Create a thesis statement which answers the topic question "What life influences can one see in Poe’s literature?".

Thanks.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2003

Answers

I thought that WAS the thesis statement and we've seen it a million times. Poe's relationship with woemn, with authority figues, with his peers starting from being a foster home orphan, exposure to varied education and life possiibilities. His contemporaries- the English Romantic "stars" who just preceded Poe(Coleridge, Shelley, Byron, Moore, modern science, philosophy)and the art genres of the day are a fact of life that Poe identified with and made his own in the young world of Amemrican letters. Personal tragedies, poverty, drinking probably hampered his his work as much as coloring some of his thematic inspiration.

Avoid the simpleminded equivalency(life-art) trap as if no artist with a life ever related to it before. In fact, Poe kept art separate from real life, especially not honest biography while on a deeper level removing the artistic and emotional core from flowery artifice. He could mine a deep passion almost dispassionately to fashion a work of beauty and even apply and address such poems to several ladies at the same time in his real life.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2003