I need help on an Edgar Allan Poe assignment that isn't due until January 17, but I want to get mine done by December 6...PLEASE HELP ME I LOOKED EVERY WHERE TO FIND IT. Oh yeah I also need the Internet Address that u found it on...THANK YOU

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2002

Answers

Sorry here are the questions that I need help on.

List three people important to Edgar Allan Poe that died in his lifetime.

What else in Poe's life could have led him to write works with evil and death as their theme?

Write three questions you would ask Poe if you could and then create the answers. Respond as Poe might, if he were alive.

-- Anonymous, December 01, 2002

Three people: well the most important would be in my opinion, his mother, Mrs. Stannard and Virginia Poe. These three express his deepest sense of himself and his life's search for his special vision. His mother, without benefit of Freud, he did not know but the absence of a female figure and rejection by the fathers(real-who died soon after and adoptive- Mr. Allan)I would think determined his need and the way his poetic vision coalesced in loneliness and search ofr something else, usually feminine. Mrs. Stannard was a friend's mother, therefore also remote and unattached but imaprting him with that spoecial artistic encouragement and calling that made her a Muse and by her death an evenm more perfect Beatrice guide- on a child's level. Virginia was his wife, a real down to earth bond whose loss devastated him. It seems the entire feminine need in his soul was dead and lost to him and strained his powers of transcendance and idealization.

Poe found a literary inspiration in the British Romantics and the Gothic genre popular at the time. When other losses struck at his central core(need for a "Helen" etc.) he treated them poetically as a death and tragedy with hyperbole in the symbolism. So some writings that you might think dealing with a death are really inspired by a romantic failure using the examples particularly of Byron's loves. The combination of terror, loneliness, melancholy and beauty were natural to him since a boy("Alone") and saved his works from being conventional in that literary circle sense. He also treats the themes fairly uniquely with less flowery or philosophical similes and more trying to capture an ambiguous awe tinged with shadowy vagueness, the actual, more honest state of us all straining in this life to see the higher mysteries.

Three questions: Did you intend a sequel to your novel? Answer: Yes, but subsequent discoveries a long time coming ruined the thesis for the conclusion which I might have done in a magazine installment of the three "lost chapters" of Pym. Also, it was a misunderstood commercial failure. It had some power in its ending as it was and there is no need to dress up a corpse once it has been buried.

Why did you not write more about Mary Shelley? She seems to have a lot in common with you and was the daughter of Godwin whom you admired and perhaps were influenced by? Answer: Well, she shared with her father also a need to instruct and moralize, which however much her heart matched my own in sympathies, put us rather far apart. And she was older, rather distant, controversial and had suffered the pox, as I heard from Washington Irving. Go talk to him. I suppose if her father were to attempt a Gothic tale it might come out strangely as "Frankenstein". My "William Wilson" gets to the crux more quickly. Well written and without those extreme "hyperbolic Germanicisms" as Sir Walter Scott says. One always, eventually, writes too much in a novel as the emotions flag.

Well now is Annabel Lee Virginia or not? Answer: When I wrote it I tried not to make it specifically so, though the heart must betray the poet's words. It was a little strainging and confusing at the time. I needed money. I was trying to get on with my life and career desperately and I am not embarassed to say this production was a worthy and satidsfying one. I did tell one or more ladies they were the inspiration. And they were- in the sense that all women, women in my life particularly and that beacon Hope of my soul were Annabel Lee- and Helen or Lenore, and so forth. I suppose people will insist I made fool out of myself mixing grief, love and desperation so unsympathetically. THat was the life of the poet. The poem though is Annabel Lee, and she exists here(points to heart) still in a feeling I cannot escape and a memory that...

-- Anonymous, December 02, 2002