The real Poe was born to traveling actors in Boston on January 19, 1809. But much of what we know about Poe is wrong, the product of a biography written by one of his enemies in an attempt to defame the author’s name. He is seen as a morbid, mysterious figure lurking in the shadows of moonlit cemeteries or crumbling castles. Just as the bizarre characters in Poe’s stories have captured the public imagination so too has Poe himself. Poe’s reputation today rests primarily on his tales of terror as well as on his haunting lyric poetry.

He is widely acknowledged as the inventor of the modern detective story and an innovator in the science fiction genre, but he made his living as America’s first great literary critic and theoretician. This versatile writer’s oeuvre includes short stories, poetry, a novel, a textbook, a book of scientific theory, and hundreds of essays and book reviews. His works have been in print since 1827 and include such literary classics as The Tell-Tale Heart, The Raven, and The Fall of the House of Usher. The noise magnifies the narrator’s guilt, until he snaps and confesses.The name Poe brings to mind images of murderers and madmen, premature burials, and mysterious women who return from the dead. In reality, it could be the narrator’s own heart, pounding with guilt. The narrator thinks he hears the old man’s heart beating after the murder. The Reason Why the Sound Gets Louder and Louder In both cases this passion is symbolized by the heart that beats impossibly loudly. It is passion that drives the narrator to kill the old man and to confess. Since vultures are scavengers that eat dead things, this eye signals how central death is to the story. The narrator calls the eye a vulture’s eye. The eye represents evil while the heart represents the narrator’s guilt and conscience. In the symbolic sense, it reflects the guilty conscience of the narrator.

In the literal sense, it reflects how the sound of a beating heart makes the narrator confess his crime. The narrator thinks he hears the heart of the old man, telling the tale of his guilt, but what he really hears is his own heart, pounding with guilt. Photo: Pere/pinterest The Significance of the Title of the Story

The tell tale heart meaning