The Works of Edgar Allan Poe

Question: What Estonian composer used a style known as tintinnabulation, a word popularized in Poe's "The Bells"?

Answer: The Estonian composer Arvo Pärt’s typical sound can be heard in such bell-like compositions as Spiegel im Spiegel.

Question: In “The Masque of the Red Death,” a figure appears at a ball dressed as the Red Death. What actual disease does this refer to?

Answer: The Red Death is a fictional disease.

Question: Which of the following Poe stories begins with the words: “The thousand injuries of Fortunato I had borne as I best could…”?

Answer: The opening lines of “The Cask of Amontillado” reveal the narrator to have borne a grudge.

Question: Which of the following stories is the first to feature Poe’s amateur detective C. Auguste Dupin?

Answer: “Murders in the Rue Morgue,” published in 1841, is one of the first detective stories written.

Question: Whose beauty is “like those Nicean barks of yore That gently, o’er a perfumed sea, The weary, way-worn wanderer bore”?

Answer: Poe was probably alluding to the legendary beauty over whom the Trojan War was fought.

Question: Which of the following concerns a “rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore”?

Answer: The speaker in the poem “The Raven” is trying to distract himself from his painful memories of a dead love.

Question: What is the name of the woman who has been buried not quite dead in Poe’s “The Fall of the House of Usher”?

Answer: Madeline Usher is the twin sister of Roderick, whom the narrator of the story goes to visit.

Question: Which of Poe’s poetic loves was chilled and killed by a wind that came out of a cloud sent by envious angels?

Answer: The poem is also titled “Annabel Lee.”

Question: What device does the phrase “the silken, sad, uncertain rustling” show?

Answer: Alliteration is the repetition of consonant sounds at the beginning of words or on stressed syllables.

Question: In which story does the narrator lose his cool and confess to the police that he has just killed an old man?

Answer: The narrator of “The Tell-Tale Heart” believes that he hears the corpse’s heart beating beneath the floorboards.