Edgar Allen Poe
It’s Edgar Allen Poe’s 200th birthday! The grandfather (by way of Baudelaire’s translations, among others) of Modern Poetry in English. What would Eliot, Pound and Yeats have been without the man whose ghost I once saw at UVA? Would there have been a Symbolist Movement without him?
His last poetic composition, written in 1849:
Annabel Lee
It was many and many a year ago,
In a kingdom by the sea,
That a maiden there lived whom you may know
By the name of Annabel Lee;
And this maiden she lived with no other thought
Than to love and be loved by me.
I was a child and she was a child,
In this kingdom by the sea:
But we loved with a love that was more than love —
I and my Annabel Lee;
With a love that the winged seraphs of heaven
Coveted her and me.
And this was the reason that, long ago,
In this kingdom by the sea,
A wind blew out of a cloud, chilling
My beautiful Annabel Lee;
So that her highborn kinsmen came
And bore her away from me,
To shut her up in a sepulchre
In this kingdom by the sea.
The angels, not half so happy in heaven,
Went envying her and me —
Yes! — that was the reason (as all men know,
In this kingdom by the sea)
That the wind came out of the cloud by night,
Chilling and killing my Annabel Lee.
But our love it was stronger by far than the love
Of those who were older than we —
Of many far wiser than we —
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:
For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes
Of the beautiful Annabel Lee;
And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side
Of my darling — my darling — my life and my bride,
In her sepulchre there by the sea,
In her tomb by the sounding sea.
You trying to Channel Dooxy?
Heaven forfend!! I had forgotten that old Dooxy was crazy about Poe. I’m a fan of his short stories more than his poetry. But feel connections with Poe in several ways. I lived right outside of Baltimore for a bit, and he died there. I’ve visited his glassed off room at the University of Virginia several times, and have seen his ghost walk the lawn. His poetry and stories in the hands of Baudelaire launched a revolution in Europe. A haunting, obsessive talent, struck down much too young.
Edgar Allen Poe wrote a lot of criticism, some of which consisted of accusing people of imitating Alfred Lord Tennyson and of defending the poetry of same. On other occasions we find him hastening to explain that he himself has never been an imitator of Tennyson. You may go to http://www.eapoe.org/people/tennysoa.htm for brief excerpts (on which I am relying) from this critical history. I mention this because I have always been amused at the choice of names in Tennyson’s narrative poem Enoch Arden, dated 1864. The name of the title character, whose dear wife remarries after waiting and waiting and finally presuming that Enoch has drowned on a sea voyage, has obvious associations with the forest world in As You Like It and with the exceptionally upright Old Testament figure who went straight to heaven without dying first. Enoch the sailor returns home to his village by the sea, only to learn of his wife’s new life and to accept that fact and to get on peacefully. The wife’s name is “Annie Lee”.
Thanks, Robert. Appreciate the link. His critical abilities have not been given their due.
The link I typed in won’t help, unfortunately. Just Dogpile (or Google) ‘edgar allen poe tennyson’ and it will be the fourth or fifth item in Dogpile.
The link I typed in won’t help, unfortunately. Just Dogpile or Google ‘edgar allen poe tennyson’ and it will be the fourth or fifth item shown on Dogpile.