i need to write a research report on Poe but i dont know what to write about. I got stuck on trying to write about how his life affected his poetry. i would appreciate some help

-- Anonymous, January 07, 2004

Answers

Relax and surf through the interactive site at knowingpoe/thinkport.com and www.eapoe.org, orisse's poe pages, links etc. There is a Poe Studies magazine printed in part online.

That common topic how his life affected his poetry is in fact tricky and usually full of over assumptions, but it is a genuine topic. Sometimes the general simple sounding topics are the hardest, and done so much just getting beyond the mistakes is extremely difficult.

Poe mined his own misfortunes in romantic losses as a recurring practice and was not afraid of using the results to address more than one flirtation. More profoundly, as in the poem Alone or The Lake, Poe is trying to write from a central inspiration unique and disconnected from this life except from symbolic signs discovered in nature or dreams. There is some confusion on identiifying loved ones or events in those poems and sometimes Poe would exagerrate in story form the actual sentiment orloss. Yeats made a clear statement about the idealization of his exp[eriences and the flaw in trying to equate the poetic women with real women in his life. The same was true in Poe as a reading of "The Philosophy of Composition" will show.

However we can see the wearing, the despair change the tone and conclusions of his poems as life goes bad. "The Raven" with the beginning of his wife's tuberculosis begins a shaking of his naive confidence in handling death and loss, in presuming hope and the triumph of the soul. "Ulalume" more specifically idealizes the mourning of his dead wife. "Annabel Lee" at last is a tale of the lone bereaved poet again, nearly mad with obsession and defiance for whom his love is mostly a sound or faint stars in the sky. Beyond hope or depsair he keeps vigil with the bond by the sea, another fantastic organic combination of sight, sound, theme and plot. Ironically no one can say for sure to whom the poem refers, if anyone, as it is the state of the poet that is the single concern. Which brings one full circle back to the beginning at "Alone" whghich was pre-hope and pre-experience.

-- Anonymous, January 12, 2004

Write a short story about a young female singer who dies while straining to sing a high note. A blood vessel bursts in her brain, similar to Tammy Turrell, Jackie Wilson, Laura Branigan, & Maria Callas in our time. As a result of her death, her adoring husband, a poet, mistakenly over-excites his pet cat while trying to distract himself by playing with his pet. The cat, who has incipient rabies, bites him by accident. A few days later, he is found dead in a gutter. The world misdiagnoses his death and blames it solely on alcoholism. He is only 40 years old, and leaves only his mother-in- law as a survivor.

-- Anonymous, September 20, 2004