Hi, i was reasearching poe for a report due in like a month, and with all the stuff he wrote that i have read so far, he seems to have 2 seperate personalities. He has dark evil stories and then good ones. Does anyone think this is a possibility?? And also, if he had multiple personalities, do you think its possible he commited murder, becuase he seems very knowledgible about murdering someone. Perhaps he even got some of the people close to him, like his cousin/wife, virginia.

I am just curious, not trying to offend anyone or anything, peace out.

-- Anonymous, October 16, 2003

Answers

read the poem annabel lee its about virgina. i dont think anyone who has that much love for someone would kill them. plus Virgina died of T.B. not murder.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2003

Writers don't, as a rule, live out the things they write. Patrick O'Brian didn't fight in the Napoleonic Wars, Robert Heinlein never traveled to other planets, and (as somebody else in this forum pointed out) Anne Rice isn't a vampire. Poe never murdered anybody. The worst harm he was capable of doing was criticizing somebody's writing too harshly. And as for Virginia, I get the feeling that he would happily have laid down his own life if by so doing he could have saved hers.

Gahan Wilson once said that horror writers tend to be very gentle people in real life. Their chosen subject forces them to think about things the rest of us would rather not face, like human mortality and the darkness and evil in EVERY human heart. This teaches them compassion. This certainly seems to have been true of Poe.

-- Anonymous, October 17, 2003

Part spirngs from the dual gifts and life circumstances of Poe himself. He was strongly inuitive and creative yet supremely analytical and scientifically curious, the antithesis of superstition and wild passion mixed with strong feelings and torments from poverty, alcohols and personal tragedies. As an American he shared the vitbrant frsh optimisim and innocent curiosity and enthusiasm for progress and some disdain for old Europe and its aristocracies. As a Southerner he got caught in the cultural rift between the two sections and the predominance in education andletters of the North.

The composition of his mind is common to great composers and it is not surprising that musical structure and emotional abstraction bnatural to music should find a premier place in his writing. He said music should not have a story or explanation to mediate its effect upon the listener but should be appreciated wholly for the sounds themselves.

As to the effect of drink bringing out his "dark side" it is evident but more mundane than the extreme fall of the murderer in "The Black Cat". Then the writings themselves reflect duality here and there according to the divided mind of the Romantic era, symbolic of troubled rebels at war with themselves and their culture. Curiously, Poe was often more personally engaged in relaying those emotions with genuine focus in his poetry than most of the British poets, but freer from the social alienation of the dying monarchies of Old Europe.

These splits are not pathological madness and being multi-gifted is not evidence of multiple personality disorder. William Wilson is more a tale of a person haunted so much by his past that falseness and rationalization becomes a personified Imp of the Perverse, which is a better fictionalizing of Poe's helpless awarensss of his obsessions and self-defeating ideals.

-- Anonymous, October 18, 2003