LITR 4232: American Renaissance

Sample Student Research Project, spring 2006

Sarah Hardwick

April 21, 2006

Edgar Allan Poe: Death Becomes Him

Edgar Allan Poe’s life situation created his eccentric writing style which was apparent throughout his works.  From his birth in 1809 until his death, some forty years later, Poe’s existence had been trying.  The theme of love and loss is evident in many of Poe’s writings, with a complete in your face account of such sublime and gothic aspects.  It is obvious through Poe’s writings that he intends to affect the reader’s emotions.  His popular style of writing allows the reader to come to a conclusion from the suspense that he has woven.  This is opposed to a classic writer that never answers questions the reader may have, such as Nathaniel Hawthorne does in “The Minister’s Black Veil” with the mysterious reasoning of the veil.  This is not to say that Poe is not classified as a classic writer, as he utilizes and employs elevated language to a supreme degree.  His short stories and poems gained popularity late in his short life due to his harsh style as a literary critic and his ability to simply tell a good story.  By gaining access to the New York world through criticisms, publication of “The Raven” was possible which allowed instant stardom into literary circles (McGill 2459-2461). 

Poe’s use of the gothic and sublime is very Romantic in literary nature, which also generates popular stories and poems with an eternal appeal.  The component of light and dark creates the gothic form, and when Poe adds a lurid color such as blood, red the element is over the top.  Another gothic attribute that Poe seems to add is the haunted space theme of decay and death with gothic arches and windows that seem to have eyes.  The setting is also meaningful to gothic and sublime writings.  An American gothic setting tends to be an enclosed place such as a coffin or a dark forest, while sublime surroundings tend to be vast and indescribably awesome.  He creates his own style using gothic aspects in which many writers have imitated and used for inspiration.  Clark Griffith states that “…Poe’s fiction is better unified but, at the same time, darker and much gloomier than the eighteenth-century Gothic had been” (131).  Poe redefines the meaning of Gothic and creates a new bar for the term.  The incredible imagery in many of his pieces creates a wildly admired surrealistic appeal in literature. 

Desire and loss is a subject which runs throughout Edgar Allan Poe’s life and affects his literature.  Coping with the loss of his parents at a very young age is only a glimpse into his woeful life and destructive.  Poe’s love of gambling tore him and his foster father apart, in part causing him not to be named his inheritor.  Poe began trying to support himself as a writer, which proved to be very difficult in making ends meet.  As editorial jobs began to look promising to Poe’s success, many ended in resignation due to his drinking and problems with his supervisor.  Poe’s wife, Virginia, died at a very early age creating another painful aspect to his unhappy life.  Even his death marked his life, which found him drunk, disillusioned and dying at age forty (McGill 2459-2461).  With the lack of control of his finances, drinking, and career he took control using his writing in which to relate to people.  Poe allowed his feelings of love and loss in life to be tapped, and he created many works by which any reader can relate.  Because he experienced such loss in his short life, this allowed him vast sensitivity. He was then able to create writings that were very real and translatable to the reader.

The poem “The City in the Sea” allows a look into Poe’s darkness which Poe was published, first in 1831, at the age of twenty-two.  By this time in his life, he had already experienced obscurity.  Rita Brenner writes: ‘“The City in the Sea” reveals a world typically Poesque in its sense of strangeness and desolateness…” (164).  In the poem, the gothic tone is set by the first line in the poem with the word “Death” which has been personified by using the words “reared himself” (Poe 2533).  The personification of death pushes through the poem also in line 29: “Death looks gigantically down.” (Poe 2533).  The capital D in “Death” allows it to be almost a name, and by allowing “Death” to be personified it is the only living being in the poem because “…the good and the bad and the worst and the best / Have gone to their eternal rest.” (Poe 2533).  The poem touches the sublime by suggesting a mysterious “light from out the lurid sea” but does not arrive “from the holy heaven come down” (Poe 2533).  The explanation of light is sublime because light can only naturally comes from the sun, but the poem suggests the light may be coming from the “Death” figure itself.  The sea within the poem sets itself apart from any other with the line: “Upon some far-off happier sea-- / No heavings hint that winds have been / On seas less hideously serene.” (Poe 2534).  The sea alludes that it is like no other, and it is almost a hellish place. 

Poe uses many literary devices in “The City in the Sea,” which allows it to be such a literary epic. The fairly evident rhyme scheme of aa, bb, cc, flows through the poem allowing a melodic quality.  The simplicity of the rhyme is not to be effortless, but it allows a sensory pleasure.  When direct rhyme is not utilized, a half rhyme is put into place for the same effect.  Poe utilizes cataloging in “The City in the Sea” as Walt Whitman does in “Song of Myself”.

            Streams up the turrets silently—

            Gleams up the pinnacles far and free—

            Up domes—up spires—up kingly halls—

            Up fanes—up Babylon-like walls—

            Up shadowy long-forgotten bowers

            Of sculptured ivy and stone flowers—

            Up many and many a marvelous shrine… (Poe 2533)

The listing of the description of the light allows the reader to understand the substance that is implied when referring to the mysterious light.  Critic Joseph Garrison declares the “most striking metaphor in the poem—the ‘wilderness of glass,’ an oxymoron that prepares for the phrase ‘hideously serene’ in the last line in the stanza.” (1-2).  Garrison continued by explaining, “The city is so still and so transparent in its stillness that it becomes a ‘wilderness of glass’, it is a place where everything is like everything else…” (2).  Poe uses the simple device of a metaphor and adds a juxtaposition of “hideously serene” to make the reader’s mind see an odd combination of words which allows one to feel the shockingly calm sensations for the first time. 

            The poem “Annabel Lee” brings the theme of love and loss back once again. Poe allows a glimpse of himself because the poem was published in 1849, and his wife died in 1847.  The narrative voice longs to be close to his deceased wife and therefore he “lie[s] down by the side / …In her tomb by the sounding sea.” (Poe 2546).  The sublime within the poem is brought about not until the third stanza, after describing the unbreakable love between the lovers until death almost came and took her.

 A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling

My beautiful ANNABELL LEE;

So that her highborn kinsman came

And bore her away from me,

To shut her up in a sepulcher

In this kingdom by the sea. (Poe 2546)

The sense of someone or something coming out of the sky and taking someone to death is a boldly sublime notion.  The narrators’ idea that “neither the angels… nor the demons… can ever dissever my soul from the soul / Of the beautiful ANNABELL LEE…” is gothic because both ends of the spectrum, good an evil, are explored.  The final stanza has a bone chilling gothic aspect when the narrator “feel[s] the bright eyes” and as he “lie[s] down by the side” of her grave (Poe 2546).  Ultimate devotion is expressed in the poem because the narrator loves Annabel Lee beyond her death.

            Literary devices are used within “Annabel Lee” to add texture to the ballad.  The rhyme scheme is not as formal and structured as in “The City in the Sea”, but there is rhyme in which to bring a harmonious quality to the party.  Many of the rhymes do not come at the end of the lines, but in the middle, “The moon never beams, without bringing me dreams” (Poe 2546).  This technique allows the reader to hear the rhyme as opposed to looking at the ending of each line.  The dashes within the poem allow the reader a pause which emphasizes the language.  The weight and detail to the language allow the poetic qualities to flow through to the reader.

            Edgar Allan Poe led a disheartening and rather short life due to destructive behavior.  His prose as well as poetry reflected much of his life of love and loss.  The detail of the language and the imagery used within his works allows a classic feel to his works.  Romanticism is present through his works with the illusions of nature and the lure of the supernatural, along with the pure intensity of each work.  Gothic fits Poe like a glove because in all of his writings, there is some evidence of strong irrational emotions.  Poe never found love or acceptance while alive, but his writings allow any reader to relate to the pain of loss in life.  In the end, Poe is loved and admired by his readers because the connections of human emotions are bound greater by the writings of this true American Renaissance writer. Poe shall be remembered greater in death than life, a footnote which would surely bring a smile to this prolific and tragic great.

 

 

Works Cited

Garrison Jr., Joseph M. “Poe’s The City in the Sea.” Explicator 48.3 (1990): 185. Academic Search Premier. 5 April 2006. http://search.epnet.com.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “The City in the Sea.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th Ed. Vol. B, Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865. Boston: Houghton Milfin, 2006.

Poe, Edgar Allan. “Annabel Lee.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th Ed. Vol. B, Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865. Boston: Houghton Milfin, 2006.

McGill, Meredith. “Edgar Allan Poe.” The Heath Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. 5th Ed. Vol. B, Early Nineteenth Century: 1800-1865. Boston: Houghton Milfin, 2006.

Griffith, Clark. “Poe and the Gothic.” Critical Essays on Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric W. Carlson. Boston: Hall and Co, 1987.

Brenner, Rica. Twelve American Poets Before 1900. New York: Harcourt, 1933.