Poe

Edgar Allen Poe remains one of the greatest writers America has ever produced. Yet, his reputation is often marred because of his drug and alcohol use, particularly alcohol. However, his brilliance as a writer was more inspired from the disadvantages and hard luck that plagued him his entire life than it was from any kind of chemically induced high. Death and love are his central themes and Poe was greatly influenced in his works from the many women he loved and the many close people in his life who died. This essay will explore how the various misfortunes in Poe’s life are apparent as influences in his writing.

One of the biggest influences from Poe’s life on his work was the unusual amount of death he experienced in his personal life, especially of those closest to him. His mother, a woman he loved, his foster-mother, and finally his wife all died early deaths. This death of those he loved is one of the factors that spurred in his writings his preoccupation with the intermingling of love and death. His story, William Wilson, is pretty much autobiographical and Poe tells us he is “his own pitiless destroyer…most men, were they honest, might make a similar confession. Yet, with Poe this was not entirely true. He might have destroyed himself, but the seeds of that destruction were germinated in childhood. Always haunting him was the thought of the death of his mother, then of the death of a wom

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and death, the divine and the earthly, “With the agony over Virginia’s death…now the eternality of love could be sensed, seen, experienced in the unbroken spiritual ties with Sissie [from Eureka] and her image which memories evoked. White could mean space; black, explosion; red, birth. The gigantic universe, through eons contracting and through eons expanding, Poe suddenly and clearly saw as animated by a life-giving heart throb, by attraction and repulsion. The birth of man as a microcosm could grasp the secret of the cosmos as the macrocosm. Round and round love compelled the world to go,” (Braddy, 1973: 10). In other words, Poe could see his own experience with love and loss as a microcosm of the universe as a whole with its eternally perpetuated cycles of creation and destruction. In a sense, from a Darwinian standpoint, he understood that life continuously evolves from the point of birth to the point of death. Only by focusing on love with the understanding that the two are interdependent and unavoidable can one accept with fulfillment the way in which love requires both to be real love. For this type of love is the real love because it is true to nature (both human and physical) because it is the only type of love t
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Some common words found in the essay are:
William Wilson, Word Evermore, Sissie Eureka, Heart Divine-what, Allen Poe, Virginia Clemm, Lee Braddy, Divine Guiding, Annabel Lee, Shakespeare Sonnets, braddy 1973, love love, edgar allen poe, heart throb, virginia clemm, type love, lindsay 1953, death love, women loved, 1973 10, braddy 1973 10, foster-mother finally wife, love loss,
Approximate Word count = 1720
Approximate Pages = 7 (250 words per page)

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