Quoth The Raven - Poe Poetry Blog

Sleeping Beauty by Victor Gabriel Gilbert This year, for Halloween, Poe’s “The Sleeper” (1841) is dressing up as a vampire. Actually, she doesn’t really need a costume because if we look at her closely, we may observe that she already fulfills the requirements. Let’s face it, the poem begins at midnight, under a full moon, amid foggy ruins, nodding flowers and a drowsy lake, and we find our undead heroine, Irenë, sleeping in an open coffin. As I pointed out in my earlier analysis (which included a recitation of the poem), an earlier draft of the poem included the word “ vampyre ” in the verse. In fairness, the word was only used as an adjective, to describe the batwing-like panels of Irenë’s family crypt. But we need not dust-off ancient contents from the vault to appreciate the vampirical elements in the poem because they are there in plain sight. The words of the poem, taken at face value, tell the story of a dead woman who does not appear to be dead, and who finds herse

“Zombie Edgar Allan Poe” by K. Werner If a Voodoo Zombie is someone enslaved by a witch-doctor’s spell; a Romero Zombie is an infectious reanimated corpse; and a Philosophical Zombie is a hypothetical human with no conscious experience who is indistinguishable from a normal person, then a Poe Zombie is a “sentimental” zombie, someone who longs to be loved but is, due to some life trauma, “dead” to the life of the heart. Poe summed up the criteria for a sentimental zombie (though he never used that term) in an early draft of a poem I previously wrote about ( here ) as a “perfect poem.” In an earlier version of the same poem, Poe wrote an intriguing addendum which he later excised: ‘T is not that the flowers of twenty springs Which have wither’d as they rose Lie dead on my heart-strings With the weight of an age of snows. Nor that the grass — O! may it thrive! On my grave is growing or grown — But that, while I am dead and alive I cannot be, love, alone.

Despite his reputation as a master of the macabre, Edgar Allan Poe did not generally write poems about supernatural bogeymen. Instead, his poems were all about setting up the mood where any bump in the night is suspected to be our dead lover, and melancholy is so thick it turns to dread and suspense that you can cut with a swinging pendulum. Although Poe did not write about ghosts and goblins, he makes one exception for one character who recurs in a few poems: the ghoul. Poe’s ghouls are not central to his narratives, but they are sufficiently developed that we can describe them and distinguish them from the stock archetype. In fact, their peripheral nature blends into the type of character Poe’s ghouls represent—they are background figures, they may be unseen, operating in the shadows.   For example, in the poem “Dream-Land” (1844) , they are mentioned in a passing allusion, merely to add weight to the atmospheric setting: By the grey woods,—by the swamp    Where the toad

A lock of hair from Poe’s burial (l.); a fragment of his coffin (r.) One hundred and seventy years ago, on October 9, 1849, Edgar Allan Poe was buried in the Westminster Hall and Burying Ground in Baltimore, two days after his unexpected death. Less than ten mourners attended the rained out ritual, which seemed to confirm the conviction expressed by Poe in one of his poems, “The Conqueror Worm” (1843) , which posits that human life is a meaningless absurdity and that the worms that feast on human remains triumph over our very existence: That the play is the tragedy, “Man,”   And its hero, the Conqueror Worm. [Listen to the audio of my recitation of the poem at the foot of this post.] Poe’s poem is gloomy, dismal, fatalistic. It projects itself over some apocalyptic future, “ the lonesome latter years ” in which humanity seems to have been extinguished. The only “ gala ” in this bleak epoch involves “ an angel throng ”—as there appear to be no humans to be found. In Poe’s

Photographic images of Poe modified with FaceApp to show him smiling. If you have ever read any of the obituaries for Edgar Allan Poe published at the time of his death 170 years ago, you know that they generally lauded him as a knowledgeable and accomplished literary figure who had achieved national renown, but they also contained disclaimers such as he was controversial and not universally liked, as well as the inevitable observation that, because Poe died so young (40), his legacy seemed obviously incomplete. How would we update that analysis today? Go to Wikipedia and you will know that Poe is regarded as a master of the macabre, the father of detective fiction, and an influential literary celebrity, if you will indulge the use of that term. However, Poe the poet remains a somewhat underdeveloped commodity, despite the fact that even the first obituaries acknowledged the popular success of “The Raven,” and his other poetry and essays about poetry have been influential wit

Colorized version of the ‘Annie daguerreotype.’ (May/June 1849, possibly commissioned by ‘Annie.’) Edgar Allan Poe’s “For Annie” (1849) recounts a near-death experience that proved to be prophetic, in many ways, as to Poe’s actual death later that year. When Poe died on October 7, 1849, he spent the last couple of days of his life in apparent delirium, speaking incoherently, and “in great distress.” That state is certainly approximated in the “ lingering illness ” described in the poem, characterized by “ moaning and groaning ,” “ sighing and sobbing ,” “ throbbing ,” “ nausea ,” “ thirst ,” and a “ fever/That maddened my brain .” The resemblance to real life was not accidental; the poem is believed to be based on an actual episode in which a troubled Poe purposely overdosed on an opium preparation and nearly died. Not surprisingly, some have surmised that Poe’s real death came under similar circumstances, through another overdose of alcohol or some other substance—though the

Illustration Edmund Dulac, 1912 Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Bells” (1848) is another example of a poem that must be recited and heard recited aloud and, for that reason, this blogpost includes an audio of my reciting the poem at the bottom of the post. “The Bells” is a composition of sound; it is onomatopoeic— about sound, it imitates sounds and plays with sound to evoke sound, and to evoke emotions evoked by sounds. Like other Poe poems, it relies on the sound effects of words—things like rhyme and alliteration—and on meter, the rhythm of the words when strung together, to create a very musical composition. Poe was inspired by the sound he heard coming from Fordham University's bell tower in the Fordham Manor neighborhood of the Bronx, New York, where Poe lived the last few years of his life (he had also written a poem about the Angelus bells ). Poe adopted the thesis that the bells are metaphor for life, and a thematic construct that divided his poem into four sections. T