Dark Romanticism

Hawthorne, Melville, and Poe all went through pretty rough childhoods with sketchy backgrounds. None of them were raised happily, half were orphans, and there was death and poverty and shame deeply ingrained in their brains. Their eyes were stuck in the mud but they all attained a pretty magnificent level of beauty, truth and mastery of language in their writing.

I am but a naive Transcendentalist. I believe in the good around me, I believe life is everything, can be everything, will be everything, has been everything if one lets it. I can see the good all over this world, and in love, and I believe that saying evil exists is creating evil itself. This id not to deny the greatness of the Dark Romantics, because I am a big fan of Herman Melville. All three of these writers had beautiful senses of reason and a down to earth style and humour that makes their work quite timeless.

In Poe's Hop-Frog, one can easily see Poe's distaste for much of society's men. His story tells the tale of a boisterous king and his councilors who under the revenge of their jester, die a smoky charred death 30 feet up in the air and captured in a chandelier. The King had dishonored a woman, laughed at everyone else's oddities and not cared a whim, thus this, for Hop-Frog the jester was enough reason to die. And it sure did prove a point I suppose. Poe can see these aspects of man as common place and the under-dog seems always to be driven to madness in Poe's stories.
In the king's presence the jester "placed the goblet nervously on the table, and looked round upon the company with a half -- insane stare. They all seemed highly amused at the success of the king's 'joke.'" Poe's character is constantly jovial and laughs at everything, but the king does not think about anything, especially not the feelings of his victims. "Whether people grow fat by joking, or whether there is something in fat itself which predisposes to a joke," Poe is not a fat man at all, and he does not pretend to joke.
You can see the evil in all of the characters in this story as plain as daylight, and though Poe starts will his wit and lyric all enticing, he lacks the courage to go forward long with a good attitude. In all of Poe's stories there is always the point of no return in which the character is marked bad for ever on.
In the Raven, Poe reaches that point at the second to last verse after the Raven has repeated once more "nevermore" to Poe's question on the woman Lenore's presence in heaven:
"Be that our sign of parting, bird or fiend!" I shrieked, upstarting--
"Get thee back into the tempest and the Night's Plutonian shore!
Leave no black plume as a token of that lie thy soul has spoken!
Leave my loneliness unbroken!
The poet is frustrated by the bird's resolve, and he is struck to madness and desperation in faint hopes that this mythic bird is there to answer all he needs. He finds this to be untrue, and for life, therefore, to be dull and useless. Which could have likely been how Poe felt himself when his wife was dying. That there was no going forward. This idea is dramatic and dark, something typical of the Dark Romantic era, but ever more so to Edgar Allan Poe himself who is the era's best literary example of that.
Poe's life was tumultuous and stormy intermittent with: serious bouts of drinking that once got him fired from a publishing house; He married his cousin when she was 13 years old but she fained to be 21; He was found delirious and in a stranger's clothes on the streets of Baltimore before he died. He was an interesting man, and this unique but genuine mind made him a literary sensation and a household name in the 1840s, despite his erratic behavior. It was his mind that made him unique, not any movement, and though he became quite famous, I doubt he ever thought of himself as in a movement of writers. He was dark, and he was romantic, but he wouldn't have been nice on the street, or even in his own living room. It doesn't seem to me that his life had anything to do with his stories. He wrote this shocking macabre in a often playful manner, but his writing seems merely to show his great intellect and imagination. The subject matter, indeed, does include subjects that could only come from his deep emotions, but that could not rationally be explained.