Edgar Allan Poe's Beliefs About the Afterlife
Sanchez 1
Andrew Sanchez
Professor Richardson
English 220
April 30, 2012
Edgar Allan Poe’s Beliefs about the Afterlife What exactly is Poe trying to tell us about the afterlife? Is he saying one even exists? And if so, what are his thoughts about Heaven and Hell? Speculations could be made about Poe’s beliefs in the afterlife due to much of his stories implying the existence of an afterlife or at least the thought of an afterlife. There have also been books written solely as psycho-analytic interpretations of his work which delve deeper into his thought processes as he wrote these tales. It’s tempting to think that Poe believed in an afterlife as well as a Heaven and a Hell with only the text from his own tales as evidence, but there is also the possibility that in his whole life he still had no clear understanding of an afterlife or Heaven nor Hell, and he included the afterlife in a select number of his tales merely as a way of coping with the loss of his own loved ones. While there is no definite way of knowing whether he believed in an afterlife or not since it’s impossible to ask Poe himself, what we can do is take a closer look into a select number of his stories and some works of other scholars as well, and we can come to a strongly supported theory that comes pretty close. Annabel Lee is a short, yet fascinating poem about young love and a love lost. In Annabel Lee, the narrator describes a love that he and the young maiden Annabel Lee have for each other as so great the angels in heaven blow a cold wind out of a cloud that makes Annabel Lee sick and eventually kills her. But their love is so great that no one on earth, heaven, or hell can separate their souls from each other, not even death. The use of an afterlife in this piece is obvious since the angels in heaven were the ones who took the narrator’s loved ones away from him. “Yes! --- that was the reason (as all men know,
Sanchez 2
In this Kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the
Andrew Sanchez
Professor Richardson
English 220
April 30, 2012
Edgar Allan Poe’s Beliefs about the Afterlife What exactly is Poe trying to tell us about the afterlife? Is he saying one even exists? And if so, what are his thoughts about Heaven and Hell? Speculations could be made about Poe’s beliefs in the afterlife due to much of his stories implying the existence of an afterlife or at least the thought of an afterlife. There have also been books written solely as psycho-analytic interpretations of his work which delve deeper into his thought processes as he wrote these tales. It’s tempting to think that Poe believed in an afterlife as well as a Heaven and a Hell with only the text from his own tales as evidence, but there is also the possibility that in his whole life he still had no clear understanding of an afterlife or Heaven nor Hell, and he included the afterlife in a select number of his tales merely as a way of coping with the loss of his own loved ones. While there is no definite way of knowing whether he believed in an afterlife or not since it’s impossible to ask Poe himself, what we can do is take a closer look into a select number of his stories and some works of other scholars as well, and we can come to a strongly supported theory that comes pretty close. Annabel Lee is a short, yet fascinating poem about young love and a love lost. In Annabel Lee, the narrator describes a love that he and the young maiden Annabel Lee have for each other as so great the angels in heaven blow a cold wind out of a cloud that makes Annabel Lee sick and eventually kills her. But their love is so great that no one on earth, heaven, or hell can separate their souls from each other, not even death. The use of an afterlife in this piece is obvious since the angels in heaven were the ones who took the narrator’s loved ones away from him. “Yes! --- that was the reason (as all men know,
Sanchez 2
In this Kingdom by the sea) That the wind came out of the
Cited: L. Howarth, William. Twentieth Century Interpretations of Poe’s Tales. Prentice-Hall Inc. Print Kent, Zachary. Edgar Allan Poe, Tragic Poet and Master of Mystery. Enslow Publishers, Inc. 2001. Print.