Edgar Allan Poe in his writings, usually dealt with paranoia rooted in personal psychology, physical or mental enfeeblement, obsessions, death, feverish fantasies, the cosmos as source of horror and inspiration, without bothering himself with such supernatural beings as ghosts, werewolves, vampires, and so on. In an anonymous review of his own work, he somewhat ironically insists on his originality: "the great fault of American and British authors is imitation of the peculiarities of idea, or the combination of ideas. He appears to think it a crime to write unless he has something novel to write about, or some novel way of writing about an old thing" (Poe 868-873). "He does not think his natural thoughts, or burn with his natural passions. His virtues are not real to him. His sins, if there are such things as sins, are borrowed. He becomes an echo of someone else's music, an actor of a part that has not been written for him" (Bloom 6). Poe was a man who always considered himself to be first and foremost a poet. In his preface to "The Raven" and other poems, he states, "with me poetry has not a purpose, but a passion" (Ketterer 26). However, his first success was to come not from poetry but rather prose. Vincent Buranelli wrote in his book Edgar Allan Poe:.
Even though Poe is often looked upon as a gifted psychopath who is describing with consummate artistry, his personal instabilities and abnormalities the fact remains that his superiority is more than a matter of art. There is a violent realism in his macabre writing unequaled by the Americans who worked in the same genre (17).
Many critics believe that we can gain a better understanding of Poe by analyzing his most famous short story. His friends often noticed that in many ways, Poe's works bared a striking resemblance to his life. A friend and fellow poet, Dr. Thomas Chivers noted that his stories "appeared to me to be faithful record of some peculiar phase of his own being, or mental rapture, at the time of their composition" (78).