as Poe would ever know, he seemed to have a mother complex from the time he was little until his death. His preoccupation with this is found in his works, and he ended up being with many women in an attempt to receive the nurturance he had from his mother, “Perhaps it was the sustaining breast, the mother image, that the childlike and innocent poet continued throughout his career to seek in the loving embraces of real women of his acquaintance, flesh and blood models whom he sometimes converted, rather unnaturally, into the pale and spiritual phantom-heroines who inhabit his supernormal stories and ghostly poems,” (Braddy, 1973: 5).
Poe evolved in his views on love over the course of his career. However, it was love that was his driving motivation. In his youth it was mother-love, in his adolescence it was self-love (as we see in works like Dreams and Alone), and in his later life it was the love for another. Poe would eventually end up marrying his thirteen year old cousin Virginia Clemm, who would eventually die of tuberculosis. All the
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