Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) had the strongest impact on the American cultural world. How powerfully the profound originality of American culture broke through can be seen in his work as a document of the spiritual history of the nineteenth century.
This American poet and writer, his world of ideas, and even his appearance had a great impact not only on American culture of the mid-nineteenth century. With great difficulty, overcoming conservatism and hostility, Poe invaded world literature. He might not have been able to break through the critics’ intolerant appraisals had it not been for the striking musical sound of his works, which contain profound philosophical meanings. Strongly influenced in his youth by Byron, Coleridge, and Hoffmann, E. Poe wrote a vivid page in the era of mature American Romanticism. It was a period of “nativism”-the romantic appropriation of American reality. American Romanticism, to a greater extent than European Romanticism, reveals a deep connection with the philosophical and aesthetic principles of the Enlightenment. The beginning of the mature Romanticism is conventionally associated with the economic crisis that shook the foundations of American society in 1837. The activities of a number of democratic literary journals, in particular, the Democratic Review O. Sullivan, created an atmosphere of creative freedom, which played a significant role in the evolution of the romantic consciousness of American artists.
In the course of the birth of national art criticism as part of the literary process, the work of E. Poe was a significant factor. With a keen eye for contemporary American consciousness, the writer was absorbed in exploring the human psyche.
Poe was a century ahead of his contemporaries, creating a rigorous aesthetic concept, a theory of the story. These ideas are outlined in the articles “The Philosophy of Creativity”, “The Poetic Principle”, “The Theory of Verse”, in various literary reviews.
Poe wrote that there should not be a single word in any work that did not directly or indirectly lead to a single intended purpose. It is customary to note the precision, the alignment of his works. He was one of the first to understand the need to change the human consciousness involved in the creative process, to the idea of synthesis rather than the opposition of logical thinking and imagination.
However, no theoretical constructions allow us to unravel the magic of the artist’s prose and poetry. His prose reveals a striking fusion of the fantastic and the realistic, the parodic and the serious. The mechanism of creativity is set in motion by two opposing forces: the meticulous activity of consciousness (a feature of the realist worldview) and the flight of fancy, intuition. In doing so, Poe achieves a remarkable synthesis that encourages a worldview in which, in the writer’s own words, the tree both remains and ceases to be a tree.
This approach later inspired the writers and artists of Symbolism, but in the middle of the nineteenth century it was a powerful counterposition of his creative self to the prevailing rationalism Another extreme in the form of “pure poetry,” “pure art,” emerged on the road to Symbolism, but Edgar Allan Poe never belonged to it: as strange as it sounds, he always stood his ground firm, coming from a truly deep understanding of the laws of life in the young North American republic, from a social reality he knew and understood perfectly.
A failed thirst for action, contempt for the surrounding squalor and calculating pragmatism created in his work a conflict of the moral and the aesthetic, typical of a certain tradition of artistic culture in Europe, beginning with Socrates, Plato, Aurelius, Augustine, then Oscar Wilde, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Baudelaire, and others. By the way, Europe owes its acquaintance with Poe’s unfading masterpieces to Baudelaire: The Raven, Annabelle Leigh, The City by the Sea, Ulyalume, Eldorado, etc.
Baudelaire wrote that Poe’s poetry, like any high poetic work, comprehends before all philosophical systems the inner and secret relations between things.
From the fifties of the 19th century short stories and novellas of the artist were published. Poe introduced into literature the genre of small fiction form. In his expressive narratives there is nothing superfluous, no redundant elements, the author’s idea is always revealed with a minimum of necessary words. The writer did not distract from the main idea, creating a kind of concentration of thoughts, images and words. It was not until a century later that American literature fully appreciated Edgar Allan Poe’s short stories, making this form one of the favorite and most popular genres. The character, the situation, the atmosphere of the work, the writer never ceased to control analytically, consistently leading the reader to the disclosure of the central idea. At the same time, his individual style abounds in the techniques of romanticism, primarily manifested in an undoubted predilection for the supernatural. Poe seemed to laugh at the primitiveness of realism, constantly rising to poetic heights and philosophically embracing the sad world. He took a step toward symbolism without losing touch with the proper American soil, with the peculiar American culture.
Edgar Allan Poe was also the founder of the detective story, which had a great future in America (and not only here). A deep and skeptical mind, a character going against all odds, he rejected the platitudes of modernity and created a phenomenon of global significance, his own aesthetic school, opened up new horizons of the poetic imagination. It was not for nothing that Hegel, in completing his Philosophy of History, spoke of America as the country of the future – the talents of its citizens already promised to make that future bright.
