For authors, life experiences come into play often when creating a written piece. Edgar Allan Poe is, in fact, a prime example of an author using personal encounters and passions to coincide with his text. It seems as if Poe reuses his journalism sometimes, when in actuality, the mood is created by his emotions as in “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven. ” Similarly, Robert Frost, an author in the same time period as Poe, utilizes his personal experiences and passions to writer his poetry. The poetry of both authors was written in the early 1900s and have become a standard in American Poetry.
Frost and Poe were prolific authors and poets who had the unique ability to effortlessly combined the rich and varied American landscape with modernized transcendental thinking. Their poems continue to inspire poets, students, and casual readers. Many of Frost’s poems center around nature, his love for New England landscape, and the human experience. Poe’s poems are usually set in darkness of the human soul were lost and grief exists all too often. Both create a point of view from their own personal experiences.
Edgar Allen Poe interweaves dark romantic imagery in both of these writings. His descriptions are incredibly vivid and allow readers to clearly envision the occurrences. With such detail, an individual’s mind is awestruck by such creativity and imagination. Scrape away the supernatural, the death, and the character distention into depravity and you are left with writer of great skill and talent (Wagenknecht). In The Mending Wall, which appeared in North of Boston, Frost writes about neighbors which are forced to work together.
While there is respect between the two men there is also a feeling of unrest. This is because the men differ on some fundamental life values which the poem explores (Cook 72). The poem centers around this growing unrest. One of the neighbors do the majority of the talking and is quite to point out that this is only his opinion and does not want to push his views on his neighbors (Doyle 9). Frost believes that each man has the right to make their own mistakes and reap the consequences. This is one of the many common experiences which are explored in Frost’s poetry (Doyle 11).
Another way Poe associates these readings is by characterization. Both narrators, which happen to represent him, are distraught by the death of a beautiful young woman, which pursues the death of someone of great importance in Edgar Allan Poe’s life. In “Annabel Lee” the woman is Annabel Lee, and Lenore is the woman in “The Raven. ” Annabel Lee signifies the death of his young wife while Lenore symbolizes the death of his mother. What matters is that the poem makes clear the fact that sometimes serious questions arise, questions that neighbors must decide.
“In this poem Frost (or the man he has made himself into in the poem) shows his neighborliness by becoming the passive one, the listener. The poem shows that being a good neighbor demands many things” (Cady 71). The concept of being a good neighbor is American ideal and an universal experience. This poem is really a dialogue between Robert Frost and his uncle. His uncle was his hardest critic and pressured Frost to do succeed at school. When Frost attempted college several times and failed, his uncle talked him into running a farm for several years (Cady 55).
Frost, while he respected his uncle, wanted him to mind his own business. He wishes that his uncle would be hopeful of the future and not try to dominate his present. Their relationship is reflected in the poem (Doyle 34). Lastly, Poe links the two pieces of writing by theme. “Annabel Lee” and “The Raven” both have loneliness, alienation, and melancholy as a part of their theme. Edgar A. Poe demonstrates that sentiments are linked to themes also by fatality. “Poe’s writing is very lyrical and rhythmic which offers a creepy background music to the entire text.
He uses repeated anapests which are a metrical foot consisting of three syllables, the first two short, or unaccented, the last long, or accented”( Brown 50). Similarly, in Nothing Gold Can Stay, he explores another common experience — that nothing good lasts forever. This is a reflection of his own experiences with loss and death. Robert Frost was born on March 26, 1874, in San Francisco, where his father, of “firm New Hampshire stock, edited a newspaper. The paper was Democratic and Robert’s full name is Robert Lee Frost, two facts which are usually taken to indicate the elder Frost’s attitude to then-Republican New England.
When Robert was eleven, his father died, and he and his schoolteacher mother crossed country and settled with relatives in Massachusetts” (Cook 60). The poem opens with images offering the freshness of spring; but as in a dream, when one reaches for the object it is gone, “Nature’s first green is gold” (ln 1). Frost continues, “Her hardest hue to hold” (ln 2), this first green is of a delicate and transitory quality that is already disappearing even as it is being born. By line four the pattern is set. These desirable things are given, but not to keep. The process goes on as ” . . . leaf subsides to leaf” (ln 5).
Every human goes through the loss of innocence and learns the archetype of golden youthfulness and innocence was soon lost before the onslaught of the properties of the tree of knowledge (Doyle 81). Edgar Allen Poe chooses certain episodes in his lifetime to create a masterpiece of literature. Specific fears and fascinations can be connected to happenings in his life. As in many stories, such as “The Raven” and “Annabel Lee,” death of a loved one has a substantial role when composing. Frost through the utilization of his own personal experiences and misadventures develops a theme of universal experience in his poetry.
The idea of universal experience is a major reason that Frost’s poetry is popular, well loved, and stood the test of time. Their personal experience can be traced through all their poetry.
Works Citied
Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction. ” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 330-44. Works Cited Cady, Edwin H. , and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Cook, Reginald L. The Dimensions of Robert Frost. New York: Rinehart, 1958. Doyle, John Robert.
The Poetry of Robert Frost, an Analysis. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1962. Greenberg, Robert A. , and James G. Hepburn, eds. Robert Frost, an Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961. Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard U, 1969- Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford UP, 1963. Bibliography Cady, Edwin H. , and Louis J. Budd, eds. On Frost: The Best from American Literature. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991. Cook, Reginald L.
The Dimensions of Robert Frost. New York: Rinehart, 1958. Doyle, John Robert. The Poetry of Robert Frost, an Analysis. Johannesburg: Witwatersrand University Press, 1962. Greenberg, Robert A. , and James G. Hepburn, eds. Robert Frost, an Introduction. New York: Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1961. Brown, Gillian. “The Poetics of Extinction. ” The American Face of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Shawn Rosenheim and Stephen Rachman. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. 330-44. Ketterer, David “”Shudder”: A Signature Crypt-ogram in “The Fall of the House of Usher””Resources for American Literary Study – Volume 25, Number 2, 1999, pp. 192-205.
Lammers, John. “Sentience and the False Deja Vu in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher. ‘” Publications of the Arkansas Philological Association 22. 1 (Spring 1996): 19-41. Thompson, G. R. “The Face in the Pool: Reflections on the Doppelganger Motif in ‘The Fall of the House of Usher’,” from Poe Studies, vol. V, no. 1, June 1972, pp. 16-21. Poe, Edgar Allan. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Thomas Ollive Mabbott. 3 vols. Cambridge: Belknap Press of Harvard U, 1969- Wagenknecht, Edward. Edgar Allan Poe: The Man Behind the Legend. New York: Oxford UP, 1963.