Quoth The Raven - Poe Poetry Blog

Sir Galahad - the Quest of the Holy Grail, 1870 by Arthur Hughes. “Eldorado” (1848) is Poe’s take on the classical grail quest—California Gold Rush edition—with a touch of swan song, to boot.   The “ gallant knight ” is practically a lost Templar from Medieval Christendom and, as in the classic grail romance, he is traversing a vast expanse that has been laid waste—a wasteland.   And the destiny he seeks is not an actual place, but a spiritual state of realization, a way to escape the false existence of the wasteland by finding the ultimate spiritual fulfilment. At the same time, the poem tracks the themes found in other Poe poems, namely the idea of a gilded childhood, and a happiness lost in adulthood, followed by a melancholic longing to recover that “ joy departed .”   In the first stanza, our Knight is “ Gaily bedight ”—he is cheerfully attired, we can imagine him sporting bright colors and chic fashions as he goes forth, “ Singing a song .” But, by the second stanza, “ a

Poe (r.) and his wife/cousin Virginia (l.). And true love caresses —  Oh, leave them apart;  They are light on the tresses,  But lead on the heart. “Al Aaraaf,” (1829) . Edgar Allan Poe never overtly wrote about sex in his poems.   Nor did he write about it covertly or with innuendo; he simply seemed to skirt the subject (no pun intended). This has led to much speculation about whether Poe was asexual or even impotent, and also to various attempts to psychoanalyze the writings for symbolic or subliminal sexual references. This blog is not a gossip rag, nor amateur shrink ops, so we will not go down those particular rabbit holes.   Instead, we will examine a few passages and propose an explanation for Poe’s dearth of sexual material in his poetry. As a preliminary matter, I do not accept that the lack of explicit discussion of the subject by itself signals that anything was awry with Poe. Graphic descriptions of sex were simply not customary in poetry at the time, at

A 24 year-old Edgar Allan Poe produces a competent and memorable poem that resonates with his oeuvre with his 1833 offering, “To One In Paradise.” The title is a double-entendre , the word “paradise” referring both to earthly delights as well as to the afterlife. The four-stanza poem explores familiar Poe themes, including a dead lover , a narrator fixated on the past, lost happiness, fatalism, and the allegorical use of natural place settings. The aspect of the poem that merits our attention on first approach is its lovely, slender architecture, reminiscent of the Poe house on Amity Street in Baltimore, where the piece was written, while Poe lived there with his aunt Maria and his cousin Virginia. The top of the structure, the first stanza concerns the “earthly” paradise, while the last stanza looks to the afterlife. The first stanza gazes back longingly on the past, while the final stanza looks to the future with pathos and foreboding. Skillfully set in the middle, one quatra

Edgar Allan Poe, who was abandoned by his biological father and disowned by his adoptive father, ever only once addressed fatherhood in a poem, and it was an Oedipal turn, in his early epic poem, “Tamerlane” (1827) . Although the poem, on its surface, is a fictionalized account of the life of a Turkic conqueror known as Timur (1336-1405), Poe knew little about the historical figure and fleshed out much of the detail with autobiographical filler. The central theme of the poem is the Gothic-Romantic idea that ambition can interrupt romantic love.   We see this notion developed in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein , where Victor’s marriage is sacrificed when his obsession with creating life takes over his energies, and we see this concept starkly presented in the film adaptation The Bride of Dr. Frankenstein (1935), where we see the dueling juxtaposition of the scientist’s “unnatural” dreams against his “wholesome” desires (sexual and otherwise). We see it a little bit, too, in some of Po

Edgar Allan Poe‘s most famous poem “The Raven” is an allegorical poem. We know that it is not simply the story of a black bird who visits a morose mourner, but it is above all, about the narrator and the cocoon he shelters himself in to be able to cope with crippling loss. The narrator is so walled-off from reality that the raven may well symbolize the final and ultimate alienation that the narrator experiences, in which he finally says farewell to sanity. There are nine successive delusions contained in the poem, which show us that the narrator is continuously misperceiving reality, and that his existence is a perpetual illusion. The misunderstandings gradually become more extreme, until, in the end, they overtake reality. The first misconception is that the narrator thinks the tapping he hears outside his door is his dead lover, Lenore. He whispers her name into the darkness, as if he actually believes that she will answer him and reveal that she is still as alive in the