"Annabel Lee" and Romanticism

When Edgar Allan Poe crosses one’s mind, she may think of dark tales of death and revenge; however, many literary elements are incorporated into this macabre master’s works. As a man writing in the literary era of Romanticism, many commonalities of the time present themselves throughout his short stories and poems. An excellent model of this is “Annabel Lee,” one of the last poems written before Poe’s death in 1849. It is about the speaker’s undying (literally and figuratively) love for the late Annabel, whom he loved as a child. Several of the main building blocks of traditional Romanticism shine in this piece, especially aspects of the supernatural, nature, and above all, emotion to convey the idea that love can cause great pain and lead people to desperate actions. People will turn to supernatural explanations when the truth is too painful to consider. Throughout history and across cultures, this has been the case, whether it be a natural phenomenon or simply a personal tragedy. The speaker in “Annabel Lee” does this in communicating to the reader that nothing, neither heaven nor hell, can separate him from his late lover. He suggests, “The angels, not half so happy in heaven, / Went envying her and me” (Poe 21-22). A love must be quite a passionate one if the angels experience jealousy, and this is exactly what the speaker is trying to convey. He later implies that this is precisely why Annabel died—because the angels could not stand the fact that two humans, especially children, could have such a brilliant love between them. The way that he comes back to this point, that it is the angels’ faults, shows how traumatic Annabel’s death was for him. Oftentimes when someone is experiencing something traumatic, she may make up excuses in their minds for why this terrible thing might have happened. The way the speaker sees it, the whole universe is out to get him, and every aspect of everyday life reminds him of her. He also reminds the reader that