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Edgar Allan Poe - TV Tropes

  • ️Wed Mar 28 2012

Edgar Allan Poe (Creator)

The world's most famous daguerreotype.

"Where was the detective story until Poe breathed the breath of life into it?"

— Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, speech at the Authors' Club in London (March 1, 1909)

Edgar Allan Poe (born Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, a critical influence on the modern horror story and the inventor of the modern detective story, as well as an early influence on the science fiction genre.

Poe believed that all stories should be short enough to be read in one sitting. He also believed that the perfect subject for poetry is the death of a beautiful young woman, because it marries the "most poetical subject"— Beauty— with the "most poetical emotion"— Melancholy. The immediate catalyst towards this sentiment will have been the death of Poe's wife and 14 year younger cousin, Virginia Eliza Poe, who contracted tuberculosis six years into their marriage and succumbed to the disease five years thereafter. This wasn't the only death of a woman that marked Poe's life, however, as Poe also lost his mother and his adoptive mother at a young age. After the death of his parents, he was taken in by a foster family and lived some of his childhood abroad, spending a couple of years in a boarding school in England before returning to America at the age of 11. After squandering his college tuition money gambling, he enlisted in the US Army at the age of 18. He published his first work, Tamerlane and Other Poems, while serving as an artilleryman at Fort Independence, Boston, Massachusetts. After securing an early discharge, he was accepted to the Military Academy at West Point, but gave up on it after a falling-out with his adoptive father, though he was popular enough that his fellow cadets chipped in enough money to help him publish another book of his poetry. Moving to New York, he became a full-time writer, and struggled financially for the rest of his short life until his death in Baltimore, Maryland at age 40.

Poe's life was plagued by rifts with his adoptive father, deaths of numerous loved ones, and alcoholism. Typical. He was also a noted Caustic Critic, which earned him a few enemies and tarnished his reputation, despite the critical acclaim that he received.

After Poe's death his literary executor (who was also one of his greatest enemies in the literary world) sought to destroy Poe's reputation with lies and forgeries. The Life and Letters of Edgar Allan Poe by James Albert Harrison actually provides evidence from eyewitness accounts that suggest he wasn't quite an alcoholic at all. That said, even without it, he still had way more than enough "inspiration" for his work.

He also created the first notable introverted Great Detective character of C. Auguste Dupin who, operating independently of the police force, solved crimes via his great observation and reasoning skills while assisted by his Heterosexual Life Partner and roommate, who also narrates the stories. Sound familiar?

Along with his detective fiction and poetry, Poe is celebrated for his wonderfully gothic and macabre horror fiction. These stories would go on to influence decades of authors who would expand and refine his themes and methods, such as Ambrose Bierce, H. P. Lovecraft, and Edogawa Ranpo. Poe also wrote quite a lot of humor (often dark humor, admittedly), which may come as a surprise to those who know his works only from assigned readings in high school.

Works by Edgar Allan Poe with their own trope pages include:

Edgar Allan Poe's other works provide examples of:

  • After the End: "The Conversation of Eiros and Charmion"
  • Answering Echo: In "Never Bet the Devil Your Head".

    "What right," said I, "had the old gentleman to make any other gentleman jump? The little old dot-and-carry-one! who is he? If he asks me to jump, I won't do it, that's flat, and I don't care who the devil he is." The bridge, as I say, was arched and covered in, in a very ridiculous manner, and there was a most uncomfortable echo about it at all times-an echo which I never before so particularly observed as when I uttered the four last words of my remark.

  • Apocalyptic Log: "M.S. Found In A Bottle" features a message in a bottle.
  • Asshole Victim: While Poe has a tendency to leave the misdeeds of the victims in his stories vague or hints that the perpetrator only imagines them, there are a few stories in which the victim has it coming. Such stories include "The Black Cat", "Hop-Frog", and "The Masque of the Red Death".
  • Author Appeal: Dead women, lost loves, and illness, considering his life events.
  • Author Tract: "The Imp of the Perverse".
  • Author Vocabulary Calendar: In particular, the words "arabesque" and "hideous".
  • Based on a Great Big Lie: "The Balloon-Hoax": a fictional short story written by Poe that was originally released as being a newspaper article of an actual event. He then showed up at the place where the hot-air balloon was supposed to arrive and explained to everyone that he'd just fooled them all with his writing. It was a publicity stunt and it worked.
  • Bedlam House: "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether," Poe's personal favorite of his stories.
  • Breather Episode: In between the heavy stories, Poe published comedies such as "The Angel of the Odd" and "Thingum Bob, Esq".
  • Buried Alive: In the early 19th Century, it was not unlikely for a coma to be misdiagnosed as death, so being buried alive was a potent and widespread fear. Works of Poe that tickle this fear include "Berenice", "The Black Cat", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "The Fall of the House of Usher". "The Premature Burial" in particular explores several nonfictional cases and has a protagonist terrified that it will happen to him. It doesn't, but a frightening experience that simulates it helps him overcome his paranoia.
  • "Burly Detective" Syndrome: In "Bon-Bon" Pierre Bon-Bon, a French restaurant owner-turned-metaphysical philosopher, has a conversation with the Devil. When he is not called by name, Bon-Bon is variously referred to as "our hero", "the metaphysician", "the philosopher" and "the restaurateur"; the Devil (when he is not called thusly) is alternately spoken of as "his Majesty", "the visitor", and "the gentleman" (there are only two characters in the story). The entire story is written in a markedly verbose and florid style, apparently in ironical intent.
  • The Cake Is a Lie: In the poem "Eldorado", a knight spends his whole life searching for the mystical golden city, only to meet Death when he's an old man, who tells him that Eldorado is located in the land of the dead; so he must die to reach it, and by that point he won't be able to reap any rewards.
  • Cooking the Live Meal: In "Bon-Bon", a short story about a French chef's conversation with the Devil, the Devil reminisces about all the famous sinners whose souls he claims to have eaten in Hell, and especially fondly recalls "Quinty" Horace, who entertained him by singing his famous carmen saeculare just while the Devil "toasted him, in pure good humour on a fork."
  • Curb-Stomp Battle: Averted in most of his stories but a common feature of his book reviews. Poe was an acute critic who passed the essential test of perceiving who of his own contemporaries were talented: he was very positive about Nathaniel Hawthorne and Charles Dickens and cautiously approving about Longfellow, but less gifted writers he gleefully beat into a fine paste. Choice examples are his reviews of Theodore S. Fay's Norman Leslie, George Jones's Ancient America, and the most famous of all, the so-called Drake-Halleck Review, a brutal takedown of Joseph Rodman Drake's The Culprit Fay and other Poems and Fitz Greene Halleck's Alnwick Castle, with other Poems.
  • Dead Man's Chest: In "The Oblong Box", a young widower on a sea-journey keeps the embalmed corpse of his wife in a wooden luggage box to transport the body to his wife's hometown.
  • Deadpan Snarker: His book reviews are made of this, especially the negative ones. In an otherwise positive review of Rufus W. Griswold's The Poets and Poetry of America, there's this relatively mild example:

    The volume opens with a preface, which with some little supererogation, is addressed "To the Reader"; inducing very naturally the query, whether the whole book is not addressed to the same individual.

  • Delicate and Sickly: Poe had a thing for beautiful women coming to slow and graceful end due to sickness. Berenice from Berenice, Lenore from "Lenore", Eleonora from "Eleonora" are all examples.
  • Depth Deception: "The Sphinx". An enormous, distant, terrifying creature turns out to be much closer to home than expected.
  • Drugs Are Bad: Alcohol is used to set up misdeeds in "The Black Cat", "The Cask of Amontillado", and "Hop-Frog." And the eponymous "Angel of the Odd" is a divine entity made of bottles and kegs who ruins the narrator's life through a series of Contrived Coincidences.
  • Eyeless Face: The Devil in "Bon-Bon" (1835), when first appearing to the eponymous protagonist, wears a pair of green sunglasses that completely hide his eyes. In the course of the ensuing philosophical conversation, he removes the glasses and thereby reveals that he has neither eyes nor eyesockets. He helpfully explains that he has a different kind of vision that not only allows him to perceive his physical surroundings like any human, but also to "see" the thoughts and minds of living beings. Moreover, in the Devil's workplace physical eyes would only be an "incumbrance, liable at any time to be put out by a roasting-iron or a pitchfork."
  • Funetik Aksent: The eponymous character of "Angel of the Odd" has his dialogue typed out as it were in a German accent. Or French. Maybe Spanish?
  • Future Imperfect: Essentially half of "Mellonta Tauta" (set in 2848) is this trope, the other half being TakeThats to 19th century philosophical and social trends.

    Pundita: It appears that long, long ago, in the night of Time, there lived a Turkish philosopher (or Hindoo possibly) called Aries Tottle.

  • The Gadfly: Despite being generally known for his horror stories, these only constitute the third part of his writing as he felt more inclination to comedy. Such was his love for mischief he wrote an essay on how diddling could be considered as one of the exact sciences. He was also fond of hoaxes, some of the most popular ones being the "The Balloon-Hoax", which later served as inspiration for Jules Verne, and The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar, as it was published without the claim of being fictional. And he didn't limit his mischief to his writing but also loved to play pranks, such as one time when he was still a cadet at West Point. In the middle of the night, he and a friend (Gibson) drew straws to see who'd go to replenish their liquor; the friend lost and went for some more. The owner of the tavern gave Gibson a full bottle of brandy and a headless gander which left him covered in blood. After seeing this, his friend Poe concocted a prank: Poe went back to his room and pretended to be studying, before Gibson (pretending to be drunk) made his entrance. After Poe demanded to learn what happened, Gibson took out a bloody knife and shouted that he murdered Old K—. After Poe called it out a nonsense, Gibson was obliged to show his "proof". In the dim litted room Gibson showed "the head" of the old man before jumping out of the window with the gandler still in hand. Needless to say, Poe's roomate ended up sitting in a corner "with a face blank full of horror".
  • Gas Chamber: The narrator of "The Imp of the Perverse" manages this with a "poisoned candle".
  • Her Codename Was Mary Sue: Signora Psyche Zenobia in "How to Write a Blackwood Article" writes a story about a lovely and refined lady named... Signora Psyche Zenobia.
  • Horror Comedy: While much of Poe's work is straight horror, he was also a master of blending horror with humor. Both his serious stories and his more comical ones tend to be written in the same melodramatic tone, with only certain details and The Reveal at the end determining whether the overall effect is either spine-chilling or morbidly amusing. Particularly noteworthy examples include "The Sphinx" (where the narrator sees a giant monster on a distant hillside that turns out to be a case of Depth Deception involving a moth climbing a spider web) and "The Premature Burial" (which satirizes the fear of being Buried Alive).
  • "How I Wrote This Article" Article: He wrote How to Write a Blackwood Article with this conceit. Blackwood's Magazine was a Scottish magazine known for their horror stories, and Poe's piece provides a humorous demonstration of how the narrator learned from Blackwood's editor on how to write the perfect Blackwood horror tale. The advice is either painfully obvious (record the sensations causing the terror), obnoxiously pretentious (use the occasional Greek word and reference philosophy to seem more substantial), or downright dangerous (throw yourself into an oven to learn what being stuck in an oven feels like). The companion piece to it, A Predicament, shows the author writing out the suggested story, which involves an implausible situation of the narrator getting their head stuck in a clock tower and getting their head sliced off by the descending minute hand of the clock (yet somehow staying alive after their decapitation).
  • How We Got Here: Quite frequent, always overlapping with Foregone Conclusion.
  • Inhuman Eye Concealers: In the short storty "Bon-Bon" the Devil, when visiting a French restaurateur, wears a "pair of green spectacles, with side glasses", seemingly to "protect his eyes from the influence of the light". In the course of their conversation, the Devil takes off his glasses, revealing to his astonished host that he has no eyes at all.
  • Inspired by…: His unfinished play Politian was a fictionalization of a famous duel case of the time.
  • It Was a Dark and Stormy Night: Poe uses the phrase in "The Bargain Lost", a 1832 short story (set in Venice) about a wannabe philosopher meeting the Devil. Poe later rewrote this tale into "Bon-Bon" (1835), in which the phrase does no longer appear verbatim, but has been replaced by an equally flowery paraphrase. In either case this seems to be satire, as throughout either "The Bargain Lost" or "Bon-Bon" Poe affects an overly ornate, flowery and long-winded style that signals that the story is not to be taken seriously.
  • It Will Never Catch On: "The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade" is written as an epilogue to the Arabian Nights, in which Scheherazade makes the mistake of putting modern (for Poe's time) inventions in one of her stories, causing the disbelieving sultan to have her executed.
    • Also invoked in Real Life by "Eureka" which postulates absurd theories the modern reader will recognize as the Bohr model, the Big Bang, and general relativity... in 1848.
  • Karma Houdini: Subverted in "The Imp of the Perverse": the narrator ran absolutely no risk of being exposed as a murderer unless he himself confessed. And once he realised that, he was doomed.
  • Kissing Cousins: In "Eleonora", Pyrros and Eleonora are cousins and live for fifteen years together with Eleonora's mother when they fall in love. Eleonora is dying from an illness and makes Pyrros vow never to find love with another. He makes the vow, yet breaks it after Eleonora's death. Her spirit appears to him later to give him her blessing after all.
  • Locked into Strangeness/Disease Bleach: The old man in "A Descent Into the Maelstrom" isn't nearly as old as he seems...
  • Love at First Sight: Parodied and gleefully deconstructed in "The Spectacles", in which a short-sighted young man falls in love with a beautiful young woman at the theater, and ends up marrying her, only to find out she is actually his own great-great-grandmother from France who wanted to teach him a lesson for not wearing glasses and hitting on unknown women at the theater. The wedding was a fake wedding, of course.
  • Love Hurts: If the protagonist, ever a man, loves a woman, she's on death row. This was probably inspired by the fact that basically every woman he ever loved in any way (his mother, foster mother, girlfriends, and his wife) all died young, mostly from tuberculosis.
  • Lovecraft Country: Helped inspire Lovecraft.
  • Luke, I Am Your Father: Played for laughs in the comedy story (yes, really) "The Spectacles," where the extremely near-sighted narrator falls in love with a beautiful woman who turns out to be his great-great-grandmother.
  • Macabre Moth Motif: In The Sphinx.
  • Malaproper: "How to Write a Blackwood Article" is about Signora Psyche Zenobia asking Mr. Blackwood for advice about what she should put into the article she wants to write for his magazine, and he gives her lots of allusions from classical and European literature to sprinkle into her prose (such as this quote from Friedrich Schiller: "Und sterb'ich doch, so sterb'ich denn / Durch sie — durch sie!" ["And if I died, at least I died for thee — for thee!"]) "A Predicament" is the article she actually writes, and she ended up mangling all the quotes. ("Unt stubby duk, so stubby dun / Duk she! duk she!") Some collections of Poe's stories publish "A Predicament" without including "How to Write a Blackwood Article", which leaves the fomer story making absolutely no sense.
  • Maybe Magic, Maybe Mundane: Recurring in various of his stories, like "Ligeia" or "The Black Cat", which the weird things happening can either be from a supernatural source or just the protagonist becoming mad.
  • Meaningful Name: Allamistakeo in "Some Words With a Mummy."
  • Mood Dissonance: Lampshaded and justified in "Thou Art the Man": the narrator is the one who set up the apparent "miracle," and knows what really happened.
  • Mummies at the Dinner Table: "Annabel Lee", though it takes a while to realize it.
  • Mummy: "Some Words With a Mummy", appropriately enough. This is an unusual case where the mummy isn't undead; he went into a cataleptic state and didn't come out for thousands of years. Since he was of a particular group known as the Scarabeus, he was fortunate enough not to get his internal organs removed during embalming.
  • No Name Given: This is a frequent occurrence in Poe's works. It's generally an omission as a result of first-person narration, with the exception of the protagonist of "William Wilson," who refuses to give his name because he's piled too much infamy upon it.
  • Noodle Incident: Readers rarely get to learn why the narrator is pursuing a cold and cruel revenge against his nemesis/victim. There was some slight made back well before the story, but it's never mentioned and most of the time the victim doesn't even remember what it was.
  • The Noun and the Noun: Most of the titles
  • Oddball in the Series: Some collections of Poe's short stories will include several essays he wrote in the fiction section. Some will either exclude them or give them their own section. In comparison to most of Poe's comical and horror stories and sketches some of these stand out as being different from the rest of the works. Some clearly were written in-character which would make fitting to put them in the fiction section but others are instead rather straight forward producing this feeling to the reader.
  • One-Book Author: He wrote a lot of poems and short stories, and even more essays, articles and book reviews, but The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket was his only novel.
  • Psychological Horror: A lot of the horror stories have no gore at all, and when there is some it's dealt with quickly.
  • Riddle for the Ages: Poe's own death, fittingly enough.
  • Sanity Slippage: Many a Poe protagonist suffers this plight.
  • Scenery Porn: "The Domain of Arnheim" is arguably Scenery Porn Without Plot.
    • "The Island of the Fay" to a lesser extent.
  • Self-Parody: In "The Sphinx", the narrator is terrified and thrown into full-blown Poe melodramatics by what appears to be a terrifying apparition of death. It turns out to be just a harmless moth magnified by the window he was sitting next to.
    • "Eureka" takes Dupin's method of reasoning to absurd conclusions. Which were mostly right.
    • "A Predicament" takes a very Poe-esque horror set-up (a woman explores a church tower, sticks her head out through an opening in the clock face, and finds that her head gets stuck as the minute hand comes around and starts slicing through her neck) and tells it with massive amounts of Stylistic Suck and the victim narrating her own death.
  • Serial Prostheses: "The Man Who Was Used Up"
  • Southern Gothic Satan: In the satirical short story "Never Bet the Devil Your Head" an elderly gentleman in a well-tailored suit takes the narrator's friend up on the titular rhetorical wager.
  • Spoof Aesop: "Never Bet the Devil Your Head", one of his less serious stories.
  • Stable Time Loop: "A Tale of the Ragged Mountains".
  • Springtime for Hitler: A certain Rufus Wilmot Griswold was a thorn in the side of Poe. After Poe's death, Griswold tried hard to ruin Poe's reputation. Most famously, he wrote a subversive biography where Poe was depicted as arrogant, evil, constantly drunk or high and very mentally unstable. Unfortunately for Griswold, this didn't deter people from enjoying Poe, instead spawned interest in the author and made him a legend surrounded by myths. Who wouldn't want to read a story written by a man who was described as being "evil"?note 
    • While Poe's reputation in America suffered thanks to Griswold, Poe's reputation and influence in France kept growing, and eventually worked its way back to the United States where Poe's name was rehabilitated.
  • Stealth Parody: "How to Write a Blackwood Article," in which "sensation stories" (i.e., stories that chronicle the narrator's descent into madness and/or death) are dissected and mercilessly mocked, hints that some of Poe's best-known psychological horror stories like "The Pit and the Pendulum" and "The Tell-Tale Heart" might have been sly jabs at the genre.
  • Take That, Audience!/Self-Deprecation: "The Premature Burial." In the end, having mistakenly thought himself buried alive and found that he wasn't, the narrator overcomes his fears. One of the changes is that he "read no bugaboo tales—such as this." (Italics Poe's.)
  • Tar and Feathers: "The System of Doctor Tarr and Professor Fether"
  • Tempting Fate:
    • Whatever you do, please don't doubt odd coincidences, the Angel of the Odd's way to convince you must be read to be believed.
    • There's also the Imp of the Perverse, which is that little whispering voice in your head that tries to tempt you into doing something stupid precisely because you know it's stupid, but you keep imagining what it would be like to do it anyway...
  • Through the Eyes of Madness: Too many times to count. Interestingly, these protagonists are almost always Talkative Loons who're clearly nuts, with the exception of the one in "Ligeia", who's merely on drugs and may have seen clearly.
  • Title Drop: A few times, most dramatically in "The Man Who Was Used Up" and "The Man of the Crowd".
  • Too Good for This Sinful Earth: Quite a few of Poe's stories have a recurring theme of young, beautiful, strong and intelligent women falling terminally ill, suffering a slow death and ultimately leaving their partners in deep depression. Many point to Poe's cousin, Virginia Eliza Clemm, whom he married when he was 27 and she was 13 and, according to sources, had a Like Brother and Sister relationship with, up until her death from tuberculosis at age 24, for being the inspiration for those.
  • Undead Author: Parodied in "A Predicament", where Signora Psyche Zenobia narrates a story that ends with her having her neck sliced off by the minute hand of a church clock.