Edgar Allen Poe

The Cask of Amontillado and The Black Cat, by Edgar Allan Poe, have similar plot lines because both the main characters burry their victims in the wall. The Black Cat made me cringe consistently as I was reading it. Who the hell kills animals because they have an anger and alcoholic problem? That’s messed up for Poe to write about! Yet, intriguing because it’s taboo. I’ve never known any author I’ve read, besides Poe, kill a cat and their wife, and feel no guilt about it. I do like how Poe has a dark sense of humor. Don’t like a person? Burry them in the wall! In addition, in his poem The Haunted Palace there is detailed imagery about this beautiful palace representing a human head. I enjoyed reading this poem because in the beginning everything seems joyful and cheery; however, in the last two stanzas the tone of the poem changes to ominous and gloomy. This kept me interested throughout the poem because I enjoy the dark attitude of Poe. A unit on Poe would be fun to use in my classroom. He has so much work in his name that there is more than enough to create a unit. The only issue I would see with this type of unit would be the content. I didn’t learn barely anything about Poe in high school, but if I were to guess why, it would be because of the inappropriate content of Poe. The narrator gouging his cats eye out and then killing his wife with an axe probably isn’t something that the school would like their students to be reading. However, it doesn’t mean that there aren’t other works of Poe that the students can’t analyze. In my Intro to Fiction class, we read Fall of the House of Usher. This is a work of Poe’s that really confused me. I had to look up the analysis of it because I was confused what was going on. I haven’t read Poe since then until recently in this class, and now I don’t hate Poe as much as I used to. His writing can be confusing sometimes, but I just need to learn to go slow and make sure to read every word carefully.