Terror and Fear in Poetry

Paper Summary:

This paper discusses Samuel Taylor Coleridge's English masterpiece "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", composed between 1797 and 1798, and Edgar Allan Poe's American classic "The Raven", first published in 1845. The paper suggests that the supernatural and the unknown are intricately woven together in both poems and serve as the foundation for bringing about dread and fear and often terror.

From the Paper:

"Once again, the narrator in Poe's Raven is also doomed, for his shadow and his soul are forever mingled with that of the bird which now exists in some type of supernatural limbo. Certainly, these descriptions by Poe and Coleridge were designed to bring about feelings of terror and fear within the reader, something which Poe had much to say about. According to Poe, all literary works of the supernatural, whether prose or poetry, must be able to express a specific single effect to the point where the reader is overwhelmed by feelings of dread and the unknown (Hunt, 61)."

Sample of Sources Used:

• Hunt, Douglas. The Riverside Anthology of Literature. Boston: Houghton-Mifflin, 1988.

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• Comparison Essay # 114994 : "Love and Nature in Poetry"
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• Book Review # 129143 : "Terror and Poe's Literature"

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