Edgar Allan Poe Death
Edgar Allan Poe - DeathEdgar Allan Poe wrote about many subjects. Many of the same ones appear in his writings over and over again. The most obvious of which, in his poems, is the death of beautiful, young women. Some critics and people who knew him personally think that many of Poe’s poems were autobiographical while some say that they were not. The controversy is a well-founded one with ample evidence to support both sides.
In his life, Poe lost many of the women he loved either when they were very young. His mother, an older woman that he was in love with as a child, and wife all died of tuberculosis. Many of his relationships were doomed romances. He was constantly declaring his love to many different women.(Magill 2244) Keeping all this in consideration, while reading his poems it is easy to come to the conclusion that his love life has had a profound effect on his writing.
Many of his poems that in some way deal with or describe the death of beautiful ,young women all have some similar elements . First of all, the women in the poems are all thought to be the perfect and irreplaceable. In “Annabel Lee” the lines, “And neither the angels in Heaven above, / Nor the demons down under the sea, /Can ever dissever my soul from the soul /Of the beautiful Annabel Lee”,(Willis 9) means that this woman was so perfect that the narrator can’t live out his life without thinking about her all the time. In “ The Raven” the narrator is talking about his lost love and says “For the rare and radiant maiden whom the angels named Lenore–/Nameless here for evermore.”(Poe 5) The word “rare”is there to express the fact that the narrator thinks that his love was one of a kind. Another common occurrence in the poems is the dead women being young. In Annabel Lee the man in grief says that his love died “…many and many a year ago,”(Willis 9) which leads the reader to believe that this event happened when they were very young. In the poem “Lenore” the line “An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young”(Poe 4) expresses both the idea of being beautiful and being young. Finally, having a narrator that is hurting so much that he does not want to get over the pain and the grief of losing some one that he loved so much is another similarity. In “The Raven” this is easily understood when the narrator screams at the mysterious bird and says, “Leave my loneliness unbroken!” (Poe 7) In “To One In Paradise” it is obvious that the narrator thinks about his lost love constantly when he says, “And all my days are trances,/And all my nightly dreams/ Are...
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