An Edgar Allan Poe Analysis

Edgar Allan Poe’s morbid fascination with death has always intrigued the public since his untimely death at age forty. Death has always been a theme in Poe’s works because of his turbulent past and the death of ones he cared for the most. Poe’s views on this subject are seen throughout his many publicized novels, short stories, and essays. Two such stories, “The Tell-Tale Heart” and “The Masque of the Red Death,” both encompass Poe’s interests on death. Why was the theme of death ever prevalent in so much of his works? Poe’s enigmatic writings leave the general public of today to ponder this elusive question.
“The Tell-Tale Heart” tells the story of a misguided, nervous man who has just committed a hideous murder of this old man and apparently has buried him under the floorboards of the old man’s room. The most striking thing is the narrator and his admittance of his sanity. This seems evident when he claims that “the disease had sharpened my sens...