18 pages • 36 minutes read
Edgar Allan PoeAnnabel Lee
Fiction | Poem | Adult | Published in 1849A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
Background
Literary Context
Romanticism—a literary and artistic movement that largely began as a reaction against enlightenment era values like objectivity, logic, and reason—came to dominate much of European and American art and literature in the 19th century. With its openness to personal experience, imaginative speculation, and the belief in the human spirit, it was an ideal form for a writer like Edgar Allan Poe—an artist fascinated by the complexity and richness of the human psyche. To be sure, with its emphasis on emotion, feeling, dreams, fantasy, and the spirit, “Annabel Lee” is very much a romantic era poem.
However, like other Poe poems—“The Bells,” “The Raven,” “The Haunted Palace,” “Spirits of the Dead,” “Lenore,” and “El Dorado”—“Annabel Lee” belongs to the sub-genre of romanticism willing to explore darker, often occult forces in ways that the work of foundational romantic writers like William Wordsworth, John Clare, and even Samuel Taylor Coleridge were not. When considered alongside texts like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, John Keats’s “La Belle Dame Sans Merci,” Percy Bysshe Shelley’s “Ode to the West Wind,”, and later, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, “Annabel Lee” stands as a poem which both prioritizes the limitless capacities of the human heart (not even death can destroy true love) and accepts the possibility that God’s emissaries (in this case, angels) are not necessarily as pure as people would like to believe.
Historical Context
Unlike his poetic contemporaries Walt Whitman, John Greenleaf Whittier, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, Edgar Allan Poe’s poems rarely speak to relevant or pressing cultural, political, religious, or social issues of the time. In fact, like most of Poe’s work, “Annabel Lee” appears to take place in an imagined landscape that holds little in common with the real world. This is not to say that “Annabel Lee” is a poem untethered to reality, as many literary scholars believe that much of the poem’s content was inspired by the death of Poe’s wife Virginia, who passed away after a protracted battle with tuberculosis at the age of 24.
Given that Poe and Virginia were married when they were 27 and 13 years old respectively, and that Virginia was the only woman to whom Poe was ever married—in conjunction with the psychological and emotional difficulties he clearly experienced as a result of her death—one can read “Annabel Lee” as an extended meditation on the all-consuming nature of Poe’s grief. Within this context, the narrator’s consistently stated beliefs throughout the poem that not even Annabel Lee’s death can keep their love from enduring, should likely be read as Poe’s veiled, fictionalized articulation of the love he still felt for Virginia even after her passing in 1847.
Related Titles
By Edgar Allan Poe
