, as he was a participant in the Romantic Movement in the U.S., invented the classic murder mystery story design, and is said to have contributed to the early science-fiction genre during his time.  His work has influenced literature all over the world and he is clearly an acceptable choice for this project.
        As I mentioned earlier, I believe that Poe's work will provide me with interesting reading material that I can enjoy, as well as shadowy symbolism that I can contemplate and analyze.  I also believe that his tragic, unusual life, coupled with his dark, twisted writing style make him an excellent choice for an author to study.  I will undoubtedly be able to find connections between his life experiences and his work, as well as connections between his different pieces of work.
        So far, my basic reading plan for covering Poe's own literary achievements is as follows.  I'll definitely want to read The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym, as it is the only novel available from him.  I'll also want to read at least twelve of his short stories, of which I'll probably include some of his better known works, such as Berenice, The Black Cat, The Cask of Amontillado, The Fall of the House of Usher, The Gold-Bug, Hop-Frog, Ligeia, The Man of the Crowd, The Masque of the Red Death, The Murders in the Rue Morgue, The Pit and the Pendulum, The Purloined Letter, and The Tell-Tale Heart.  I don't have any particular order in which to read these planned, although I might possibly read his stories in an order based on chronology, so I can see how and if his writing style noticeably changed over time.  To get a biographical sense of the author, I have a few essays about him to read in mind, including Life of Poe by James Russell Lowell, Death of Edgar A. Poe by N.P. Willis, and Edgar Allan Poe: An Appreciation.  I don't know exactly which two articles of literary criticism of Poe I'll read yet, but I'll be able to find something easily on the internet.  Besides, I'll save that portion of reading for last.  I may also want to consider reading separately some essays of literary criticism written by Poe himself, as well as some of his poetry, just to view his literary voice from some different angles.  Anyway, I look forward to studying this author all of next semester and anticipate on finding some interesting material in the world of Edgar Allan Poe.