Influence of Poe's Life on his Poetry

The effect of a poet's life upon his poetry is always an important issue. One of the reasons "The Raven" by Edgar Allen Poe is so frequently used as an example of this is that the poem itself so clearly shows the influence of Poe's private life upon his thinking.

To understand the influence of Poe's private life on "The Raven," it is necessary to know that Poe "married his 13-year-old cousin, Virginia Clem. She died eleven years later." Although it is well known that Poe wrote the poem "Annabel Lee" about his beloved lost bride, the influence of her loss upon his thinking can also be clearly seen in "The Raven." And yet, "The Raven" has such an intense sense of loss that even the loss of his beloved bride doesn't seem quite enough to account for it. Reading further into Poe's life, one can find additional reasons for the hopelessness and loneliness of "The Raven."

When Poe was a very young child, he was orphaned and was raised by a man who, while giving him a good home, did not choose to adopt him. To have lost both of one's parents at a very young age, and then to be taken into a home where one's welcomeness is always doubted, since the child has never been adopted, one understands better the sense of lost chances in "The Raven." For Poe had lost each of the essential personal relationships in life prior to his writing it (mother, father, wife). So if in "The Raven" as in much of his other work, Poe seems obsessed with death, this is not unnatural in a man who had se

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h of it on himself. It was because of this self-destructive quality of Poe's that D. H. Lawrence observed in his Studies in Classic American Literature that "He was an adventurer into the vaults and cellars and horrible underground passages of the human soul. He sounded the horror and the warning of his own doom." In reading of Poe's private life, it's hard not to hear Lawrence's phrase that Poe "sounded his own doom" frequently. For Poe in many ways seemed unequipped for the realities and the hardships of life. In the poem "The Raven," the character repeatedly asks the raven questions in hopes that one will give an answer that provides some sense of hope beyond the finality of death. But when the raven keeps repeating "nevermore" to the questions, making clear that death is a very final and uncrossable line, the man in the poem shouts and curses at the raven. In many ways, this reflects Poe's own life. For a man who seeks and pleads for the truth, and then when he gets it, to shout and hurl curses at the person who reveals the truth, is not a man who will find life very easy. So when D. H. Lawrence refers to Poe "sounding his own doom," he means everyone has their terrible griefs, and extreme hardships in life. But we must

Category: Literature - I