Hello... I'm doing a research paper on Poe, I have to write about his themes and philosophy, yet I can't really find any good ones. They must be about death, young women's deaths...no, not the relationships between his life and his work but what he believed and put in his works? Thanks...

-- Anonymous, September 15, 2002

Answers

At www.eapoe.org read Poe's critical essays. Someone once said all of Wagner, at least the Ring Cycle, could be reduced to four themes. perhaps Poe is even simpler. The peculiar Beatrice-like muse, almost but never satisfyingly redemptive(as for Baudelaire)is a personal and poetic core for his most serious work. The nature of that relationship,and all relationships that end in loss, leaves this positioning of Poe as another important theme, the poet trapped between the lost past and the unseen future at the terrifying edge of death where loss is certain but not hope. Memory and revolt are not so much an answer as an obsession which Poe also is unhappy with(also Baudelaire). The poete damne of one of the first living eamples. His sought cosmic answers, experiences and philosophies all to resolve and answer this core, honest anguish. this forged his art,but to say it provided THE answers he sought would be only partially true. Like Faust he was always seeking and unsatisfied, always trapped with death approaching from one side and the ghosts from the other.

So what is next important is that, like Coleridge,he sought order, new science and progressive reason to answer what religion and rtradition could not in these extreme condtions. The amalgam is the peculiar creation of that century's Romantic movement(Frankenstein eg). Poe however seems the most honest or the least satisfied with his yearning for hope. Having a tough life didn't encourage optimism although he obstinately kept trying.

-- Anonymous, September 19, 2002