Edgar Allan Poe and Dark Romanticism

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote ‘The world is nothing, the man is all; in yourself is the law of all nature’(Norton 548). Emersonian individualism has had a burning influence on American society, where the individual mind is perceived as something divine, where man stood alone, independent and all-knowing. A contemporary author, Edgar Allan Poe, had a different take on this. What if you look inside and you cannot find anything? What if instead, you find something abhorrent and repulsive? Worse yet, what if you look inside and find that you are mad? Poe’s view on the individual was far from the romanticized man you find in Emerson’s “The American Scholar”. Poe, in company with Hawthorne and Melville, set in motion a new literary sub-culture as a response to the Romantic wave that had reached Americas shores. The so called Dark Romanticism ‘held less optimistic view of nature, mankind and divinity’(Lawrence 43). In this essay, we will look at Poe’s short story The Black Cat, and see how it can be an example of Dark Romanticism. Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) led a short, but turbulent life. During his forty years he experienced the loss and abandonment of both his parents, the loss of his brother, being kicked out and betrayed by his foster parents and the death of his wife. In addition to this, he suffered from poverty, alcoholism and a feeling of alienation from the world. Still, no matter how little money it gave him, he never gave up on his writing. Poe believed prose and poetry to be a form of art and one of the most effective ways to express literature. It should also only appeal to the sense of beauty. He wished to make an impression on his readers, to shake them a little, and ‘sought ways to get its [his audience] attention for stories that, aside from their shock value, regularly addressed compelling philosophical, cultural and psychological issues’ (Norton 687). The poet played with the human mind and the human consciousness. This is why we often find