Nice meet to you, Members of Writing Club!
As an East Asian male, I am writing an article for the writing club for the first time today.
Since I am not familiar with English, I am not sure if I can write works that meet the writing club's requirements!😅
I hope you understand first that I have the level of English conversation skills of an American elementary school student!
I hope you understand my lack of English writing skills!
I have a lot of interest in American history, culture, and literature.
So, I had a lot of conversations with Americans at Hive.
The Americans patiently read my unfamiliar English sentences and gave me a lot of help and criticism.
So, I wanted to write about the American literature I studied.
Edgar Allan Poe (/poʊ/; né Edgar Poe; January 19, 1809 – October 7, 1849) was an American writer, poet, editor, and literary critic who is best known for his poetry and short stories, particularly his tales of mystery and the macabre. He is widely regarded as a central figure of Romanticism in the United States, and of American literature. He was one of the country's earliest practitioners of the short story, and is considered the inventor of the detective fiction genre, as well as a significant contributor to the emerging genre of science fiction.[1] He is the first well-known American writer to earn a living through writing alone, resulting in a financially difficult life and career.[2]
Poe was born in Boston, the second child of actors David and Elizabeth "Eliza" Poe.[3] His father abandoned the family in 1810, and when his mother died the following year, Poe was taken in by John and Frances Allan of Richmond, Virginia. They never formally adopted him, but he was with them well into young adulthood. He attended the University of Virginia but left after a year due to lack of money. He quarreled with John Allan over the funds for his education, and his gambling debts. In 1827, having enlisted in the United States Army under an assumed name, he published his first collection, Tamerlane and Other Poems, credited only to "a Bostonian". Poe and Allan reached a temporary rapprochement after the death of Allan's wife in 1829. Poe later failed as an officer cadet at West Point, declared a firm wish to be a poet and writer, and parted ways with Allan.
Poe switched his focus to prose, and spent the next several years working for literary journals and periodicals, becoming known for his own style of literary criticism. His work forced him to move among several cities, including Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York City. In 1836, he married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clemm, but she died of tuberculosis in 1847. In January 1845, he published his poem "The Raven" to instant success. He planned for years to produce his own journal The Penn (later renamed The Stylus), but before it could be produced, he died in Baltimore on October 7, 1849, aged 40, under mysterious circumstances. The cause of his death remains unknown, and has been variously attributed to many causes including disease, alcoholism, substance abuse, and suicide.[4]
Poe and his works influenced literature around the world, as well as specialized fields such as cosmology and cryptography. He and his work appear throughout popular culture in literature, music, films, and television. A number of his homes are dedicated museums. The Mystery Writers of America present an annual Edgar Award for distinguished work in the mystery genre.
I call Edgar Allan Poe a cursed genius!
I felt he was the father of American literature because he made it equal to European literature!
Perhaps my esteemed senior, Steve, is concerned that I am misunderstanding American history and literature!
By the way, I will continue to write my thoughts and feelings!
I believe that Edgar Allan Poe gave a very explicit literary expression of the medieval European sensibility hidden at the bottom of American society!
He was orphaned in childhood and adopted by a wealthy tobacco merchant.
His life was very tragic from the beginning.
His adoptive father was not a great personality and was very hard on Poe.
So, Poe would have developed a gloomy and solitary disposition!
I felt that his literary works were gloomy, tragic, fearful and mysterious because of his unhappy life!
I felt that Poe revealed through the black cat a behavior that Americans want to hide!
I believe that Poe predicted the future American Civil War!
I guessed that Americans probably remember the Civil War as the most tragic event in American history!
"The Black Cat" is a short story by American writer Edgar Allan Poe. It was first published in the August 19, 1843, edition of The Saturday Evening Post. In the story, an unnamed narrator has a strong affection for pets until he perversely turns to abusing them. His favorite, a pet black cat, bites him one night and the narrator punishes it by cutting its eye out and then hanging it from a tree. The home burns down but one remaining wall shows a burned outline of a cat hanging from a noose. He soon finds another black cat, similar to the first except for a white mark on its chest, but he soon develops a hatred for it as well. He attempts to kill the cat with an axe but his wife stops him; instead, the narrator murders his wife. He conceals the body behind a brick wall in his basement. The police soon come and, after the narrator's tapping on the wall is met with a shrieking sound, they find not only the wife's corpse but also the black cat that had been accidentally walled in with the body and alerted them with its cry.
The story is a study of the psychology of guilt, often paired in analysis with Poe's "The Tell-Tale Heart".[2] In both, a murderer carefully conceals his crime and believes himself unassailable, but eventually breaks down and reveals himself, impelled by a nagging reminder of his guilt. "The Black Cat", which also features questions of sanity versus insanity, is Poe's strongest warning against the dangers of alcoholism.
In particular, "The Black Cat", a masterpiece that brilliantly portrayed his mystery and horror creativity, is remembered as a cult masterpiece in Japan and Korea to this day!
Perhaps devout Christians like Steve and Joseph reject the superstition of black cats!
I don't believe in the superstition that black cats are witches, but Poe's work is so charming!
I felt that the black cat represented the black shadow that Americans want to hide!
Americans in Poe's day, I felt, had a far more puritanical fanaticism than they do today!
The fact that Poe wrote such an unchristian work in such a puritanical American society in the early 19th century shocked me greatly!
Perhaps Poe was a Unitarian and Liberal like ?
In reading Poe's Black Cat, I discovered the superstitious fears and mysteries that lie in the unconscious of all humans!
It was a medieval European sensibility Americans wanted to hide!
The owner of the black cat murdered his wife with an ax and hid her body in a wall.
He copied what medieval European monks did to cover up their murders.
He imitated the killings of Roman Catholics in medieval Europe.
I studied the wars fought by Americans after they first arrived in North America!
I felt that my respected seniors, and
, might be offended by my behavior!
I recognize that wars are always happening events in human history!
So, let me first tell them that I have no special personal feelings about the wars Americans have waged!
I felt that the murder represented by the black cat and the actions taken to cover it up were Americans imitating medieval Europeans!
Poe's literary description of the Americans imitating the Roman Catholics and committing murderous acts even though they came to the New World to escape the religious persecution of the Roman Catholic and Anglican Churches.
The American Civil War (April 12th, 1861 – May 26th, 1865; also known by other names) was a civil war in the United States. It was fought between the Union[f] ("the North") and the Confederacy ("the South"), the latter formed by states that had seceded. The central cause of the war was the dispute over whether slavery would be permitted to expand into the western territories, leading to more slave states, or be prevented from doing so, which was widely believed would place slavery on a course of ultimate extinction.
Decades of political controversy over slavery were brought to a head by the victory in the 1860 U.S. presidential election of Abraham Lincoln, who opposed slavery's expansion into the western territories. An initial seven southern slave states responded to Lincoln's victory by seceding from the United States and, in February 1861, forming the Confederacy. The Confederacy seized U.S. forts and other federal assets within their borders. Led by Confederate President Jefferson Davis, the Confederacy asserted control over about a third of the U.S. population in eleven of the 34 U.S. states that then existed. Four years of intense combat, mostly in the South, ensued.
During 1861–1862 in the war's Western Theater, the Union made significant permanent gains—though in the war's Eastern Theater the conflict was inconclusive. The abolition of slavery became a war goal on January 1st, 1863, when Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, which declared all slaves in states in rebellion to be free, applying to more than 3.5 million of the 4 million enslaved people in the country. To the west, the Union destroyed the Confederate's river navy by the summer of 1862, then much of its western armies, and seized New Orleans. The successful 1863 Union siege of Vicksburg split the Confederacy in two at the Mississippi River. In 1863, Confederate General Robert E. Lee's incursion north ended at the Battle of Gettysburg. Western successes led to General Ulysses S. Grant's command of all Union armies in 1864. Inflicting an ever-tightening naval blockade of Confederate ports, the Union marshaled resources and manpower to attack the Confederacy from all directions. This led to the fall of Atlanta in 1864 to Union General William Tecumseh Sherman, followed by his March to the Sea. The last significant battles raged around the ten-month Siege of Petersburg, gateway to the Confederate capital of Richmond. The Confederates abandoned Richmond, and on April 9, 1865, Lee surrendered to Grant following the Battle of Appomattox Court House, setting in motion the end of the war.
A wave of Confederate surrenders followed. On April 14th, just five days after Lee's surrender, Lincoln was assassinated. As a practical matter, the war ended with the May 26th surrender of the Department of the Trans-Mississippi but the conclusion of the American Civil War lacks a clear and precise historical end date. Confederate ground forces continued surrendering past the May 26th surrender date until June 23th. By the end of the war, much of the South's infrastructure was destroyed, especially its railroads. The Confederacy collapsed, slavery was abolished, and four million enslaved black people were freed. The war-torn nation then entered the Reconstruction era in an attempt to rebuild the country, bring the former Confederate states back into the United States, and grant civil rights to freed slaves.
The Civil War is one of the most extensively studied and written about episodes in U.S. history. It remains the subject of cultural and historiographical debate. Of particular interest is the persisting myth of the Lost Cause of the Confederacy. The American Civil War was among the first wars to use industrial warfare. Railroads, the telegraph, steamships, the ironclad warship, and mass-produced weapons were all widely used during the war. In total, the war left between 620,000 and 750,000 soldiers dead, along with an undetermined number of civilian casualties, making the Civil War the deadliest military conflict in American history.[g] The technology and brutality of the Civil War foreshadowed the coming World Wars.
Reading Poe's works, I was struck by how much pre-Civil War American society resembled the Catholic world of medieval Europe!
I thought that the reason Poe's works were ignored and forgotten in 19th-century America was that he revealed a fact that Americans wanted to hide!
As I read Poe's works, I was amazed at his genius!
I concluded that he revealed in his works the truth Americans most want to forget!
Perhaps Americans disliked his tragic, melancholic, and unchristian literature!
So, I called him the cursed great genius!