Poe’s works are evidently a reflection of his life — he writes about himself. First of all, Poe incorporates the death of loved ones in his literature, just as Poe lost many of his close ones. He lost the people who were most important to him: his wife, his mother, his foster mother, and the list goes on. All these people supported him exhaustively. Without them, Poe had nobody to lean on. In a letter to a dear friend, Poe writes about his wife, "Each time I felt all the agonies of her death — and at each accession of the disorder I loved her more dearly & clung to her life with more desperate pertinacity". In the poem "Annabel Lee", the male narrator was in unabridged love, loving "with a love that was more than love". Much to his dismay, …show more content…
The plot revolves around the narrator trying to forget and get over her death — to no avail. Both these stories are very similar to the relationship Poe had with his wife, Virginia Clemm. She, like the lover in the first poem, and Lenore, in the second, dies quite young, leaving Poe all alone. This proves that there is a big relation between Poe’s life and his literature. Furthermore, one can assume that he purposely wrote in memory of his wife. Second of all, Poe writes about alcoholism rather frequently. With the death of his wife, Poe experiences depression and turns to alcohol. It's his escape mechanism, and serves its purpose quite well. Similarly, in "The Black Cat", the narrator is a heavy drinker. Frequently, he finds himself intoxicated, and as such, does many atrocities. The effects of alcohol are further explained in "The Cask of Amontillado", where one of the main characters, Fortunato, is often inebriated. Oblivious to his friend Montresor's intentions, he drinks much without a care in the world; this leads to his eventual demise. These two works are evident reflections of his addiction, as, in both, there would be no story if there were no