Edgar Allan Poe Writing Style

Edgar Allan Poe's writing style is gothic and deliberate, aimed at one effect at a time, and it runs through short tales, poems, literary criticism, a single novel called The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym and the three Dupin stories that started detective fiction. He said so in print: a tale should be short enough to read at a single sitting, and every sentence in it should bend toward a result the writer settled on before the first line went down. That is a production method, and it explains the airlessness. It also explains why a working writer can take one of these tales apart, lay the pieces on a table, and find that every one of them was cut to fit.

His narrators are the mechanism. A Poe narrator opens by defending his own reason. The defence is the evidence against him. He tells you he is calm. The sentences shorten and double back while he says it, and he goes on explaining his logic with a patience that would be admirable in a man who had done nothing, which is the detail that turns the whole account over. You end up a juror. What you have been handed is a confession dressed as a rebuttal.

He also built the room. Poe shrinks the space as the pressure rises: a cellar, a crypt, a cabin below the waterline, a pit whose walls move in. The house in Usher has a crack running down the front of it before anything happens at all, mentioned once, in passing, as a fact about the stonework, and by the last page that crack has widened into the ending.

Then there is the sound. The refrain in The Raven does the work an argument would do in another writer, wearing a reader down by return rather than by proof. He invented the detective story along the way, in 1841, and then went back to the walled-up cellars as though it had been a diversion.

The single-effect rule he published

Poe published his own instructions. They take an evening to read. He set the terms out in an 1842 review of Hawthorne's Twice-Told Tales, arguing that a writer settles the effect first and then admits no sentence that works against it. The Philosophy of Composition demonstrates the procedure on The Raven. He begins at the feeling he wanted a reader left holding, then reasons down through the refrain, the creature that could repeat it and the room it would be repeated in. The Poetic Principle carries the argument into verse and refuses the long poem outright, on the grounds that the excitement a poem runs on cannot be held for that long. Whether he composed The Raven this way is a question critics have argued over since, and the procedure works on a stalled scene whether he followed it or not.

The narrator who argues his own sanity

The opening of The Tell-Tale Heart asks why anyone would call the speaker mad. No such accusation has been made. He is answering a charge he brought himself, which puts the confession in the first line. Give a narrator a charge to answer that has not been made, then let the rebuttal accumulate detail no innocent person would have kept. The reader assembles the case while the speaker thinks he is dismantling it.

The room that gets smaller

Track the space in a Poe tale and it contracts on a schedule. Montresor and Fortunato descend. The passage narrows, the niche appears, the last brick goes in. The pit narrows while the pendulum drops. Physical reduction does the job that rising stakes do elsewhere.

The refrain

A returning word gives a reader nothing to push against, which is work no argument can do. Poe repeats until the sound itself carries the meaning, and a reader stops receiving the dread and starts supplying it. Prose can borrow this at smaller scale by returning to one image at intervals, changed a little each time. The trick fails when the interval is even, so vary the distance between returns and let the last one arrive early.

Putting the horror on an object

Poe rarely describes the body. He describes the floorboards above it, the sound underneath them, the cat walled in beside it, the eye that provoked the whole business. Displacement lets a reader do the assembly. What they assemble is worse than anything you could supply.

Ratiocination

Dupin reasons out loud from small physical facts, and Conan Doyle took the whole apparatus, companion narrator included. Poe used the same chain of inference in his horror as well, which is what makes the terror feel argued rather than staged. Nothing new may enter at the end.

The unreliable first-person narrator

The device was not his invention. He made it load-bearing. His speakers report accurately and interpret disastrously, so every fact a reader needs is already on the page and carrying the wrong label, which is why a second reading feels like a different book altogether.

The setting as a body

The House of Usher has eyes for windows and a fissure for a wound. It dies when its owner does. Poe holds the anatomy so steadily that the collapse at the end reads as a death. The device asks for restraint: name one bodily feature of the building early, plainly, without pressing it, and let the reader carry it forward. Pressing it turns the house into a costume.

Dramatic irony held to the last line

In The Cask of Amontillado the reader understands what Fortunato does not, and Poe stretches that gap across the whole descent without once letting the victim catch up. Every courteous exchange gains a second meaning the reader cannot unhear. Sustaining it needs a victim who is not stupid, only occupied. The moment the victim suspects, the device is spent and the scene has to end.

Sound as argument

Alliteration, internal rhyme and a heavy repeated metre push The Raven forward on rhythm alone, carrying it through stretches where reasoning would stall and a reader would otherwise begin to argue back. Poe builds a sonic pattern early, then lets small departures from it register as alarm, which is the same principle a composer uses. Prose writers can take the smaller version: set a rhythm in a paragraph of even clauses, then break it with one clause of the wrong length at the point of shock.

Copying the old-fashioned diction

The most common Poe imitation reaches for whilst, ere and upon, and stops there. That vocabulary was the house style of the 1840s, and his contemporaries wrote it without producing anything like his tales. What carries the effect is sentence shape and the change of register inside it. Period costume on a flat structure reads as pastiche.

Stacking adjectives for atmosphere

Dank, dreary, dismal, gloomy. They arrive together in most imitations and cancel each other out. Poe's adjectives carry information about the space or the narrator's state, and he rarely uses three where one will do the work. When four adjectives modify the same noun a reader stops picturing anything and starts skimming. Choose the one that changes the picture.

Making the narrator obviously unhinged on line one

Poe's narrators sound reasonable for as long as they can. The collapse arrives late. Imitations announce the madness in the first line, which leaves the rest of the story with nothing to reveal. Give your speaker an argument that would hold up in a letter to a newspaper, and let the cracks be things the reader notices first.

Reaching for gore instead of dread

Explicit violence and dread work against each other. Poe knew which he wanted. His most frightening tales keep the body offstage. Gore resolves a reader's tension by answering the question, while dread keeps the question open, and open is where the reading pleasure sits. If a scene has stopped frightening you as you write it, look for the moment you showed too much.