The Role Of A Beautiful Woman In Edgar Allan Poe's Personal Life

As a child, Poe would watch his mother perform on stage every night. He would be sitting front row watching the beautiful actress commit suicide every night due to her role as Juliet from Shakespeare's famous play. After the curtains closed, Poe’s mother would take young Edgar and go on with her evening (Edgar Allan Poe). Now, as an impressionable young child, Poe would see his mother die on stage and then see her “come back to life”. This led to Poe’s fascination with death. In “The Raven”, “Annabel Lee”, and “The Cask of Amontillado”, death is the main component. In “The Raven”, Poe talks about a man who was going mad while trying to forget his love who had just died. The fact that this woman is dead contributes to Poe’s theme of death. Now, this is not the only piece of literature that has to do with a man’s love dying, in the poem “Annabel Lee” Poe

Edgar Allan Poe is regarded as one of the most famous writers of all time. He is known for his sinister and horrific tales and his seemingly pessimistic view on life. This overwhelming theme is rarely questioned by other writers and fans alike because of his personal tragedies; it is only fitting that a man as disturbed as Poe would write such troubled stories. It is common knowledge to most that Poe had a heartrending life; he lost his biological mother, adoptive mother, and wife all before he went to college. Poe used the tragic premature endings of his family members as inspiration to write his trademark literature, lengthy eloquent works revolving around fatality. It is atypical for one of his stories to not mention death in one way

Usually, fairy tales are in connection to big and illustrious happy endings. But in Edgar Allan Poe’s case, it is evident that they do not exist, for his stories more often than not bear a grotesque demeanor. His life was surrounded by death. All of the women in his life died young, including his mother, sister, and wife. By the age of three, he had experienced what most would not experience until nearly the middle or end of their lives. Living in such an atmosphere allowed Poe to reach deep into his emotions when writing. Edgar Allan Poe was known for his macabre metaphors. These metaphors challenged the reader to endeavor themselves into his simple words; coming to find the gothic elements portrayed. He most commonly portrayed love and death in his poems. Poe is even credited with contributing to the emerging genre of science fiction. Edgar Allan Poe utilizes symbolism and portrays an envious love tale, ending in tragedy to expose the speaker’s emotional state in the poem “Annabel Lee.”

Furthermore, the next example is when the About Edgar Allan Poe text states, “He was attached to Frances who was so much like the biological mother he had loss” (2). This explains that his adoptive mother had practically became as close as his biological mother, and she inspired his writing just as much. Frances inspired his view of women as angels, as she treated him much kinder than her husband who abandoned Poe financially, and for that he felt she deserved respect. Additionally, her death from tuberculosis most likely inspired his similar story, The Masque of The Red Death. The final example is when the Poe Biography article claims, “His young cousin, Virginia, became a literary inspiration to Poe as well as his love interest. The couple married in 1836” (3). This illustrates perfectly how the women in Edgar’s life inspired him and his literature. It shows how, unlike the men in his life, women were angelic figures of grace, and muses that inspired beauty in his writings. In conclusion, in the world of Edgar Allan Poe, the women in his life have treated him significantly better than the

Lenore is thought of to be a representation of Poe’s deceased wife Virginia. He did not want to get over the loss of his wife. “Leave my loneliness unbroken! – quit they bust above my door! Take thy beak from out my heart, and take they form from off my door!” (The Raven). In the poem, To My Mother, Poe writes about his own mother taking care of Virginia in heaven and becoming her mother as well. The death and mourning of his wife did, in fact, come out in his writing. Poe is very lonely at this point in his life and misses his wife Virginia. “For ‘mid the earnest cares and woes That crowd around my earthly path, (Sad path, Alas, where grows Not even a lonely rose!)” (To One Departed). Death is a time in life that scares Poe and he thinks of it as being evil, because the two women he loved dearly died. He did not always think of death as being an evil thing. In Tamerlane, Poe knew that death was a part of life and he seemed content with the idea of dying. “Father, I firmly do believe – I know – for Death, who comes for me…. Else how, when in the holy grove” (Tamerlane).

For context, Poe is known to set up several instances to which a death of a beautiful woman is either inevitably played out, or said death is being lamented upon. Often times it is the narrator, unnamed, written to mourn, or speak on the behalf, of a dead woman, to which had significant value to them. Either a lover, signifiant other, what have you, the mourner has romantic ties to the deceased, thus creating the relationship between the living and the dead.

Poe adores his foster mother Francis, which later dies of illness on February 28, 1829, in Richmond. Poe suffers enough agony and despair for two lifetimes by the time he turns twenty. Just when it seems like Poe’s life couldn’t get worse, his brother Henry dies in 1931, of tuberculosis, after Poe relocates to Baltimore. Once more, in 1924, Poe loses another important woman in his life, yet again to terbuculosis, her name was Jane Strannard. Poe called her “the first, purely ideal love of my soul,” notes author James M. Hutchisson in the biography Poe, “[Jane] inspired one of [Poe’s] most beautiful poems” (Hutchisson 13). Stannard the mother of one of Poe’s friends from William Burke's school. Poe attaches to Jane extremely quickly after he meets her. Another, important women in his life, is his wife Virginia Poe. Poe and Virginia married on Monday, May 16th 1836. Poe loved his wife dearly, “my own sweetest Sissy, my darling little wifey”, he called her, confirms author of The Modern Library Of Biography Edgar Allan Poe, Brian Morton (Morton 91). Poe’s wife succumbs to terbuculosis, and dies on January 30, 1847. After Poe’s wife dies, he could not bear with it. He is “[miserable], erratic, and

Almost every story and every poem of Poe’s had something to do with death. The reason being is he had dealt with so much death especially of loved ones in his life that it became a part of his life story. He lost most of his loved ones due to tuberculosis. Both of his mothers and his wife passed away due to this disease. Death kind of became a mystery to Poe because it happened so often to the ones he loved.

During the year 1831, Poe made public a compilation of new poems. At this time, Poe lived with his aunt Marie and his cousin Virginia. At the age of twenty-seven, he marries Virginia. Correspondence with his father indicated that he was in need of money

Edgar Allan Poe was a popular American author during the Romantic Era. During this era, authors wrote with emphasis on emotion and imagination, and Poe fits this stereotype perfectly. John Chua describes his reasons for writing by saying, “Poe’s writing aims at a concentrated affection or emotional response from the reader.” In many of his poems, Poe uses characters and plots that touch both the reader’s heart and imagination. These characters were often modeled after actual people in his life, such as his mother and many lovers. His poetry became even more famous after his death because of the “evil” persona that was adopted to his name (Meyers 263). In fact, two of Poe’s most famous poems, “Annabel Lee” and “The Bells,” were published after his death in 1849 (Poetry of Edgar Allan Poe). He achieved this reaction by using many different literary devices. Edgar Allan Poe’s biographical background contributed to the theme of death, role of women, and the use of doppelgänger to produce an emotional response from the reader.

“Beauty is the sole legitimate province of the poem” Poe, Edgar Allan. The Philosophy of Composition. 1846. The name Poe often brings to mind tales of horror and mystery, but this Poe was also a writer of sophisticated poems, capable of extreme poetic beauty within a dark genre of writing. Poe never lived the happiest of lives, but his writing is extraordinary, both for its execution, and for the sheer elegance of the words which he found to write upon the page. Death is among one of the recurring themes which Poe explored. Dark and stormy compositions focussed around such ideas serve only to illustrate Poe’s writing style. One can see that such a horrid subject is clearly derived from the writer’s distraught life which would almost appear to create a trail of death in the writer’s footsteps. That being, Poe discovered the secret to writing. Edgar Allan Poe chose to write in an incredibly dark area of literature, but the mastery with which he explores such subjects is applicable to writing in the whole of literature.

Edgar Allan Poe had married his fourteen year-old cousin, whom died ten years later at the age of twenty four, from Tuberculosis (Ljungquist N.P.). After Virginia died, Poe became lost, alcoholic, drug addicted, and debauchery (Szumski 20). “Under the adroit cover of the special mechanism he had constructed, Poe could unveil his inner, introverted self

Picture this. The father of modern crime and detective stories, known as Edgar Allan Poe, is sitting down about to write a beautiful piece of writing and BAM! He whisks away into a story of love, death, and just plain out horror; either characters are losing someone near and dear to their hearts or they are plotting to kill. Edgar Allan Poe, at a very young age, lost both of his parents, and later on in life, lost his wife to tuberculosis, so in one way or another, these stories reflect off of his personal experiences. A major theme in Poe’s writings is death. The theme of death is seen throughout the works of Annabel Lee, the Cask of Amontillado, the Raven, and the Black Cat.

In his writing, the reader can taste the depression, emptiness, and sorrow Poe has felt in his lifetime. In Poe’s story “Alone” he believes that his childhood was “the mystery which” has bound him to the good and the bad (line 12). In Poe’s early age his father left and his mother died from tuberculosis. Soon after Poe’s mother’s sorrowful death, he was adopted by John and Frances Valentine Allan which meant he had to be separated from his brother, William Henry Leonard Poe, and his sister, Rosalie Mackenzie Poe at a young age (Biography.com Editors). Before Elizabeth Poe’s death, Poe and his mother had a genuine relationship. Elizabeth Poe was an actress and Poe went to his mother’s plays where she would play Juliet in “Romeo and Juliet.” During this play, Poe would witness his mother croak and then revive, which gave Poe an odd aspect of life and death. Between Poe’s birth father leaving and his foster father’s neglect, Poe never had a strong male figure to look up to. Poe has experienced heaps of death of his loved ones throughout his life, losing both his, birth mother and his foster mother to the Grim Reaper by illness. The vicissitude in Poe’s life has influenced Poe to write his deep and meaningful poem,

Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836,she was only 13, then in 1837 they went to New York there he published the narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym his only novel. In the summer of 1846 he moved with his wife to a cottage in what was a rural area in Bronx N.Y; she died there of tuberculosis in January of 1947.On October 3, 1949, in Baltimore a stranger found him delirious and in need of medical attention, a few days later he died at the age of 40 from unknown causes.