Poor Soul. (Poe In

“The Raven”) Essay, Research Paper

“Hoaxter, liar, impostor, and plagiarizer” (45) are words Kaplan used to describe Edgar Allan Poe. Poe as he claimed to be, was the best when it came to deception and perversion.

In living his life and even in his manner of negotiating death, Poe was a captive of the imp of perversity. But with art as his shield, the realms of perversity became a haven for his troubled soul. . . Perversion is a complex strategy of mind, with its unique principles for regulating the negotiations between desire and authority. To achieve its aims, the perverse strategy employs mechanisms of mystification, concealment and illusion, devices characteristic of the tales of Edgar Allen Poe. The perverse strategy is, as Poe might have put it, a faculty of human soul. (46)

Even though a good number of critics despise Edgar Allen Poe with a passion, almost all who read his creations gave him credit for being a genius. He was the first to write a detective story and tales that dealt with split personality or divided consciousness way before the matter was well known by the common people. He managed to capture the imagination of the public by exploring the mysterious psychological world of the individual – madness, despair, pain, inner chaos, etc. His works, which lack a sense of right or wrong, had great influence upon some types of popular fiction, with a detective story on the lead. Ranging from French symbolists, like Rimbrad and Mallarme, to American writers, such as Bierce, Melville, and Faulkner, were influenced by Poe’s writings. He even inspired well-known Philosophers like Frederick Nietzsche and George Bernard Shaw. Just to mention a few, gothic architecture, psychological abnormalities, hidden meanings, nightmarish activities, mystery, and inner turmoil were the focus of Poe’s tales, and “The Raven,” in particular.

In some ways, “The Raven” shows Poe at his greatest image-making power, in which part of his life serves as a blueprint. His perfect illustration of the prison-like environment, on top of the inner turmoil of the narrator, creates a detailed, terrifying picture for the reader. At first glance, it is easy to see that Poe wrote this poem in reference to someone he truly loved. The problem is to know exactly who that person, Lenore, is, because without having that information, it would be impossible to understand the four points Poe is trying to make.

By looking at the obvious, anybody can decide that Lenore was no longer part of the real-human-world. And if we accept that fact, we could rule out Virginia Poe, Edgar’s wife, and Elmira Royster, to whom Poe was engaged in 1826, because they were both alive when “The Raven” was being composed in 1844. Since that leaves us with Poe’s mother and foster mother whom he dearly loved, it would seem appropriate to say that Lenore was a nickname Edgar used to represent one of his dead mothers. But there are more problems to this equation. First of all, Poe’s real mother died when he was only two years old and for him to feel that much pain because of her death seems ridiculous. Second, his foster mother died in 1829; why would he wait fifteen years to express his feelings. And third, in a poem titled “Lenore,” which Edgar wrote around the same time as “The Raven,” he made it clear that Lenore was young when she passed away or when she was about to pass away: “That did to death the innocence that died and died so young” (Poe 12). The fact that neither his mother, nor his foster mother was young when she gave up the soul, forces one to go back to Poe’s biography and try to find the missing piece of the puzzle. By doing so, one will learn that “in 1842 Virginia burst a blood vessel while singing, and hovered on the verge of death. She entered a terrible spiral of recovery and illness, and Poe despaired of her life” (Bloom 14).

How shall the ritual then be read – the requiem how be sung

By you – by yours, the evil eye – by yours the slanderous tongue

That did to death the innocence that died and died so young.

(Poe, “Lenore” 10-12)

Armed with the new discovery about his life and with the help of the stanza quoted above, it will be safe to conclude that Lenore was meant to represent Virginia. With that in mind, it is possible to move to the next step of understanding the points in “The Raven.” As Bloom explained with a single word, despair, Edgar was convinced that his wife was going to die and leave him, like the other women he loved (his mother and foster mother). In the poem “The Raven,” Poe carefully placed verses, like: “Once upon a midnight dreary, while I pondered, weak and weary”(1), “Thrilled me – filled me with fantastic terrors never felt before” (14), and “long I stood there wondering, fearing / Doubting, dreaming dreams no mortal ever dared to dream before” (25 – 26), to express how much the possibility of losing his wife terrified him. To Poe, his wife’s death not only marks the end of his marriage but also his happiness and short lived successful life. Approximately a year before Virginia’s accident, Edgar’s luck seemed on the verge of taking the golden road.

[1841] was in many ways the high point of Poe’s life, and may be seem as the only happy period in his adult life. He was hired as editor of Graham’s Literary Magazine at the affluent salary of $800 per year, and during his tenure the circulation of the maga