How Is Edgar Allan Poe Cop With Grief

Every individual person has their own unique way of coping with grief. For Edgar Allan Poe, he utilized his grief to generate dark and intense tones in his stories. The initial death of his mother, due to tuberculosis, prompted a series of deaths of women whom Poe loved. It would not be incorrect to understand that these deaths incidentally inspired how Poe wrote his stories, taking into consideration the dreary and spooky style in which the stories were written. In Edgar Allan Poe’s works “To Helen,” “Annabel Lee,” and “The Raven,” beautiful and dead women are portrayed as the mere objects for Poe’s general mood of his poems, as the representation of the dead women Poe loved in his formative years, and as the spiritual motivation of the narrator’s

Moreover, they are the objects that constitute the established mood of the poem. In Poe’s famous work “The Raven,” it is apparent that the narrator’s mood is affected by the loss of his former love: “From my books surcease of sorrow—sorrow for the lost Lenore,” (Poe 189). He is clearly grieving the loss of his own Lenore—all the while he hears repeated tapping and is excessively tired. This suggest that, under the narrator’s circumstances, he is losing his sanity with the focus of his troubles being that of losing Lenore—the woman that controls the mood of the story. In a similar way, Karen Weekes explains, “Poe never truly wrote about women at all, writing instead about a female object and ignoring dimensions of character,” (Weekes 111). Poe has used

Harold Bloom articulates, “the poem…is a response to the deaths of ‘beautiful women,’” (Bloom 1). Throughout the poem of “Annabel Lee,” Annabel Lee is a reference to a woman that was in Poe’s life, Virginia, Poe’s wife who died of tuberculosis. This death, among others, inspired Poe to write his dark and twisted stories. However, “Annabel Lee” was a reflection for the loss of his wife, and as for the narrator, a reasoning as to why he lost his love. Poe writes: “But we loved with a love that was more than love…with a love that the winged seraphs of heaven coveted her and me,” (Poe 193). Poe is alluding to his wife Virginia and using her death as a way to create the character of Annabel Lee who also dies as the narrator blames it on the angels, or seraphs, in heaven that covet their love. Once again, Bloom draws similarities between Annabel Lee and Poe’s life in the way that “Poe curiously blends the natural and supernatural, as ‘chilling and killing’ also suggests the all-too-real circumstances of death from tuberculosis,” (Bloom 2). In the poem, Poe mentions the chilling that killed Annabel Lee. This could be used as an allusion to the illness that took Virginia away from Poe. In a different sense, the female characters in Poe’s stories act as motive for the narrator’s