Anna Valentine
November 3, 2016

    Today in class, the class finished the evaluation and analysis of tone in Edgar Allen Poe's The Tell Tale Heart and introduced the idea of Dark Romanticism using the poem as an example. In class we utilized the idea that tone is the attitude a text takes towards it subjects, which almost always makes it implicit, and thus hard to figure out, but can ultimately be found through the analysis of rhetorical devices, word choice, and punctuation. For example, in The Tell Tale Heart, the class found tones such as, agitated, unhinged, ominous, panicked, obsessive, and ashamed, by analyzing the last two paragraphs. They reasoned that these tones were applicable because Poe used punctuation such as dashes, and exclamation points to convey that the cadence and tone of the text was increasing in speed and excitement. It was also acknowledged that these tones were used to describe the text because of Poe's use of rhetorical devices such as rhetorical questions and antistrophes to let the reader know how he wanted the text to be read (tone). Using Poe's poem as an example, and the class now having a new-found understanding of the text through analyzing it's tone, the idea of dark romanticism was introduced, which highlights the work of authors, like Poe, whom embodied romantic ideals bit with negative tones and pessimistic themes. When a romantic such as Whitman writes, he believes that people are naturally or inherently good, while a dark romantic, like Poe, would believe that people are inherently evil. This idea brings the class to it's final topic of the day, absolutism in romanticism. Absolutism, the idea that something is one way, and not any other way, such as people being ONLY inherently good, or ONLY inherently evil, is a value that romanticists supported. Romanticists believed in no grey area, only black and white. The next time class meets, the knowledge acquired in the past days of learning will be used to select positive and negative tones in a text and identify different characteristics of romanticism using tone.

A Dramatic rendition of Edgar Allan Poe's "The Raven" :

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLiXjaPqSyY

The Simpson's video above has a emphasized/sarcastic play on Poe's Poem, which makes it easier to decipher its tone.