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This same theme remains evident in Poe s poems. In To Helen the narrator speaks of a beauty that brought me home/To the glory that was Greece,/And the grandeur that was Rome (Poe 8-10). The character, Helen, is the subject of beauty in which the narrator finds himself overwhelm by. Helen, thy beauty is to me/Like those Nicean barks of yore (Poe 1-2). Her beauty is almost intoxicating; it is a means of escapism. A close association between death and loss of beauty also resides in the poem The Sleeper. Poe speaks of the death of a character Irene; All Beauty sleeps! and lo! Where lies/Irene, with her Destinies! (Poe 16-17). The lack of beauty is the lack of life for Poe. Once again, in the poem Annabel Lee there is the theme of loss of beauty. Poe writes A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling/My beautiful ANNABEL LEE[ ]/That wind came out of the cloud by night,/Chilling and killing my ANNABEL LEE (15-16). She is continuously referred to as my beautiful. For Poe to depart from the beauty of ANNABEL LEE would denote loss of life for him. And neither the angels in heaven above,/Nor the demons down under the sea,/Can ever dissever my soul from the soul/Of the beautiful ANNABEL LEE (Poe 30-32). Obviously a life without beauty for Poe is not a life worth living.

The parallel between the loss of beauty and the loss of life is even more evident in his most famous poem The Raven. The death of his rare and radiant maiden whom the angels name Lenore (Poe 11) has left him weak and weary (Poe 1). The narrator hears the knocking on his door and through desperation for his beautiful Lenore wishes for it to be her. With the very small and disillusioned notion that it could be his beautiful Lenore, his soul grew stronger; hesitating then no longer (Poe 19). After asking if he will ever see the beauty of Lenore on earth or in heaven and getting the response Nevermore, the narrator becomes miserable and weary once again. Whether the end is a literal death or a symbolic death, it is death in that it denotes the total loss of beauty from his life.

Edgar Allan Poe obviously had a life that was often times void of happiness. It was a life filled with misfortune and ugliness. By looking closely at Poe s literature, it is nearly impossible to say that a parallel between the loss of beauty and the loss of life did not exist. Yvor Winters believes that

Briefly, Poe implies something like this: the proper subject-matter of poetry is Beauty, but since true Beauty exists only in eternity, the poet cannot experience it and is deprived of his subject-matter; by manipulating the materials of our present life, we may suggest the Beauty exists elsewhere, and this is the best that we can do (Winters 186).

This idea is highly reflected in his the poetry and short stories. Poe sees lack of beauty as evil, and evil is a major threat to himself and to man due to the fact that his life was full of moral and spiritual ugliness. In Poe s literature it seems that beauty, or the absence of beauty, determines the true value of life. Did Poe ever experience the true beauty that he speaks of in his literature and then lose it, or was it merely an idea drove by self-torture to make him mad? Never the less, Poe s life seemed to be dramatically dependent on the idea of beauty.

Works Cited

Asselineau, Roger. Edgar Allan Poe. Seven American Stylists

from Poe to Mailer: An Introduction. Ed. George T. Wright. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1973.

Poe, Egar Allan. The Tell-Tale Heart, The Fall of the House of

Usher, Ligiea, To Helen, The Sleeper, Annabel Lee,

and The Raven. The Health Anthology of American Literature. Ed. Paul Lauter. Vol 2. 3rd ed. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Company, 1998.

Winters, Yvor. The Recognition of Edgar Allan Poe. Ed. Eric

Carlson. Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1966.

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