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Edgar Allan Poe Anti Transcendentalism Essay

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The conceptualization of a better world has always plagued the mind of our species. However, this notion comes with the realization that mankind is and has always been cruel and terrifying, even to each other. Although some people tend to believe that they live in a perfect society, most people have never really explored the dark side of themselves until analyzing the works of Edgar Allen Poe. Both Nathaniel Hawthorne and Poe established themselves as anti-transcendentalists through their spine-chilling literature of horror, giving us the basis to what is today’s horror. They showed us what cruel animals humans can truly be. Through understanding the Transcendentalist movement, and how Poe established himself as an anti-transcendentalist, we …show more content…

Transcendentalists believed that every person was inheritably good and that we could form a paradise based off these new principles of Transcendentalism. Many people, however, disagreed with transcendentalism including Poe. History has shown that we have retained most of our primitive behavior, making a utopia near impossible. Poe’s work shows how gruesome we “civilized” people can really be. One example would be the “Cask of Amontillado.” In this story, we observe how a character with such power and intelligence easily turns into a mad man who has devised a plan to murder an innocent man over a plebian conflict the two experienced. In one statement, Montresor says, “I must not only punish but punish with impunity” (Poe 1). In short, Montresor is implying that killing Fortunato is the fair thing to do and that he should be exempt from punishment for doing so. If I were to kill a classmate because he insulted me, I wouldn’t be exempt from punishment. Poe shows us that we can’t hold back our strange and uncivilized urges to get revenge on those who dishonor or hurt us. In order to have a utopia, all classes of people would need to be able to work together as a whole, which has been an endless conflict of the

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