Besides novels Cooper wrote social criticism. In the latter he analysed the shortcomings of democracy in his own country. Edgar allan poe (1809-1849)

Poe was born in Boston. His parents were both actors but after their death he was adopted by John Allan, a wealthy merchant from Richmond. The Allan family lived in England from 1815 to 1820 where E.A. Poe went to school. He studied at the University of Virginia in 1826-1827, enlisted in the army and in 1830 entered the Military Academy at West Point but was discharged in 1831.

In 1836 he married his cousin Virginia. Her death from tuberculosis in 1847 was to be a source of “intolerable sorrow” for Poe. He himself died soon after, in 1849 in Baltimore under mysterious circumstances. Perhaps because of the strangeness of his tales and poems, many bizarre theories have been put forward to explain his life and his death. They are a further proof of the power of his writing and the strange emotions they excite.

Yet in 1827 he published Tamerlane and Other Poems. In 1929 was issued his second volume of verses, Al Aaraaf , Tamerlane and Minor Poems.. Poe’s best stories were written in 1838-1840 and published as the collection Tales of the Grotesque and Arabesque. In 1845 were published The Raven and Other Poems and Tales.

Poe is the most strange and extreme figure in romantic tradition of American literature. He was not properly estimated by his contemporaries. He became a poet of European merit only by the end of the nineteenth century due to Mallarme’s translations into French and Brusov’s translations into Russian. His works which are now the classics of American literature seem to lack national foundation (e.g. The Golden Bug and The Raven). Unlike those of the majority of his contemporaries, Poe’s subjects and themes were either universal or exotic. The story The Manuscript Found in a Bottle begins in a heretic manner: “About my motherland and family I hardly have anything to say.” He had little interest in the topical or everyday occurrences and did not show interest either in the political history of the USA or in American customs. He was beyond historic time or geographic space. He continually emphasized estrangement, disappearance, oblivion and all ideas which suggest nonbeing. His concentration on the inner self, the dual personality, mystery and the supernatural, and the horrors and nightmares of a hallucinatory world, reveals the workings of a lively and highly individual imagination. The artistic world of the writer are Gothic semidestroyed castles, dungeons, plague, death. But the shadows of the imaginary world created by Poe are visible, material. According to Dostoyevsky, “His works cannot be directly referred to fantastic … He always takes extreme reality, sets his characters in the most extreme external or psychological situation, and with what striking accuracy he speaks of the inner state of this person!” Among Poe’s best stories are The Purloined Letter, The Fall of the House of the Usher, The Black Cat, The Masque of the Red Death .

Unlike other Romantics who kept to one definite genre, Poe was a prosaic writer, a poet, and a literary critic. In the genre of the short story he invented single-handedly logical stories or ratiocinations (detective stories); horror or psychological stories; science fiction stories. As a poet he showed that “Beauty is the sole legitimate province of poetry”, that “Melancholy is thus the most legitimate of all poetic tones”. As a critic Poe worked out the theory of “short forms” in poetry and prose and created the first American theory of the short story. The forms that he favoured were highly musical poems and short prose narratives. Both forms, he argued, should aim at “a certain unique or single effect”.His thoughts concerning poetry and symbolism were to attract the interest of English Pre-Raphaelites and, most significantly, the French Symbolists.

Poe remains to be one of the most contradictory writers. He was a mysticist and rationalist, a symbolist and aesthetist, the investigator of the dark states of the human soul and enthusiast of scientific progress, the poet of ration and insanity. Dostoyevsky was impressed by his imagination, Baudelaire and Mallarme proclaimed him their teacher, Debussie was inspired to make a symphony and an opera.