Sex and Edgar Allan Poe

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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.



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 least not in the Romanticism and Gothic literature that Poe identified with (as they would be in poets of the following generation, for example, Walt Whitman). But the fact that graphic depictions were shunned does not mean that the subject should be omitted altogether; Shakespeare, for example, wrote about sexuality without resorting to descriptive depictions of sex acts, in the main.  Poe, on the other hand, largely avoids the subject, either explicitly or generically.

So, what gives? In this regard, I accept Lorine Pruette’s analysis in her 1920 piece, “A Psycho-Analytical Study of Edgar Allan Poe,” published in The American Journal of Psychology, Vol. 31, No. 4, to this extent (only):

His nature demanded the adoration and approval of "woman," rather than sexual conquests, and he worshiped in his poems a feminine idealization to which he ascribed various names. These women are never human; they are not warm flesh and blood, loving, hating or coming late to appointments—they are simply beautiful lay figures around which to hang wreaths of poetical sentiments.
We see precisely this “feminine idealization” in his archetypical “To Helen” (1831):

Helen, thy beauty is to me 
Like those Nicéan barks of yore, 
That gently, o'er a perfumed sea, 
The weary, way-worn wanderer bore 
To his own native shore.

The same holds true for the 1848 more extensive poem by the same name, which is structured differently but ultimately holds the same themes: a beautiful woman remembered in idealized fashion.
The closest Poe comes to describing sensuality is in one such poem that idealizes and lionizes feminine virtue, the platonic love-letter, “For Annie” (1849).  In it, Poe paints the subject as the epitome of all noble female qualities: she is beautiful (“Bathing in many/A dream of the truth/and the beauty of Annie”); she is motherly (“She covered me warm,/And she prayed to the angels/To shield me from harm”); she is sisterly (“I rest so contentedly … With her love at my breast”); she is angelic (“It glows with the light/Of the love of my Annie”) and, not least of all, she is lover-ly (“It glows with the light/Of the eyes of my Annie”).
Describing the attentive way in which Annie nurses him back to health after a serious and debilitating illness, the narrator describes a tender scene, in which the caregiver seems to give herself over body and soul to his recovery, until he is “Drowned in a bath/ Of the tresses of Annie.”  Then he describes an exquisitely sweet scene:

She tenderly kissed me, 
She fondly caressed, 
And then I fell gently 
To sleep on her breast— 
Deeply to sleep 
From the heaven of her breast.
The scene is undoubtedly sensual, describing an intimate moment that is made the more charged because of the narrator’s vulnerability and the caregiver’s complete domination at the moment.  But that is as far as it goes, and it would be grasping at straws to attempt to extract more—though it bears noting that Annie takes on a more fleshed-out humanity than other Poe heroines.
Apart from this, other than the occasional “kiss upon the brow” (in “A Dream Within A Dream,” 1849), Poe generally avoids sensuality in his poems.  This is because the treatment he gives his love interests usually cycles between the abstract worship discussed above, and the melancholy, mournful motif of his “dead lover” series.

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