The romanticism of Poe's horror novels is also reflected in his unique writing style. Unlike mainstream writers such as Emerson and Whitman, whose creative styles are optimistic, confident and enthusiastic, Poe expresses his unique romantic inspiration by showing death and ugliness, and expresses his understanding of the world and human nature by means of symbols and metaphors. His horror novels are often set in abyss, castle, darkroom, storm or moonlight. The characters are tortured by loneliness, death consciousness and mental abnormality, which makes them feel creepy and chilling, just like nightmares. Edgar Allan Poe writes delicately and uses exquisite words. By conceiving and designing thrilling plots, he tries his best to describe grotesque events and horror scenes that ordinary people can't imagine in horror novels, create artistic conception and render atmosphere, and accurately achieve the expected artistic effect of his works. Poe's creative principle is his "effect" theory, and his choice of "death" as the theme of literary creation is determined by his creative principle. Edgar Allan Poe believes that whether writing a poem or a novel, a writer must pay attention to the unity of effect and always think of the predetermined ending, so that every plot is essential. When commenting on Hawthorne's Restatement of Stories, he once expounded his creative principles: "A clever artist does not integrate his thoughts into his plots, but carefully plans in advance to come up with some unique and distinctive effects, and then fabricates such plots-he connects these plots in series, and everything he does will be beneficial to the realization of the envisaged effects to the maximum extent." Make "every event, every description detail, even every word, every sentence get a unified effect, an expected effect, an impressionist effect." He emphasizes the emotion and effect that works can arouse for readers. In Philosophy of Creation, he believes that the primary purpose of the story is to grab the reader's heartstrings emotionally and produce the most exciting effect.
The theme of death is expressed through careful and compact structure and concise works. Poe's works are exquisite in form and skillful in technique. When commenting on Hawthorne's Restatement of Stories, edgar allan poe emphasized the conciseness and unified effect of his works. In writing, he also keeps the plot and structure highly concise, and there are usually only two or at most three characters in novels, without digression and irrelevant decoration. In his view, a skilled writer must think carefully, choose and organize the plot before writing, in order to achieve the expected effect, and the intention of a word cannot be directly or indirectly irrelevant to the previous idea. In order to better reveal the theme of death, he resolutely ruled out the plot irrelevant to the theme, demanding that the works must have exquisite artistic forms and must embody the principle of high unity of content and form. He believes that in order to ensure the unity of the effect, the first thing to consider is the length of the work. He said that a poem or novel should not be too long, so that readers can "read it all at once". Otherwise, mundane trifles will interfere with readers' reading and appreciation and undermine the unity of the effect of the works. To this end, he carefully designed the structure in order to achieve the perfect unity of form and content. When constructing the plot of humorous stories, Poe obviously absorbed the narrative mode of frontier humorous stories, sometimes letting the narrator participate in the development of the stories, and sometimes letting the narrator stay out of the stories, always shuttling inside and outside the stories, so as to feel the inner thoughts of the protagonists and objectively describe the stories with realistic tricks. The difference is that Poe's story is more detailed, more refined, more focused on the pursuit of effect, and more diverse and rich means. Although the humorist Mark Twain criticized Poe, the narrative mode of his humorous stories is obviously similar to that of Poe's novels.
There are many humorous characters in Poe's humorous stories. Through the investigation of these archetypes, we will find that their creation is actually a humorous imitation of many famous people of Allen Poe. In the process of parody, Poe always likes to use irony and puns to express his satire on the characters' words and deeds; Sometimes, in order to highlight the humorous personality, Poe even rewrites or inverts the language. Edgar allan poe wrote sixty or seventy short stories in his life. Although he only wrote four or five mystery novels, he is universally recognized as the "originator of mystery novels". The representative works, Murder in Moguel Street, The Mystery of Mary Roger, Stolen Letters and Scarab, are regarded as the pioneering works of this kind of novels, which have great influence on later generations.
Hai kreft, an expert in detective stories, said: "Crime is committed in a tightly locked darkroom; The process of solving the case has become a model for edgar allan poe to write detective novels, with rigorous logic and empathy. " This pattern has been imitated by detective novelists all over the world since 140, and even Detective Cuff in the famous work The Moon Stone by British writer Collins was also influenced by edgar allan poe. Most of Edgar Allan Poe's novels have elements of Gothic tradition. Its characteristics mainly highlight the details embodied in the novel narrative and the magical narrative plot, without losing the realism of the narrative. He has a unique aesthetic appeal in describing the exquisite Gothic environment and controlling the contingency in the narrative plot. It is also in these aesthetic acceptances that we can see the influence of the tradition of early English Gothic novels on Poe's creation.
It is worth mentioning that edgar allan poe's Gothic novels are also of great practical significance, reflecting the alienated psychological state of people in today's society: loneliness, fear, anxiety, worry, despair and so on. Lonely and anxious people, based on their psychological needs of "self-protection", naturally have a desire for sublimity: people are eager to be in a certain safe zone, where destructive objects pose real threats and harm to people, and at the same time enjoy the aesthetic pleasure brought by terror, adventure and darkness. Poe plays an important role in the development of science fiction. Some critics believe that Poe started science fiction. Sam Moskau, who attributed the honor of creating science fiction to Mary Shelley, wrote in To the Infinite Explorer: "Poe's overall influence on science fiction is immeasurable, but his greatest contribution to the development of this genre is that he put forward a rule that all extraordinary things must be scientifically explained." Hugo gernsback listed three writers, including Poe, when trying to explain what articles he would publish in Amazing Stories, the first sci-fi magazine.
Generally speaking, Edgar Allan Poe's science fiction is not only imaginative and fascinating, but also has a convincing scientific theoretical basis. Many famous sci-fi writers in later generations, including Verne, the founder of two schools of modern science fiction, and Wells, the representative of "soft science fiction", all admire Poe. In their works, there are more or less traces of imitating Allen Poe. Therefore, Chen called Poe the forerunner of science fiction, and Shi also thought: "The great writer who wrote real science fiction was Poe of the United States." It is worth noting that Edgar Allan Poe's science fiction is not an ordinary popular science reading. Like his other novels, it is also a tortuous artistic expression of Edgar Allan Poe's real life. The so-called "pure poetry" of symbolism was first put forward by Poe. According to Poe, "there is no such poem in the world, and there can be no more completely noble and extremely noble work than this poem itself." This poem is a poem, nothing else. This poem is written entirely for poetry. "
Edgar allan poe believes that music is the foundation of poetry. "Music has become a great opportunity in poetry creation through its beat, rhythm and rhyme, so it is unwise to reject it." "Music combined with pleasant thoughts is poetry, music without thoughts is just music, and thoughts without music are prose with certainty." Poetry is endowed with a vague emotion through its musicality, which is the purpose of poetry. "It is in music that the feelings of poetry are aroused, thus bringing the struggle of the soul closest to the great goal-creating sacred beauty."
Edgar allan poe's thought and practice on the musicality of poetry had a far-reaching impact on French symbolism, making musicality a very important artistic feature of symbolism.