The Poe “Zombie”

“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.

Poe writes: “I am dead and alive” and tells us of the conundrum that creates because, although grass is already growing on his grave, he nonetheless “cannot be … alone.” The nineteenth century mind found these lines so shocking that John Haskell Hewitt, admitting the surface implication to be “offensive,” pretextually surmised that Poe must have meant that he was clearly still alive, and only “dead to certain friends of his past.” Thomas Ollive Mabbott, Complete Poems By Edgar Allan Poe, p. 137 [available online, here].  But a purely figurative death is hard to square with Poe’s assertion that grass is growing on his grave, and with similar language from other poems that suggests Poe felt “dead” inside in a way beyond having lost touch with his acquaintances.

For example, in “For Annie” (1849), Poe declares that “the fever called 'Living'” has been “conquered at last,” and concedes that his condition is such “That any beholder/Might fancy me dead.”

Similarly, in “To One In Paradise” (1833), Poe asserts that, “alas! alas! with me/The light of Life is o’er!/No more,” he tells us, “Shall bloom the thunder-blasted tree,/ Or the stricken eagle soar!”

Is Poe saying that he is literally dead? Well, no. But there is a part of him that has died: he is like a “thunder-blasted tree” that no longer can “bloom,” or like a “stricken eagle” that no longer can “soar.” Or as he puts it in the deleted verse of 1828, “the flowers of twenty springs” (he was approximately 20 years-old at the time) “Lie dead on my heart-strings/With the weight of an age of snows.” In other words, the part of him that is dead (or frozen over) is that faculty of the heart—the capacity for romantic love.

This implicates the oft-asked question of whether Poe was an “incel” (someone who is unable to find a sexual partner despite desiring one). I have previously written that his poems do not necessarily shed light on Poe’s sex life. The “Poe Zombie” theory does not impinge on my earlier conclusion that the poems are silent as to his sexual activity; being a “Poe Zombie” is truly limited to “sentimental” issues, meaning that it has to do with feeling oneself emotionally or psychically (not) ready for love.

It may be very fitting, then, that, in “Ulalume: A Ballad” (1847), Poe says “the lonesome October” to describe the month of Halloween—the season of zombies and other creepy creatures. After all, isn’t failure in love the scariest horror story of all?