who was guy de vere?

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if anyone can help me with this please do, i want to know who guy de vere was, as mentioned in "lenore" i believe his identity holds a major point that would help me in my lit A level coursework, any pointers would be very helpful thanks! neal

-- Anonymous, February 04, 2002

Answers

Poe's contemporaries were very put out by these unexplained references. Let them stew, Poe would say. The effect of the sound, the mystery are more important than the reference itself as in most of Poe's works.

But what have we here Guy DeVere? In 1842 there was a novel by John Plummer Ward called "DeVere, or the Man of Independence(1827) that Poe had mentioned in a review of Bulwer's "Poems in the Broadway Journal"(2/08/1845 and in 1849 in the marginalia number 220. These may be found online at www.eapoe.org. A poem by Tennyson"Lady Clara Vere Devere" doesn't seem to fit.(Mabbot's Complete Poems of edgar Allan Poe.) Apoem reviewed of Dr. Chivers about a Guy Devere. Only the name fits.

The poem appears a complaint by sanctimonious "mourners"(like Book of Job) that DeVere does not mourn the doubly dead, the most ideally pathetic of all melancholy deaths according to Poe himself. DeVere lets them have it and rejects their ceremonies as hypocritical, unwanted by the now happy enthroned Lenore in heaven. No dirge but a Paean celebrating her new happiness with happy memories of the past(the two lost ideals for the stranded poet here and in several other poems.)

-- Anonymous, February 05, 2002


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