From Eulalie to Ulalume--the Muses of Edgar Allan Poe

A good dozen or so poems by Edgar Allan Poe feature fictional or semi-fictionalized women characters enshrined forever in often heartfelt verse. Today, we will classify ten of them, whom I place in three distinct classes:

Most of them are femmes tragiques, the members of Poe’s “dead lovers” club and they include Annabel Lee, Lenore, Ulalume and Irene. An equal number are straight-up muses, women whom he celebrates in romantic odes: Helen, Ligeia, Isadore, and Eulalie. Finally, there is a smaller category, which I call the angels, the helpers, who soothe and succor: they are the down-to-earth Annie and the more ethereal Psyche.

One is tempted to generalize and an argument could be made that these characters stand in a spectrum for Poe’s ideal of femininity, but that would probably be an over-simplification because these characters represent different real women, and different thoughts about women; though there may well be some bleed-through. Eulalie, from the prefix “eu-” meaning “good,” translates as “sweetly speaking;” at the other end of the spectrum, Ulalume, associated with the Latin “ululare,” which means “wailing,” strikes a more somber note.

Here, without further ado, is an alphabetical listing, with some minor observations.

1. Annabel Lee from “Annabel Lee” (1849). The titular heroine of one of Poe’s most famous poems stands out as the object of a perfect love, truncated by a tragic death, but cast in triumphalist Romanticism where love conquers all, including premature death. The “maiden” herself is a Juliet type, willing to risk it all for love and devoted to “no other thought” than the highest virtue of love.

2. Annie from “For Annie” (1849). One of Poe’s most tender and evocative heroines is also the most realistic or, shall we say, the least romanticized. Annie is someone who nurses Poe back to health during a “crisis” illness and who shows him the full breadth of feminine nurturing, but without crossing the line into the sexual. She is the flesh and blood incarnation of Psyche, his spiritual “sister.”

3. Eulalie from “Eulalie” (1843). An outlier poem, “Eulalie” stands Poe’s usual themes on their ear, supposing an unhappy past and a blissful present (as opposed to the usual happy past, followed by a tragic present). Yet one has the distinct feeling that this “yellow-haired young Eulalie” will morph into the dead bride of poems such as “Lenore:” “The life upon her yellow hair but not within her eyes.”

4. Helen from “To Helen” (1831) and “To Helen” (1848). In both poems with the same name, we get the same message: a beautiful woman remembered in an iconic pose, perhaps years later. In the first poem, the figure evokes Helen of Troy; in the latter poem which describes a similar scene, we get the impression that she is a flesh-and-blood woman from Poe’s life.

5. Irene from “Irene” (1831) and “The Sleeper” (1841). The unique contribution Irene makes to the “dead lover” sequence is that we get a flashback from the tragic woman’s childhood which sets her up to parallel Poe’s own haunted childhood. As such, it offers a valuable insight into Poe’s concept of tragic love (also mirrored in “Annabel Lee:” “I was a child and she was a child…”).

6. Isadore from “To Isadore” (1845). Isadore is almost a carbon copy of Helen, above: “Last eve in dreams, I saw thee stand,/Like queenly nymphs from Fairy Land…”

7. Lenore from “Lenore” (1843) and “The Raven” (1845).  Immortalized in Poe’s most famous poem, “The Raven,” Lenore is the most famous name associated with Poe’s gothic love theme. But the character is most developed in the eponymous “Lenore,” and its predecessor “A Pæan” (1831). In these poems, as in “Annabel Lee,” the young lover’s loss is compounded by class inequities.

8. Ligeia from “Al Aaraaf” (1829). Ligeia is almost a throw-away line, except that the content of the phrases is so evocative that it elevates the character to a rarified and sublime ideal. In a way, this is typical Poe: we don’t learn that much about Annabel Lee, but we know that she and the narrator loved with a love that was “more than love.” Similarly, we must accept that Ligeia’s “harshest idea will to melody run.” But, the thought of it sets the heart racing!

9. Psyche from “Ulalume” (1847). Like Annie, Psyche is an angelic helper who stays by Poe during a time of pain and delirium. She anchors him to reality and becomes ensnared in his delusions. More than any other female companion, Psyche is defined as Poe’s spiritual twin: his “Soul.” Like the androgynous “Shade” in “Eldorado,” Psyche is a spirit guide and fellow traveler at the same time.

10. Ulalume from “Ulalume” (1847). Ulalume is the ultimate tragic figure, crossing over into a horror trope. In the longer version of the poem, her corpse becomes a sinister “thing” hidden in the woods in the suppressed final stanza, just as she has been blocked in the narrator’s memory; a loss too powerful and tragic to be acknowledged, she is relegated to a forest haunted by “ghouls.”

There you have the women represented in Poe’s verses, who are given a name and a basic personification. Notably, Poe did not do this for male characters in his poems, other than the narrators whom we take to be autobiographic avatars, and occasional stock characters, seldom even named.