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Edgar Allan PoeA modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Syntax refers to the rules for arranging words into sentences. Poe’s sentences are carefully structured to produce specific effects. For example, in the following sentence, he repeatedly uses the em dash to embed ideas and create a sentence as elaborate and suspenseful as the chateau it describes:
In these paintings, which depended from the walls not only in their main surfaces, but in very many nooks which the bizarre architecture of the chateau rendered necessary—in these paintings my incipient delirium, perhaps, had caused me to take deep interest; so that I bade Pedro to close the heavy shutters of the room—since it was already night—to light the tongues of a tall candelabrum which stood by the head of my bed—and to throw open far and wide the fringed curtains of black velvet which enveloped the bed itself (481).
Another syntax technique Poe is known for is anastrophe, in which words are moved out of their usual grammatical order. In the sentence “[r]apidly and gloriously the hours flew by, and the deep midnight came,” Poe moves the adverbs from their usual position after the verb into the high-visibility position at the sentence’s beginning in order to create a parallel
By Edgar Allan Poe
A Dream Within a Dream
A Dream Within a Dream
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Annabel Lee
Annabel Lee
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Berenice
Berenice
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Hop-Frog
Hop-Frog
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Ligeia
Ligeia
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Tamerlane
Tamerlane
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The Black Cat
The Black Cat
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The Cask of Amontillado
The Cask of Amontillado
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The Conqueror Worm
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The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar
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The Fall of the House of Usher
The Fall of the House of Usher
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The Gold Bug
The Gold Bug
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The Haunted Palace
The Haunted Palace
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The Imp of the Perverse
The Imp of the Perverse
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The Lake
The Lake
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The Man of the Crowd
The Man of the Crowd
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The Masque of the Red Death
The Masque of the Red Death
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The Murders in the Rue Morgue
The Murders in the Rue Morgue
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The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket
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The Philosophy of Composition
The Philosophy of Composition
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