Edgar Allan Poe
- A Critical Study on Edgar Allan Poe -My first experience of Edgar Allan Poe's work started when I first read and uttered these lines from his poem Annabel Lee±: That a maiden there lived whom you may knowReading the first few lines of the poem has affected me in a way that I never really expected. When I read the lines of the poem, I was surprised to feel a gust of salty damp air, to hear the crashing waves, to see the pale beam of the moonlight from that cold night and to feel his pain when the angels, not half so happy in heaven, took from him his life and his bride c¤ his beautiful Annabel Lee. I was able to experience the real essence of the poem through my senses; I was able to see and live through the imagination behind the words of the poet. My interest in Edgar Allan Poe was stirred from then on and I began to explore his brilliance through his works. I appreciated his work as it was able to awaken my senses and allowed me to exude emotions from his words. Most of the poems done by the poet, I noticed, were dark and brooding, as if a shadow was cast over it. I tried to seek an explanation for the
The Allans treated Edgar as if they were his own son: they dressed Edgar like a young prince and took him each summer to White Sulphur Springs and other fashionable resorts± (Meyers 9). Poe may have his life wallowing in misery. He found in Romantic poetry an artistic correlative for his own unhappy life (Meyers 52). Poe has remained contemporary because he has always appealed to basic human feelings and expressed universal themes common to all men in all languages: dreams, love, loss, grief, mourning, alienation; terror, revenge, murder; insanity, disease and death (Meyers 304). Frances Allan lavished on him an affection which was strong as it was deep. Poe's use of rhyme and rhythm in the poem permitted him to achieve the indefiniteness he wanted, to be suggestive where statement was impossible, to imply those vague fancies and half-dreams that escaped direct description. Poe himself advised that Biography is not merely a sketch of the poet's life- It is a gradual development of his heart and mind, of his nature as a poet and a man that endears him more to us, while it enables us more thoroughly to comprehend him± (qtd. He compares, in sensual rhythm, Jane Standard's loveliness, which symbolizes a classic ideal, to ancient triremes that carry an exhausted but victorious Greek warrior home foe the fragrant coast of Asia Minor (Meyers 17): Lo! in yon brilliant window-niche How statue-like I see then stand, The agate lamp within thy hand! Ah, Psyche, from regions which Are holy land!The subject of Ulalume± is very simple: the longing of a weary widower for a second wife after the loss of his first, yet all the while fearful that he might not find a great love in the second marriage (Davidson 93). For several years in the 1840s, he suffered through Virginia's bout with tuberculosis, finally losing her in 1847. The theme of "The Raven" is the narrator's grief over the loss of an ideal love, it is about a lonely man who tries to ease his sorrow for the lost Lenore. During his years at Burke's school, Edgar became intimate with Jane Stanard; the mother of his friend Robert, who took interest in the young Edgar, an affection which was returned to her by a son's loving devotion. Ambition: Poe sacrifices his first passionate love for his fianc¨¦e for the sake of great achievement and then discovers that success without love is empty indeed (Davidson 4): How was it that Ambition crept,Unseen, amid the revels there, Till growing bold, he laughed and leaptIn the tangles of Love's very hair Elmira also inspired Poe's Song±, her engagement to another man caused him great pain and in his poem, he suggested that she still loved him though she had married another (Meyers 19):I saw thee on thy bridal day-When a burning blush came o'er thee,Though happiness around thee lay,The world all love before thee:One of the major themes in Poe's whole corpus of writing is his longing for the mother, for a kind of female nightshape, who is never there and will never come± (Davidson 47).
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