DAWN B. SOVA
Edgar Allan Poe
A Literary Reference to His Life and Work
Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
Copyright © 2001, 2007 Dawn B. Sova
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Sova, Dawn B.
Critical companion to Edgar Allan Poe: a literary reference to his life and work / Dawn B. Sova.
p. cm.
Rev. ed. of: Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z. c2001. Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and index.
ISBN 0-8160-6408-3 (acid-free paper)
1. Poe, Edgar Allan, 1809–1849—Encyclopedias. 2. Authors, American— 19th century—Biography—Encyclopedias. I. Sova, Dawn B. Edgar Allan Poe,
A to Z. II. Title. PS2630.S68 2007 818′.309—dc22 2006029466
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i-viii_Poe-fm.indd ii
C
ONTENTS
Acknowledgments v
Introduction vii
Part I: Biography
1
Part II: Works A to Z
13
Part III: Related Entries
285
Part IV: Appendices
405
Edgar Allan Poe: A Time Line
407
Chronology of Poe’s Works
410
Poe Research Collections
428
Selected
Bibliography
430
i-viii_Poe-fm.indd iv
v
T
o examine comprehensively the life and worksof an author such as Edgar Allan Poe requires tenacity on the part of the writer and tolerance on the part of her friends, family, and colleagues. In revising Edgar Allan Poe, A to Z, I have tried to exhibit the necessary tenacity as one source after another led to a dead end, while other unex-pected sources emerged unannounced. I gratefully acknowledge that those personally closest to me, as well as professional contacts whose names appear here or whose names are omitted by their choice, have shown a remarkable tolerance over the years during which this guide acquired form and moved toward completion. Unlike my subject, who sur-vived many of his 40 years with feelings of loss, abandonment, and personal as well as professional frustration generated by others, I have enjoyed willing assistance and personal support, for which I am grateful.
Bert Holtje of James Peter Associates, Inc., is a remarkable individual who was both my literary agent and the caring voice of reason upon whom I relied. I appreciated his confidence in my dedica-tion to the initial project and his support, despite difficulties that threatened to derail my progress. Although he is now retired, he inspired me in making the necessary changes that have made an already great book better. I am also heartily grate-ful for his extensive knowledge of many subjects, which made his problem-solving efforts that much more meaningful.
Jeff Soloway, my editor at Facts On File, Inc., who inherited this project already formed and was
charged with bringing it to fruition in its new incar-nation, has shown admirable grace and tenacity in assisting me to produce a comprehensive and valuable work of which we can both feel proud. I very much appreciate his professional insight, his willingness to work with me, and his insight-filled suggestions as the work progressed. Having worked with Jeff on previous books, I expected no less than the best editorial direction, which I received on this work as well.
I. Macarthur Nickles, director of the Garfield [New Jersey] Public Library, has made me view every new book project as a cause for celebration because each brings a renewed opportunity to enjoy the continuing innovation he has brought to my hometown library. His professional expertise, his knowledge of people and resources, his understand-ing of the multitude of possibilities in research, and his graciousness in sharing that knowledge have been invaluable in this and other projects. Kath-leen Zalenski, reference librarian, provided me with a steady stream of materials for the project, some of which I thought might be impossible to obtain, and I thank her for her efforts.
Robert Gregor, whose professional world is one of Web-based researching and information tech-nology, provided valuable technical and resources management assistance that enabled me to harness the power of my computer and my time. For his patience and expertise I am grateful.
My appreciation also goes to the University of Virginia libraries and special collections; the Edgar Allan Poe Society of Baltimore, Maryland; the
vi Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
Edgar Allan Poe Library of Richmond, Virginia; the library of Montclair State University, New Jer-sey; and the people who have dedicated them-selves to maintaining sites both large and small dedicated to Poe.
Last and most important are the debts that I owe to my family, especially my parents: my mother, Violet Sova, and my late father, Emil J. Sova, who instilled in me a love of learning and the desire to know.
i-viii_Poe-fm.indd vi
vii
T
he contemporary popularity of Edgar AllanPoe relies on only a few of his works. The larger part of his extensive writings are unknown to all but a small number of readers and schol-ars. Poems such as “The Raven,” “The Bells,” and “Annabel Lee,” and short stories such as “The Black Cat,” “The Cask of Amontillado,” “The Pit and the Pendulum,” and “The Tell-Tale Heart” remain extremely influential today and have even provided source material for television dramas and comedies—some with a nod to the author, but more often not. Everyone recognizes the plot or certain famous lines, but few know the full range and the innovations of Poe’s work in science fiction, liter-ary criticism and theory, and philosophy. Even the most familiar works are often insufficiently under-stood. Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe seeks to fill that void by providing comprehensive entries on Poe’s life and writings.
Readers whose knowledge of Poe is limited to short stories and poems included in high school anthologies or college textbooks might be amazed to learn that Poe published more than 350 stories, poems, essays, and critical articles under his own name and is the likely author of many additional anonymous works. He popularized the American short story, and he is credited with inventing the modern detective story, featuring an investigator who uses reasoning instead of legwork to solve crimes. Poe also served as editor of several peri-odicals. His correspondence with the other lead-ing writers of his day was extensive, and he was praised in print by many other literary figures who
never met him but admired his work. He had the boldness, critical status, and credibility to attack in print the works of other writers who enjoyed strong reputations. Such critical assessments appeared in leading literary and popular periodicals of the time, as did his stories and poems.
A large body of Poe’s work is no longer in print, leaving only the well-known and frequently cre-atively recycled stories and poems to perpetuate his fame. Most libraries long ago cleared their shelves of his literary criticism and decimated sets of his collected works, retaining the best-known tales and poems and winnowing out the rest. The reasons for such decisions are varied, but most have to do with the low regard in which Poe was held during the first half of the 20th century. As biographers who have taken the time to consult the correspon-dence, journals, and criticism of Poe’s day have found, his loss of status was largely undeserved and easily traced to the successful efforts of Rufus Wilmot Griswold at defaming Poe’s character. Gris-wold, nominally a friend, claimed after Poe’s death that he had been designated the author’s literary executor. He manipulated Poe’s mother-in-law, Maria Clemm, into supporting his handling of Poe’s writings and went on to destroy Poe’s character. On October 9, 1849, Griswold avenged an old grudge against Poe by publishing a defamatory obituary— to which Griswold signed the name “Ludwig”—that cast aspersions on Poe’s moral character. Griswold suggested that the excesses of Poe’s fiction were renderings of Poe’s own experiences and life. While many of Poe’s contemporaries tried to correct this
viii Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
image by publishing defenses of Poe in the decades that followed, Griswold’s charges remained in the public mind for many years.
Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe is a
com-prehensive examination of Poe’s writings that presents a complete portrait of a complicated and brilliant thinker and writer. Other studies have examined all of the known stories or some of the best-known poems, and a few have identified and discussed several of the essays that gained promi-nence, such as “A Rationale of Verse,” “Eureka,” or “The Poetic Principle.” No single work, how-ever, has covered all of these works in critical detail along with Poe’s extensive literary criticism.
About This Book
Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe is a
compre-hensive guide to Poe’s life and work. It is designed to be useful both for those readers who know Poe well and for those coming to Poe for the first time.
Readers of Edgar Allan Poe A to Z, upon which this critical companion is based, will find this vol-ume different in important ways. The first differ-ence is that this volume contains new commentary sections analyzing Poe’s major tales and poems and expanded sections on important characters in the tales. It also contains more than 20 additional new illustrations. The second and most obvious differ-ence is that rather than featuring a single,
alpha-betical listing of Poe’s works, fictional characters, relevant people, places, and topics, this volume is divided into four parts.
Part I contains a biography of Poe. Part II is divided into two sections: The first provides entries for each of Poe’s published poems and works of fic-tion, in alphabetical order; the second provides entries for each of his published essays and reviews. Every one of Poe’s more than 350 publications is covered. Entries on fictional works contain sub-entries on major characters in the work. Entries on major fictional works and poems contain sec-tions providing expanded critical commentary on the works. Part III of the book contains entries on important people in Poe’s life (such as his cousin and wife, Virginia), influences on his writing (such as Charles Dickens), publications he wrote for (such as Graham’s Magazine), places (such as Baltimore, Maryland), topics (such as “detective story” and “mesmerism”), and more. Part IV contains the fol-lowing appendices: a time line of Poe’s life, a list of his works in chronological order, a list of major research collections, and a bibliography of second-ary sources.
Any reference to a person, place, thing, or topic that is the subject of an entry in Part II or Part III is printed in SMALL CAPITAL LETTERS the first
time it appears in an entry, in order to indicate a cross-reference.
i-viii_Poe-fm.indd viii
P
ART
I
001-012_Poe-p1.indd 2
Edgar Allan Poe
(1809–1849)
An American writer and critic who is credited with refining the short story form and inventing the modern detective story, Poe has been denied the full respect due his accomplishments. The details of his life, rife with reports of gambling, drinking, addiction to opiates, and other profligate behavior, combined with his marriage to a 13-year-old cousin, have overshadowed his achievements, which include the publication of more than 350 poems, short stories, and critical reviews and essays, and his influence in creating a uniquely American form of literature, as well as his continuing influence on contemporary literature and culture.
Poe was born on January 19, 1809, in a board-inghouse on Carver Street, in Boston, near the
Boston Common, while his actor parents, ELIZA
-BETH ARNOLD HOPKINS POE (1787–1811) and
DAVID POE, JR. (1784–1811?), were on tour. His
elder brother, WILLIAM HENRY LEONARD POE
(1807–1831), was also born in Boston, but his
sis-ter ROSALIE POE (1810–1874) was born in
Rich-mond, Virginia. Edgar’s father had been studying to be a lawyer but abandoned that career when he joined an acting troupe and married Elizabeth Arnold Hopkins, who had been widowed less than a year before. Edgar’s paternal grandfather, DAVID
POE, SR. (1742–1816), was a prominent member of
Richmond society, a distinguished veteran of the American Revolution, and the former deputy quar-termaster of Baltimore, as well as a wealthy man, but he disowned his son when David, Jr. aban-doned law for the stage. David Poe’s lack of acting talent and critics’ harsh reviews led to his lack of popularity onstage, and his heavy drinking and vio-lent temper made him a poor bet as a wage earner. After he deserted his wife and three children in July 1811, leaving them impoverished, Edgar’s mother struggled to feed her children by continuing to take any stage roles she was offered, although she was already ill with tuberculosis and died only months later. Accounts of her death relate that she and her children were living in a poorly heated room, with straw on the floor for their beds; the three children
were with her as she died and were found huddling close to their dead mother.
After experiencing the trauma of their mother’s death, the children were further traumatized when they were separated and sent to live with different families. William Henry Leonard was sent to Balti-more to live with the paternal grandparents, then after their death lived with his late father’s sister MARIA POE CLEMM (1790–1871). As an adult,
Wil-liam Henry journeyed to the Near East, the West Indies, Montevideo, the Mediterranean, and Rus-sia during the late 1820s as a crewman aboard the American frigate Macedonian; his accounts of his adventures were listened to eagerly by Edgar, who later claimed some of William Henry’s adventures for his own, hinting darkly of adventures in Russia and other distant places. William Henry died of tuberculosis and alcoholism at age 24. Rosalie, later described by observers as being mentally slow, was adopted by WILLIAM and JANE SCOTT MACKENZIE.
Edgar Allan Poe, circa 1848 (Courtesy of Edgar Allan Poe
4 Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
Young Edgar was taken into the home of JOHN
ALLAN (1779–1834), a wealthy Richmond
mer-chant whose wife, FRANCES ALLAN (1785–1829),
was unable to have children. Both Mrs. Mackenzie and Mrs. Allan had been among a group of women from respectable Richmond families who consid-ered their charitable duty to bring food and other items to the poor families in Richmond; among the families for which appeals were made were Eliz-abeth Poe and her children. When the children were left bereft of family, the two women assumed responsibility for Rosalie and Edgar.
Frances Allan was a tender and unassertive woman who gave Edgar the maternal nurturing and love that he had not experienced with his struggling
birth mother, and she also protected him against her husband’s anger. The Allans provided Edgar with a private school education when they traveled to England in 1815, and his education continued in private schools when they returned to the United States in 1820. In 1826, Poe entered the newly established University of Virginia, but John Allan made him leave one year later after Edgar racked up huge debts by drinking and gambling instead of attending classes. Poe was forced to return to Richmond as a clerk in Allan’s mercantile firm, but he hated the work and ran off to Boston, where he
enlisted in the army under the name of EDGAR A.
PERRY. After Poe left the Allan household in 1827,
he continued his contact with Frances Allan and
Poe’s room at the University of Virginia (Edgar Allan Poe Library, Richmond)
001-012_Poe-p1.indd 4
wrote her affectionate letters. She was chronically ill and died of tuberculosis at age 44. In letters writ-ten to SARAH ELMIRA ROYSTER, Poe revealed that
he felt guilty about Frances Allan’s death, feeling that he somehow might have been able to prevent it had he remained on good terms with John Allan and continued to live with the family. His grief was increased because he could not be with her in her final hours due to a bureaucratic delay in process-ing his military papers. He arrived in Richmond the day after her funeral.
Poe served two years in the army, after which he pleaded with Allan to help him to leave the army. Allan agreed, provided that Poe obtain an appoint-ment to the United States Military Academy at West Point, to which he acquiesced. Frances Allan had died in the last weeks of Poe’s enlistment, but she had pleaded his case with her husband, who was willing to give him another chance. Although Allan
appeared to outsiders to treat Edgar as his son, his support was never wholehearted. Allan raised Edgar as the seeming heir to his fortune, but he never legally adopted the boy. Instead, Allan, who with his partner, Charles Ellis, eventually became a wealthy merchandiser of tobacco commodities and also inherited a great deal of money from his uncle WILLIAM GALT, provided Edgar with only minimal
support. He sent Edgar to the University of Virginia but failed to provide him sufficient funds to buy furniture, clothes, meals, or books. When Edgar was at West Point, Allan refused to provide any of the financial support that would raise Edgar’s military life from its meager, rigid, and difficult existence of bare survival. Edgar might have tolerated the frugal coldness that Allan showed him, but he was intensely protective of his foster mother, whom he felt Allan had mistreated by having several extra-marital affairs and by fathering several children by
6 Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
different women. Poe quarreled with John Allan before entering West Point, and that argument, coupled with Allan’s remarriage in October 1830 to LOUISA GABRIELLA PATTERSON, created a final,
irre-vocable break. Even after his death, John Allan pro-vided one more insult to his foster son by omitting all mention of Edgar from his will, but he provided inheritances for illegitimate twin sons born in 1830, only a year after the death of Frances.
Already at the military academy but with little hope of financial support from Allan, Poe worked to be expelled, and succeeded. After he left, he began his publishing efforts in earnest. His immedi-ate literary influence was GEORGE GORDON, LORD
BYRON (1788–1824), whom he had emulated in
wearing primarily black clothing and in his predi-lection toward melancholy subjects. Poe admired Byron both for his poetry and his rebelliousness, but John Allan had earlier expressed clearly his hatred for the cult that had grown up around Byron, and he blamed Edgar’s attention to Byron for his foster son’s rebellious behavior and profligate ways. In an attempt to show that he had reformed, Poe reas-sured Allan in a letter dated May 29, 1829, that he had long ago given up Byron as a model. However, this statement is suspect, as it appears in a letter in which he also asked his guardian to write to the
publishers of AL AARAAF to guarantee the book
to the extent of $100. For years afterward, Poe was fond of reciting Byron’s poetry during his pub-lic recitations. In one lecture, presented in Lowell, Massachusetts, on July 10, 1848, his recitation of Byron’s “Bride of Abydos” was rendered so affect-ingly that one onlooker wrote that this reading was the only remembrance of the evening that he car-ried away. The influence of the Byronic personality and attitudes on Poe’s work is found in his manner of dressing in dramatic black, as well as in let-ters, poems, and several tales. A few Poe characters are thinly veiled examples of the Byronic physi-ognomy and personality, most apparently in “The ASSIGNATION.”
His first book, TAMERLANEAND OTHER POEMS,
had appeared anonymously in 1827, and the sec-ond volume of verse—his first to be commercially published—AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR
POEMS, appeared in 1829. Poe’s third book, POEMS,
appeared in 1831. In 1829, no longer welcome in John Allan’s home, Edgar moved to Baltimore to live with his paternal aunt MARIA POE Clemm
(1790–1871) and her young daughter, VIRGINIA
CLEMM (1822–1847), as well as her son Henry, an
intermittent drinker; his paralytic grandmother, old Mrs. David Poe, who had been bedridden for two years; and his alcoholic older brother William Henry Leonard, who suffered from advanced tuber-culosis. The household was poverty-stricken and survived only on the money that Henry Clemm made as a mason’s apprentice, Poe’s small allow-ance from John Allan, and Mrs. Clemm’s sewing; yet Mrs. Clemm, known as “Muddy” to her dear “Eddie,” enthusiastically welcomed him. “Muddy” was a penniless widow, but she was also a strong-willed woman who appears to have offered Poe both unconditional love and complete support in his literary attempts. Although not educated, she seems to have understood Poe’s literary genius and backed his efforts to publish his early stories, and she offered him physical and mental support as well as emotional assistance throughout his career.
With this move, Poe began a productive period of writing and publishing short stories while he also worked as an editor and established an important connection with the SOUTHERN LITERARY MESSEN -GER, where he served as editor from 1835 through
1837. For six years, Poe used the Clemm household as his home base as he traveled to Richmond and other cities in efforts to publish his writing and to make a living. During most of that time, he treated Virginia simply as his young cousin whom he called “Sis” or “Sissy,” even asking her on occasion to carry love notes to other young women whom he was courting. After his grandmother and brother died and Maria’s son went to sea, Poe felt a respon-sibility for the security of Maria and Virginia, with whom he had formed the first happy family unit in his life. In 1834, Poe expressed his love for the intelligent and beautiful 12-year-old Virginia, 13 years his junior, and proposed marriage. He tried to obtain a teaching position at Richmond Acad-emy to provide a stable income for his new life, and while he was in Richmond, his second cousin NEILSON POE, who had married Virginia’s half
sis-ter, offered to take Virginia into his household and
001-012_Poe-p1.indd 6
to care for her until she was what he considered to be of a more suitable age for marriage. The offer was refused by Virginia and her mother, who took pity on Edgar, who had written desperate letters to them in which he had expressed his passionate love for Virginia and begged her to reject Neilson’s offer. In a threatening and agonizing letter sent on August 29, 1835, Poe wrote, “Virginia, My love, my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey, think well before you break the heart of your cousin.”
In October 1835, when Poe was rehired by the
Southern Literary Messenger, Virginia and Maria
joined him in Richmond. After seven months, on May 16, 1836, the 13-and-a-half-year-old Virginia and the 27-year-old Poe were married. A witness swore that Virginia was 21. The marriage provoked a storm of disapproval among Poe’s acquaintances and his extended family, especially his cousin Neil-son, who had earlier tried to take Virginia into his household, but the marriage had Maria Clemm’s blessing. Poe made every effort to develop Virginia’s intellectual and social abilities, tutoring her in the classics, algebra, and other academic subjects, and he stretched his meager income to provide her with singing and piano lessons. Her sweet disposition and complete adoration of her “Eddie” made the first six years of marriage a time of emotional peace for the three members of the little household. For the first two years of the marriage, Poe continued to sleep apart from Virginia, but they began a nor-mal married life when she turned 16, which con-tinued until she experienced her first hemorrhage from tuberculosis when she was 20.
From all accounts, Virginia remained childlike, plump, and sweet-tempered throughout most of the first six years of their marriage. In 1842, after a period of severe financial strain, Virginia lost con-siderable weight and became ill. On January 20, 1842, while she was playing the piano and singing to amuse her husband, a blood vessel in her throat broke, and blood began to pour from her mouth. Little more than five years later, on January 30, 1847, Virginia died. In the five years from the first serious evidence of her illness, Virginia had become an invalid, and her increasingly fragile health and the destruction of her body by tuberculosis sent Poe into deep depression. He lived in daily fear
of her death, and the pain of watching her body waste away stayed with him until his own death. Many critics have seen the influence of Virginia’s five years of dying in Poe’s work during those years, especially in works that focus upon death in life, such as “ELEONORA,” “BERENICE,” “LIGEIA,” and
“The FALLOFTHE HOUSEOF USHER.” The madness
of which Poe speaks in this letter and in other com-munications becomes the madness of the narrators
of “The CASK OF AMONTILLADO,” “The TELL
-TALE HEART,” and “The BLACK CAT.” Although
“ANNABEL LEE” may reflect their relationship, it is
“ULALUME,” published in December 1847, that was
inspired by Virginia’s death and which Poe made clear was a memorial to his late wife.
During their 10 years of marriage, Poe moved the family, including Maria Clemm, to Philadel-phia and then to New York City, where he worked
as an editor on such periodicals as BURTON’S
GENTLEMAN’S MAGAZINE, GRAHAM’S MAGAZINE,
ALEXANDER’S WEEKLY MESSENGER, and GODEY’S
MAGAZINE AND LADY’S BOOK, among others. He
also published extensive criticism and numerous poems and short stories in these and other
pub-lications. He published his only novel, The NAR
-RATIVEOF ARTHUR GORDON PYM, in 1838; TALES OF THE GROTESQUE AND ARABESQUE, containing
25 stories, was published in 1840; The RAVENAND
OTHER POEMS appeared in 1845, as did TALESBY
EDGAR A. POE.
These years were Poe’s most productive, and he appeared to enjoy the presence of his wife and aunt/mother-in-law, both of whom adored and revered him and made certain that his liter-ary genius had the quiet and the comfort in which to flourish. It was also during these years of his
marriage that Poe developed the DETECTIVESTORY
format with the detective as the main protagonist and created the detective who uses his ratiocina-tive power to solve the crime, which would serve as models to later writers. Poe’s Auguste Dupin, a
French detective hero, appeared in “The MURDERS
IN THE RUE MORGUE” (1841), “The MYSTERY OF
MARIE ROGET” (published over 1842 and 1843),
and “The PURLOINED LETTER” (1845). Dupin’s
remarkable powers of deduction and his idiosyncra-sies—such as the desire to sequester himself from
8 Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
society and his procedure of entering the mind of the murderer—as well as the dual national asso-ciation of a French detective created by an Ameri-can writer, led to a range of successors both in the United States and abroad, the most famous of which was SIR ARTHUR CONAN DOYLE’s Sherlock
Holmes. Doyle used Poe’s technique of narrating his detective’s exploits through the viewpoint of a companion, and he gave Holmes intellectual capa-bilities as well as bizarre habits similar to those of Dupin. Critics have also suggested that Agatha Christie had Poe’s Dupin in mind in creating her Belgian detective Hercule Poirot, who insists that his powers of detection reside in his use of “the little gray cells” and whose idiosyncrasies are abundant.
Within nine months of arriving in New York
City in April 1844, Poe published “The RAVEN,”
and his success was instantaneous. Thus began a round of literary gatherings, invitations to lecture, and acquaintances with other writers who were later profiled in “The LITERATIOF NEW YORK CITY.”
With his newfound success came the expected great tragedy when Virginia died in 1847 of tuberculosis. Poe also became very ill and was nursed by Maria
Clemm and MARIE LOUISE SHEW, the medically
trained daughter of a physician. Shew consulted the physician VALENTINE MOTT, who told her that
Poe had had a brain lesion when young, and this was responsible for the erratic behavior through-out his life. In the remaining two years of his life, Poe continued to publish and lecture. He died in Washington Hospital in Baltimore, on October 7, 1849, and was buried in Westminster Churchyard the following day.
Poe lived and worked briefly in Philadelphia, shown here in the 1840s. (Courtesy of National Archives)
001-012_Poe-p1.indd 8
Poe had made a terrible error in appointing RUFUS WILMOT GRISWOLD (1815–1877) as his
lit-erary executor. Griswold was a Baptist clergyman who replaced Poe as the editor of Graham’s
Maga-zine, and the two men were literary and personal
rivals for the favors of FRANCES OSGOOD. Despite
their rivalry, both recognized the power that each carried in the literary world, so they maintained a tentative friendship. Once Poe was dead, how-ever, Griswold was free to wreak his revenge on his old rival. The power and authority that such an appointment brought led the public to believe every scurrilous word of the infamous obituary of Poe that Griswold published. Using the pseud-onym Ludwig, Griswold published an obituary of Poe in the October 9, 1849, issue of the New York
Daily Tribune, which destroyed Poe’s reputation
and remained the “official” view of the poet’s life
for nearly a half century. As soon as Poe was dead, Griswold began the process of exacting posthu-mous revenge against Poe, stating of his death that “few will be grieved by it” and depicting him as a mentally unstable misanthrope who “had few or no friends.” Still bitter from Poe’s attacks on his work, Griswold condemned Poe as “little better than a carping grammarian” who also had “little or nothing of the true point of honor.” Despite efforts
by JOHN R. THOMPSON, who published “The Late
Edgar A. Poe” in the November 1849 issue of the
Southern Literary Messenger, and GEORGE R. GRA
-HAM, who published in his magazine “Defence of
Poe” in March 1850 and “The Genius and Char-acteristics of the Late Edgar Allan Poe” in Feb-ruary 1854, Griswold’s vitriolic characterization of Poe became the unofficial biographical record that extended well into the 20th century and kept
10 Critical Companion to Edgar Allan Poe
Poe from achieving his full literary due. Griswold’s lies included claims that Poe was expelled from the University of Virginia, that he deserted from the U.S. Army, and that he had been “sexually aggressive” toward John Allan’s second wife. Gris-wold also made a pronounced effort to prove that Poe was a morally negligent drug addict whose concerns were only for himself. In his introduc-tion to the 1850 ediintroduc-tion of Poe’s works, Griswold misled readers by suggesting that Poe had based the portrayals in his bizarre stories on personal experience.
Poe had trusted that Griswold would make certain that his sister Rosalie and “Muddy” would have comfortable lives from the proceeds of his literary estate, but his wishes were not honored. Weeks before his death, Poe had asked Rufus Gris-wold to edit his works in the case of his sudden death, a request to which Griswold had agreed. Griswold also acquired the copyright to the works at that time and later refused to turn it over to Mrs. Clemm when Poe died. Instead, in order to publish the material with an appearance of credibility, he asked that she endorse him as executor of Poe’s literary estate and as editor of the works, which she did in a preface to the first volume of Griswold’s 1850 edition. For her efforts, she received several sets of the published works, which she tried to sell to raise money on which to survive. Left without a home at Poe’s death, she lived with friends at different times in Richmond and Fordham in New York City before returning to Baltimore in 1858. On February 16, 1871, she died in the Church Home and Infirmary, formerly named the Balti-more City Marine Hospital, where Poe himself had died in 1849.
Poe’s first English biographer, JOHN HENRY
INGRAM (1842–1916), tried in Edgar Allan Poe:
His Life, Letters and Opinions (1874) to correct the
many misconceptions created by Griswold regard-ing Poe’s character. He wrote lengthy correspon-dence to everyone he could locate who had ever had any contact with Poe. He also traced many Poe
letters and corresponded extensively with SARAH
HELEN WHITMAN and ANNIE RICHMOND, using all
the information that he could to refute the many venomous lies that Griswold told and wrote about
Poe’s relationships with women. Ingram’s enthusi-astic defense of Poe aided in reversing the common 19th-century misperceptions regarding Poe’s char-acter, but Poe did not receive serious consideration from literary critics until well into the 20th cen-tury. It was not until the 1941 biography by A. H. Quinn, Edgar Allan Poe: A Critical Autobiography, that a balanced view was provided of Poe, his work, and the relationship between the author’s life and his imagination. Even after this, however, critics such as Joseph Wood Krutch and Marie Bonaparte continued to assert that the madmen and murder-ers in Poe’s stories had their sources in his life and in his disturbed mentality. Added to the controversy over Poe’s sanity was the question of the value of Poe’s works as serious literature. Such literary fig-ures as Henry James, Aldous Huxley, and T. S. Eliot dismissed Poe’s works as juvenile, vulgar, and artisti-cally debased. These same works were judged to be of the highest literary merit by such writers as George Bernard Shaw and William Carlos Williams.
In contrast to Poe’s unfavorable reputation among American and English critics was the gener-ally more positive opinion held by critics elsewhere in the world, particularly in France. Following the extensive translations and commentaries of French poet Charles Baudelaire (1821–1867) in the 1850s, Poe’s works were received with high esteem by French writers, especially those associated with the late 19th-century Symbolist movement. Baudelaire was an early critical defender of Poe’s work, and his translations remain the best in any language. Pub-lished over 16 years from 1848 to 1864, they occupy five books of the 12-volume set of Baudelaire’s stan-dard works. Baudelaire vowed to make Poe a great man in France, even though Americans had largely dismissed him. His enthusiasm was shared by other members of the French Symbolist movement, such
as ANDRÉ GIDE (1869–1951), who proclaimed Poe
the master of the “interior monologue,” the pre-sentation of a character’s thoughts in a manner more controlled than stream-of-consciousness and on a level closer to direct verbalization, and Ste-phen Mallarmé (1842–1898), who encouraged the FRENCHCRITICS to embrace Poe’s work.
Despite Griswold’s massive campaign of charac-ter assassination, Poe’s works have endured. Many
001-012_Poe-p1.indd 10
of his poems and short stories have inspired com-posers of such diverse nations as Ireland, Russia, Lithuania, France, Sweden, Austria, and, of course, the United States to compose musical accompani-ments and other instrumentals. Renowned French impressionist composer CLAUDE-ACHILLE DEBUSSY
(1862–1918) left two unfinished operas on Poe themes, Le Diable dans le Beffroi [“The DEVILINTHE
BELFRY”] and La Chute de la Maison Usher [“The
FALLOFTHE HOUSEOF USHER”], on which he had
been at work for years and which obsessed him. Poe’s short stories have provided contemporary writers with inspiration and inspired Hollywood to place Poe’s work on screen, although most films were loosely based on the works, sometimes associ-ated only by title or the recitation of the relevant poem at the beginning or end of the movie: The Pit
and the Pendulum (1961), Tales of Terror (1962), The Premature Burial (1962), The Raven (1963), The
Masque of the Red Death (1964), The Haunted Palace
(1964), The Tomb of Ligeia (1965), The City Under
the Sea (1965), The Conqueror Worm (1968), The Oblong Box (1969), and Cry of the Banshee (1970).
Today, Poe is regarded as one of the founding writers of modern literature, both in popular forms, such as horror and detective fiction, and in the more complex literary forms of poetry and criti-cism. Unlike earlier critics who disparaged Poe’s work and sought to find the sources of his art in his mind and life, many critics today focus on the works as creative compositions. Rather than view-ing each poem and each story as simply the expres-sion of Poe’s emotions and mental state, critics now acknowledge Poe as an artist whose stories, poems, and essays exhibit his creative talents and convey a sense of modernism in literature that remains relevant more than a century and a half after his death.
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P
ART
II
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013-284_Poe-p2.indd 16
“Acrostic, An”
(1829)
Unpublished nine-line poem written by Poe some-time around 1829 for his cousin ELIZABETH REBECCA
HERRING. Thomas Ollive Mabbott included it
among the unsigned works in his definitive
Col-lected Works of Edgar Allan Poe (1969). Critics have
noted the influence of John Keats in the poem’s mention of Endymion (Keats’s poem “Endymion” was published in 1818) and the way it connects love, pride, and death.
“Al Aaraaf”
(c. 1827)
Poem written before 1827. SYNOPSIS
Al Aaraaf is the name of the region between heaven and hell, or limbo, in the Koran, as well as the name that the astronomer Tycho Brahe gave to a star he discovered in 1572. Poe applied this name to a star that suddenly appears, then disappears, when he uses a metaphor for the concept of idealized fantasy in the poem. The poem mingles science with poetry and creates a dream world of ravishing sights while it emphasizes the ideal of absolute beauty. Poe had planned to create a poem of four parts, but the first two parts became so long he chose to end it with the first two.
Part I
The first part of the poem takes place in Al Aaraaf. Al Aaraaf is a timeless ethereal plane inhabited by superior beings whose intelligence is beyond that of ordinary humans yet inferior to that of God. The inhabitants live in a paradise free of all earthly concerns, with none of the needs or conflicts expe-rienced by mortals. Prior to the beginning of the poem, those of Al Aaraaf have carried out God’s command to destroy the Earth and returned to its location “near four bright suns.” God determined that the continuing thirst for knowledge by mortals was dangerous and would lead humans to claim themselves to be equal to God. Such challenges to patriarchal domination would eventually destroy
the cosmic balance; thus, God believes that those on Earth must atone for their arrogance. The ruling presence on Al Aaraaf is God’s favorite angel, the maiden Nesace, who symbolizes ideal beauty and spirituality yet exists in a nonmaterial state. She alone in the universe can hear God’s voice directly and begs Him to elevate to a higher spiritual plane the lower beings who have come to Al Aaraaf.
Part II
The second part of the poem takes place in the temple in which Nesace lives. She calls together all of her subjects and commands the angel of harmony, Ligeia, who also exists in a nonmaterial state, to awaken the spirits of those who lie dor-mant. Nesace then instructs those assembled to devote their time to the contemplation of beauty and purify their natures so that their corporeal state will be transformed into pure idea. To those who do not, the godly realm of perfect knowledge will always remain closed. Angelo and Ianthe alone do not respond to her summons. They are lovers who are so deeply engrossed in each other that they are oblivious to Nesace’s summons. Angelo is an angelic creature, the spirit of a man who was the world’s greatest lover and creator of beauty. He leaves the Earth after dying during a catastrophe and seeks to enjoy a life of sensuality and passion with the angelic creature Ianthe, “a maiden angel” who encourages her lover to be happy on the star. In an effort to make him content with his new home, Ianthe tells Angelo that “A brighter dwelling-place is here for thee . . . grey Time unfurled / Never his fairy
wing o’er fairier [sic] world!” Their downfall is that they choose the world of passion over the world of the mind. The two remain locked in their world of passion and reject the opportunity to devote their lives to pure beauty and spirituality and to share in the world of perfect knowledge that Nesace can offer them.
COMMENTARY
The poem received little notice in its first pub-lication because of distribution difficulties. Poe submitted the poem to literary critic JOHN CLAY
NEAL, who mentioned the work in his column in
the September 1829 issue of Yankee. Although Neal called “Al Aaraaf” in the main “nonsense, rather exquisite nonsense,” he also expressed hope that the young poet “would but do himself justice.” When Poe chose on October 16, 1845, to read the poem at the Odeon in Boston, as part of his lecture before the Lyceum, he identified it
as “The Messenger Star.” The length of the poem and its abstract imagery dismayed listeners, many of whom walked out during Poe’s lecture. The press severely criticized Poe for making a poor choice of reading and provided new ammunition to his enemies.
“Al Aaraaf” is Poe’s longest poem and one of his most difficult; it is also the first work in which Poe displayed his interest in astronomy. Influenced by
numerous writers, including JOHN KEATS, Thomas
Moore, and LORD BYRON, as well as the Bible and
Oriental literature, Poe uses the poem as a vehicle to present his views about beauty, truth, God, and the nature of the universe. Bettina Knapp writes that “Al Aaraaf” may be looked upon as “an expo-sition in the steps involved in Poe’s conception of the creation of the poem, the role played by the imagination in expanding consciousness, by feeling in helping to purify and depersonalize the experi-ence” (61). Another critic writes that passion is
Illustration for “Al Aaraaf” (Edmund Dulac)
Illustration for “Al Aaraaf” (Edmund Dulac)
18 “Al Aaraaf”
013-284_Poe-p2.indd 18
portrayed as being an affliction that “hinders the poet in his devotion to beauty” (Stovall 107). As a result of his passion for Ianthe, Angelo is barred from experiencing the life of ideal beauty and spiri-tuality on Al Aaraaf.
The poem is an allegory for poetic creation that conveys Poe’s aesthetic ideas in a manner similar to Plato’s quest for the ideal. Concerned with spiritual intangibles and with uncovering intellectual concepts that are above and outside earthly views, Poe creates in Al Aaraaf a place characterized by truth, beauty, and justice. He presents an ethereal realm where celestial rules apply and where those who are willing to give up the material world and its sensual temptations will be among the very few who can glimpse absolute beauty. In the same way, only those poets who work to transcend the material world and who are willing to remove themselves from prosaic human entanglements and material needs will be able to write the perfect poem.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
“Al Aaraaf” first appeared in TAMERLANE AND
OTHER POEMS, a collection that Poe first
self-pub-lished in May 1827. In December 1829, the poem appeared in AL AARAAF, TAMERLANE, AND MINOR
POEMS, published commercially by the firm of
Hatch and Dunning.
FURTHER READINGS
Cairns, William B. “Some Notes on Poe’s ‘Al Aaraaf.’ ”
Modern Philology 13 (1915): 35–44.
De Prospo, R. C. “Poe’s Alpha Poem: The Title of ‘Al Aaraaf.’ ” Poe Studies 22, no. 2 (1989): 34–39. Knapp, Bettina L. Edgar Allan Poe. New York:
Freder-ick Ungar, 1984.
Neal, John. “Comments on Poe’s Poems.” In The
Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Eric W.
Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Stovall, Floyd. “An Interpretation of Poe’s ‘Al Aaraaf’.”
University of Texas Studies in English 9 (1929):
106–133.
Van Doren Stern, Philip. Edgar Allan Poe: Visitor from
the Night of Time. New York: Thomas Y. Crowell,
1973.
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and
Minor Poems
(1829)
Collection of poetry written before 1829. SYNOPSIS
Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems was Poe’s
second collection of poetry and the first to be com-mercially published. The collection contains the
lengthy poems “AL AARAAF” and “TAMERLANE”
as well as shorter poems “SONNET—TO SCIENCE,”
“ROMANCE,” “TO—”[“SHOULD MY EARLY LIFE SEEM”], “TO—[“THEBOWERSWHEREAT, INDREAMS,
I SEE”], “TOTHE RIVER—,” “The LAKE” “SPIRITSOF THE DEAD,” “A DREAM,” and “FAIRYLAND.”
COMMENTARY
Poe attempted to publish the collection in early
1829 while he was in BALTIMORE, waiting to hear
if he would receive an appointment to West Point. He hand delivered the manuscript of poems to the prestigious Philadelphia publisher Carey, Lea, and Carey with a long letter in which he lauded the merits of his work. Poe wrote simultaneously to
JOHN ALLAN and asked him to guarantee the
pub-lishers against loss by sending $100. Allan ignored the request, and the publishers refused to publish the manuscript, so Poe took the work to Baltimore publishers Hatch and Dunning, who compensated him by giving him 250 copies of his 72-page work. When the work came out in December 1829, Poe sent a copy to John Allan.
The publication of the collection drew harsh criticism from early reviewers who claimed they could not understand the main poem “Al Aaraaf,” and many echoed the words of the critic J. H. Hewitt, who stated, “No man has been more shamefully overestimated.” Poe did receive encouragement from novelist, poet, and critic JOHN NEAL, who wrote in an article published in
the September 1829 issue of Yankee and Boston
Literary Gazette, “He [Poe] is entirely a stranger
to us, but with all their faults, if the remainder of “Al Aaraaf” and “Tamerlane” are as good as the body of the extracts here given, to say nothing of the more extraordinary parts, he will deserve
to stand high—very high—in the estimation of the shining brotherhood.” To attract readers, Poe included as an advertisement the claim that the poems had earlier been printed in Boston in 1827 “but suppressed through circumstances of a private nature.” The truth was more mundane than the mysterious words suggested, because the self-pub-lished Poe had simply run out of money to publish more than a few copies of the work. Prefatory pas-sages in each volume revealed Poe’s moods in pub-lishing each edition of the collection. As Stovall points out, “The predominant moods of the 1827 volume as a whole are those of wounded pride and resentment for the wrongs, real or imagined, that he had suffered, and the dominant tone of the 1829 volume is one of disillusionment with the world and escape into some more congenial realm of dream or of the imagination” (205). Criti-cal commentary on the individual poems appears under their titles.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
A total of 250 copies of the 71-page work were published by Hatch and Dunning of Baltimore in December 1829.
FURTHER READINGS
Neal, John. “Comments on Poe’s Poems.” In The
Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Edited by Eric W.
Carlson. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1966.
Stovall, Floyd. Edgar Poe the Poet: Essays New and Old
on the Man and His Work. Charlottesville:
Univer-sity of Virginia Press, 1969.
“Alone”
(1829)
Poem written in 1829.
SYNOPSIS
“Alone” is a highly personal poem that expresses clearly in 22 lines the deep loneliness that Poe experienced early in life and sense of isolation that remained with him until his death. In the open-ing lines, the speaker relates this awareness that “From childhood’s hour I have not been / As others were—I have not seen / As others saw—I could not bring / My passions from a common spring.” In lines that follow, the speaker conveys his inability to feel the joy that others feel and his early recog-nition “in my childhood, in the dawn / Of a most stormy life” that others might enjoy the peace and certitude of a “Heaven [that] was blue” but he is doomed always to perceive “a demon in my view.” The speaker exhibits an awareness of his great dif-ference from the way others think and feel.
COMMENTARY
“Alone” was not published until September 1875 in Scribner’s Magazine, where it appeared with a prefatory note by EUGENE L. DIDIER, who gave the
poem its title and who identified it as having been found in an autograph album originally owned by Lucy Holmes Balderston, who died in 1881, and given to him by her daughter. The daughter of Dr.
Oliver Holmes of BALTIMORE, Lucy Holmes
Balder-Title page of Al Aaraaf, Tamerlane, and Minor Poems, published in 1829 (Robert Gregor)
20 “Alone”
013-284_Poe-p2.indd 20
ston kept the the autograph album during the years 1826–48, but the two pages written in Poe’s hand-writing and dated March 17, 1829, are the only significant contributions to the album, which is currently in the Rare Book Room of the Maryland Historical Society.
JOHN H. INGRAM, an early biographer of Poe,
disputed the authenticity of the work and wrote in 1875 that “If the caligraphy [sic] be Poe’s, it is different in all essential respects from all the many specimens known to us, and strongly resembles that of the writer of the heading and dating of the manuscript, both of which the contributor of the poem acknowledges to have been recently added. The lines, however, if not by Poe, are the most suc-cessful imitation of his early mannerisms yet made public, and, in the opinion of one well qualified to speak, are not unworthy on the whole of the par-entage claimed for them” (xlvii). Campbell writes that Ingram’s denunciation of the work may have
been due to his lack of familiarity with Poe’s early handwriting.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
Originally untitled when Poe wrote this poem in the autograph book owned by Lucy Holmes, “Alone” was not published until September 1875.
FURTHER READINGS
Bandy, W. T. “Poe’s ‘Alone’: The First Printing.” Papers
of the Bibliographical Society of America 70 (1976):
405–406.
Campbell, Killis. The Mind of Poe and Other
Stud-ies. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press,
1933.
Cauthen, I. B., Jr. “Alone.” Studies in Bibliography 3 (1950–1): 284–291.
Ingram, John H. “Memoir of Poe.” The Works of Edgar
Allan Poe. 4 vols. Edinburgh: Black, 1874–1875.
Vol. 1, pp. xvii–ci.
Lucy Holmes Balderston Album, 1826–1848. Mary-land Historical Society. Available online. URL: http://www.mdhs.org/library/Mss/ms001796.html. Accessed April 4, 2007.
Mabbott, T. O., ed. Collected Works of Edgar Allan Poe. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard Uni-versity Press, 1969.
“Angel of the Odd: An
Extravaganza, The”
(1843)
Short story written in 1843. SYNOPSIS
The plot relates the story of an unnamed narrator, a heavy drinker of alcohol who professes to be a rationalist. As the story begins, he concludes his dinner with “some apologies to dessert, with some miscellaneous bottles of wine, spirit and liquer.” After attempting to read a newspaper and “reading it from beginning to end without understanding a syllable, conceived the possibility of its being Chinese,” one paragraph catches his attention. The improbable story about a man who acciden-tally inhales rather than blows a long needle while
playing a game called “puff-the-dart” angers the narrator, who pronounces the story “a contrived falsehood—a poor hoax.” He asserts that the gull-ibility of the age has encouraged the publication of “improbable possibilities—of odd accidents, as they term them.” Commending himself for having a “reflecting intellect,” the narrator declares he will “believe nothing henceforward that has anything of the ‘singular’ about it.” He has hardly uttered these words when a heavily accented voice intrudes on his thoughts, telling him, “Mein Gott, den vat a fool you bees for dat!” After frustrating the narra-tor’s attempts to ignore him, the speaker identifies himself as “te Angel ov te Odd.” The odd-looking being claims that he is “the genius who presided over the contretemps of mankind, and whose busi-ness it was to bring about the odd accidents which are continually astonishing to the skeptics.”
The narrator’s skepticism is tested after he drives the angel away, then falls asleep because he has drunk too much. His intended nap of 25 min-utes stretches into two hours, making him late for an appointment during which he had intended to renew his fire insurance on the house. The house burns down, and the narrator breaks his arm when a hog rubs up against the escape ladder he is descending. The narrator loses his hair, then finds his attempts to marry a rich widow blocked by the antics of the angel. When the narrator attempts suicide by leaping into the river, the angel drops a guide rope from a balloon and demands, “ ‘Ave you pe got zober yet and come to your zenzes?’ ” When the narrator still refuses to admit to the reality of the absurd, the angel cuts the rope and the narrator falls down through the chimney of his house, which has been miraculously rebuilt while he wandered. He awakens sober at four in the morning, surrounded by shattered bottles and overturned jugs. Whether or not his experiences were a dream, he is forced to revise his narrow philosophy of a reasonable universe and to admit that accident, unreason, and absurd probability are real.
COMMENTARY
This tale appears to be Poe’s satire on the philoso-phy of human perfectibility. The story was highly
popular when it first appeared because of the strong public interest in spiritualism and spiritual manifes-tations of the time.
The inspiration for this story may lie in three sources: the article “It’s Very Odd,” which appeared in the January 1829 issue of BLACKWOOD’S MAGA -ZINE; “Progress of Social Questions,” published on
June 8, 1844, in the NEW YORK TRIBUNE; and a
novel titled The Man About Town, written by Cor-nelius Webbe and published in 1839. All three show minor resemblances to the story, and Webbe’s novel also includes a character who speaks in a German dialect similar to that of the Angel of the Odd. This story has not attracted significant critical attention, but psychoanalyst MARIE BONAPARTE suggests that
Poe uses it to acknowledge his demons, even if he is unable to avoid them. The addictions to alcohol and drugs, his feelings of lacking control over his destiny, and the memories of his abuse at the hands of JOHN ALLAN are all contained within the
treat-ment that the unnamed narrator undergoes at the hands of the Angel of the Odd.
PUBLICATION HISTORY
The story first appeared in print in the October 1844 issue of Columbian Magazine.
CHARACTERS
Angel of the Odd His mission is to force the
unnamed narrator to drink to excess and to acknowledge the existence of the odd, the unex-plained, and the absurd. The insulting and offensive angel speaks with a pronounced German accent. Its body is constructed of a rum cask, with wine bottles for arms and kegs for legs. The head is a Hessian canteen with a funnel on its top “like a cavalier cap slouched over the eyes.” This ridiculous personage appears to the narrator and plies him with so much liquor that the man forgets the need to renew the fire insurance on his home. He falls asleep and does not awaken until the fire insurance has expired and his house is on fire. Not satisfied with leav-ing the narrator homeless, the angel continues to stalk the man and create disaster at every turn until the man finally nods his head in assent to the angel’s demand, “You pelief, ten, in te possibility of te odd?”
22 “Angel of the Odd: An Extravaganza, The”
013-284_Poe-p2.indd 22
Grandjean, Auguste Grandjean supplies the
nar-rator with a wig to cover the “serious loss of my hair, the whole of which had been singed off by the fire.”
FURTHER READINGS
Gerber, Gerald. “Poe’s Odd Angel.” Nineteenth
Cen-tury Fiction 23 (1968): 88–93.
“Annabel Lee”
(1849)
One of Poe’s final finished poems; composed in May 1849.
SYNOPSIS
Lines 1–4
Poe introduces the setting of the poem and the character of Annabel Lee in these lines. The cre-ation of a vague time frame and the repetition of the phrase “many and many a year ago” indicate that the poem relates an event that occurred in the distant past, and the legendary tone of the setting is further emphasized by the location in “a kingdom by the sea.” These lines also introduce the charac-ter of Annabel Lee, who is described as someone “whom you may know,” through which the poet adds a feeling of intimacy between speaker and reader through use of the personal pronoun “you.”
Lines 5–8
These lines introduce the speaker’s relationship to Annabel Lee and relate the relative youth of both the speaker and Annabel Lee. The reader learns of her devotion to the speaker and that her only thought was to “love and be loved” by him, a rela-tionship emphasized by the repetition of the words
love and loved. In line 7, the repetition of the word child suggests that the love between Annabel Lee
and the speaker was an innocent, youthful love, free from the corruption of the adult world. The repetition of line 2 as line 8 in the poem creates a refrain to harmoniously link the stanzas.
Lines 9–12
The characterization of the relationship as inno-cent is further emphasized in these lines, as the writer repeats the words love and loved and places the relationship above merely earthly affection by
suggesting that “the winged seraphs” envy the lov-ers’ feelings for each other.
Lines 13–16
In these lines, the speaker reemphasizes the jealousy of the angels, whom he blames for the death of Annabel Lee, which appropriately occurs at “night.” After line 14 repeats the refrain that appears in lines 2 and 8, the speaker tells of the chilling wind that emerges from the sky—the realm of the angels— which results in the death of his beloved wife.
Lines 17–20
The reader learns more about the background of Annabel Lee in these lines, as her funeral is also introduced. Reference is made to her “highborn kinsmen,” which suggests that she is a member of an upper-class family. The impression of her higher
Poe’s handwritten version of his poem “Annabel Lee”
social class also emerges in the speaker’s use of the formal word sepulchre, rather than tomb. The finality of the separation of the couple emerges in the speak-er’s worry that others will “shut her up” and place her “away from me,” as well as in the final line of the stanza, which is the refrain from lines 2, 8, and 14.
Lines 21–26
These lines repeat the speaker’s belief that the envi-ous angels caused Annabel Lee’s death by blowing a chilling wind from the cloudy sky above, and the use of the word Yes followed by an exclamation point suggests the growing frenzy of the speaker. Poe reemphasizes the legendary tone by using the phrase “as all men know” in line 23. The appear-ance of the refrain in line 24 reminds the reader of the loss that has occurred, as does the use of the term chilling in line 25, which also sets the mood for the speaker’s deep sorrow, which is complete in the final line of the stanza, which relates the “killing” of Annabel Lee.
Lines 27–29
Contrasted with the horror of death related by the use of the term killing in line 26, the lines follow-ing remind the reader of the deep love shared by the speaker and Annabel Lee. The word love is repeated, and the speaker relates that the couple has experienced a more intense love than that experienced by older and wiser people.
Lines 30–33
The speaker relates his faithfulness to Annabel Lee and makes clear that his loyalty continues beyond death, despite the attempts of “angels” to destroy the deep love of the couple. In “Poe and the Art of Suggestion,” Richard Wilbur relates that the lines in which the speaker professes his never-ending love are very similar to those that appear in St. Paul’s Epistle to the Romans (chapter 8): “I am persuaded that neither death, nor life, nor angels, nor principalities, nor powers, nor things present, nor things to come, nor height, nor depth, nor any other creature, shall be able to separate us from the love of God.”
Lines 34–37
In these lines, the speaker uses references to the celestial bodies to immortalize Annabel Lee and to assert that his love for her is eternal. He speaks of the “moon” and the “stars” as his messengers who bring him her love in the form of “dreams” and who project to him visions of her eyes.
Lines 38–41
The final lines of the poem place the emphasis of the poem squarely on death, in contrast to the repeated attempts by the speaker to keep memo-ries of the love relationship alive throughout the first 37 lines of the poem. Despite the speaker’s references to his “bride” and the repetition of such terms as my darling and his characterization of her as his “life,” the reader learns that the speaker vis-its the entombed Annabel Lee each night and lies next to her. The final two lines, parallel construc-tions beginning with “in her” and ending with “the sea,” create a strong sense of finality to the relationship as they end the poem, a feeling that is supported by the identification in this stanza of
Illustration for “Annabel Lee” (Edmund Dulac)
24 “Annabel Lee”
013-284_Poe-p2.indd 24
Annabel Lee’s resting place as both “sepulchre” and “tomb.”
COMMENTARY
“Annabel Lee” contains themes that appear in many of Poe’s works, such as the death and burial of a beautiful woman, undying love, and deifica-tion of her memory. Despite strong contemporary sentiment that Poe composed the poem to memo-rialize his love and loss of VIRGINIA CLEMM, after
his death other women in his life, including SARAH
ANNA LEWIS, HELEN WHITMAN, and SARAH ELMIRA
ROYSTER, claimed that they had been
immortal-ized in this poem. The poem recounts a love so powerful that even the angels feel envious of the bond, which transcends death and overcomes both human and cosmic forces that seek to “dissever my soul from the soul of the beautiful Annabel Lee.” Poe’s words also exhibit his resentment for the years of poverty that often left him powerless: “So that her high-born kinsmen came and bore her away from me.”
The repeated profession of the speaker’s love for Annabel Lee might mislead readers into view-ing the poem as simply the anguished cries of a lover mourning a dead love, but “Annabel Lee” is far more complicated in meaning. The poem examines a range of important themes beyond the survival of love beyond death, among them the issues of memory and reminiscence, the con-sequences that death has for the living, and the destruction of innocence, concerns that perme-ate the works of Edgar Allan Poe. The speaker states that the events of the poem occurred “many and many years ago” and admits that his tale of the relationship with Annabel Lee is based upon memories that have existed after a long pas-sage of time. The considerable distance between the events described and the current relation of these events suggest that more of the memories are based upon idealized versions of reality rather than accurate recall. The intensity of the speaker’s grief, despite the acknowledged passage of “many years,” indicates that this is an abnormal, obses-sive grief and makes everything else he relates sus-pect. Was the brief love affair with Annabel Lee as pure and ethereal as memory suggests? Are his
memories of their happiness accurate, or are they, instead, based upon a false and idealized memory of Annabel Lee? Poe uses the symbol of the sea to represent memory and links it to the speaker’s life with Annabel Lee because they lived together “in a kingdom by the sea.” The sea is also linked with her death, as the reader learns in the final two lines, which tell us that her body is laid to rest beside the sea, and the speaker fears that the sea will also separate him from his beloved. He speaks of demons lurking under the sea who might “dis-sever” his soul from hers.
The poem is also very concerned with the effect that death has upon the person or people left behind and explores the problems they face in con-tinuing to live. As the memory may be distorted in relating a love and a life after “many years,” so is reality distorted by the speaker who provides no medical or physical reason for the death of Anna-bel Lee, other than that a “chill” came upon her. Rather, he escapes into a metaphoric illusion of envious angels who act to destroy their deep love and who take her from him. Ordinary disease or accident would not be strong enough to destroy his deep love; only the intervention of supernatural beings is powerful enough to do so. The expla-nation offered by the speaker indicates more of an inability to accept the death, a psychological weakness, than an all-enduring love that survives beyond the grave.
The poem presents a speaker who struggles to maintain his love against the disapproval of oth-ers who are more socially powerful than he. The speaker relates that he and Annabel Lee were children, thus suggesting that their love was first opposed by the adult world. Later in the poem, the threat to their love comes from a more powerful source, the angels who are envious because these young lovers appear to enjoy more happiness on Earth than the angels in heaven. After suggesting that the more privileged angels have caused the death of Annabel Lee, “her high-born kinsmen” take her body away from the speaker. Throughout, the speaker struggles to maintain a love affair in the face of opposition from powerful forces–adults, angels, and the upper social class.
