how did death in poe's life affect his poetry

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how did death in poe's life affect his poetry and what poems?

-- Anonymous, April 16, 2002

Answers

Actually I think Poe had an unresolved horror of death in its reality. His most death centered poems actually used it symbolically rather than personally(sometimes using death as a metaphor for a romantic failure). In Annabel Lee we see defiance within the grief, obsession and avoidance horribly mixed. In his letters to Lowell who had lost his wife Poe does not seem to want to discuss it, nor ever gets biographical except in the rending, long decline of Virginia which emotionally destroys the romantic conceit of the beautifully melancholic tragedy of death. He still comes back to it but the tone is more agonizing and desperate. I don't think Poe came to full term with any deaths, deprived of his mother at too young an age to grieve, but suffered the wound of each like an unremovable ghost his whole life.

-- Anonymous, April 17, 2002

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