Edgar Allan Poe, the American short story writer and poet was born January 19, 1809 in Boston, Massachussets. His fictional prose works have become the basis for the contemporary American horror and detective novel. For this project we wanted to analyze a known facet of Poe's prose corpus - the themes and imagery of entrapment, of capture and release that are visible in many of his short stories (i.e. "The Tell-Tale Heart" "The Black Cat" "The Fall of the House of Usher" "The Cask of Amontillado" "The Premature Burial" etc.). These stories often feature the boarding up of characters behind walls and beneath floor-boards. For our research we wanted to examine if, and to what extent, the poetical corpus of Edgar Allan Poe mirrors this theme through language that triggers conotations of opening and closing.