Exploring Poe’s idiolect: A linguistic study of grammatical preferences

The study of unique linguistic and stylistic features of texts by the American poet and prose writer Edgar Allan Poe is an important stage of unpacking his poetics, which involves analysing the key components, namely his idiolect, idiostyle, and idionarration. This article examines the grammatical level of Poe’s idiolect by analysing his poetry and prose, particularly in the context of Poe’s numerous revisions of his texts. It is suggested that the author’s idiolect differs from his idiostyle as an independent and unique element of his poetics, although the boundary between these two terms is blurred. Results demonstrate that the most characteristic grammatical features of Poe’s idiolect are unconventional (de)capitalisation and punctuation, sentence fragmentation, and syntactic inversion, and these grammatical deviations represent intentional linguistic choices rather than accidental violations of language norms. Thus, a comparison of early and later editions of his poem “Tamerlane,” in combination with the analysis of his short stories “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “The Black Cat,” “The Masque of the Red Death,” to name just a few, reveals the consistency of these grammatical preferences represented equally in Poe’s poetry and prose. These techniques not only convey emotional and psychological tension but also contribute to a distinctive estrangement effect that the reader might experience. Additionally, the findings show that the grammatical level of Poe’s idiolect, defined by a coherent system of grammatical preferences, goes beyond genre boundaries. Finally, the study suggests that future research may explore how real readers perceive and respond to these linguistic features in Poe’s works.